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Y'all??? Top one is Galton and bottom one is Okatchee. Am I going crazy? These aren't fake states.

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We’ll have to do dinner Thursday night instead.

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Sorry guys, cool people don't look at explosions has been the precedent ever since Lot looked not back upon Sodom

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I just learned the other day that the Colorado River doesn't go anywhere. It just kinda... stops somewhere in the desert. Turns out when you siphon all the water out of a river for agriculture and energy, it stops being a river and just becomes plumbing.

What the fuck, America.

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Chocolate Ranking

Milk Chocolate: This is good chocolate.

White Chocolate: This is sweeter chocolate.

Dark Chocolate: Each day I must cope with the tragedy that this bitter ingot of sadness can be considered chocolate. My contempt for the misguided, incorrigible networks of dark chocolate "enjoyers" runs deeper than the depths of the darkest ocean trench.

I will often see these individuals partaking in their beloved ebony squares, whereupon I wonder: "Why? Are you so blinded by this corrupted confection or do you decide to forgo all sense? Worse, yet, have you not experienced the majesty of the greater chocolates?" I never dare to ask my questions. Haughty by nature, the dark chocolate devotee will raise their snoot and spit vitriol in my face.

Still, these defenses put not my mind at ease. "When you eat baked beans, do you crunch down on raw navy beans and gulp Worcestershire sauce? Do you drink rennet and milk together in lieu of cheese?" Of course, their desire to consume only the primary components of foodstuffs is limited to the discussion of chocolate.

This creation, this utter travesty, can afford no better title than this: The Cocoa Menace.

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Just an update for the approximately two people who will actually see this, I've completed the first part of the trading quest! Most of that time was spent instancing rooms for different items, but I made sure to add some actual content in between so it's not just running around collecting stuff.

Now I have to transition into the hotel, which is going to be the most complicated bit of the game. I've been in a bit of a drought for motivation for quite a while now, so I'm still unwinding how exactly the player will get there and progress, but I have the basic frame done.

I've also written a bit of music for the game to get me back into it, but I'm not actually sure it's possible to implement considering the limitations of Google Slides audio tools. I'll look into that.

Current slide count: 745

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Maître François Baudouin Valentin Désiré Dupin IV

Inspired by Rouxls Kaard and my French teacher, Madame C. They're objectively superior to Rouxls Kaard because they can actually conjugate their verbs correctly. SERIOUSLY, KAARD, IT'S NOT THAT HARD. EST FOR YOU, ETH MORE ME. (Grammar nazis, don't hiss at me. I know there's more to it than that.)

Also, their name must always be said in a French accent and may not be truncated in any way.

Also also, interacting with them is required to beat the game.

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So a while ago I decided to start this project of trying to make an RPG in GOOGLE SLIDES and...

Well, it got very complicated very fast.

I made a system to move between rooms by linking objects to certain slides and threw together a locked door and an NPC.

Problem: if you pick up the key, you must keep the key.

Sounds pretty simple IT IS NOT SIMPLE. This one simple rule is the reason the slideshow is currently 524 slides in length, and not finished.

Let's say you move from one room to another, and the second room has a key you can pick up. You pick up the key. You move back to the previous room and now there has to be a new slide because in the slide for the last room, before you picked up the key, you didn't have the key. Essentially, there has to be a separate slide for every single instance of a room.

You open a door halfway across the map?

Boom. New room instance.

You go through a story-required dialogue sequence?

Boom. New room instance.

Something changes in a different room?

Boom. New room instance.

It gets really tiring. There was originally going to be a bunch of puzzles you had to get through but I quickly realized that puzzles required tons of room instances.

Notably, I did a puzzle requiring the player to memorize a sequence of three tiles from one room and click them in the correct order in another. I had to make every permutation of one and two tiles twice, because there are two keys, and you might happen to have the other one going into the tile puzzle!

Then there's dialogue. There's nothing wrong with it, it just creates far more room instances because you need a separate instance of the dialogue in a room for each distinct instance of the room.

Oh, and did I mention, for some reason, I decided it was a good idea to make a required trading quest? Yeah, there's a town, you have to trade things around just so you can get one specific item to move on.

Speaking of the town, there's a town! Gumbton is a run-down charming little town with a bar and grill, some crummy apartments, a dribbly fountain, a cheese shop, an abandoned Italian ingredients store, and a massive hotel with questionable practices.

I'll see if keeping this blog updated doesn't escape my ADHD mind.