Ranokoas Shifting Halls

[Ranokoa]

Prelude: A few months ago I started work on a standalone mod called "Ranokoas Shifting Halls" after having seen that there just aren't a whole lot of maze mods out there (or at least at the time) and what mods had any maze parts to them were not very grand. So I decided to make a maze, but not just any ordinary maze, a maze where the paths literally change, or "walls shift".

 

Description: In the maze there are several triggerboxes that, once triggered, shift the direction of the walls "out of sight" of the player, changing perspective and challenging logic altogether. The maze consists of mostly Fort Ruin interiors, as they were the easiest, straightest, interiors and offered a wide variety of things to use. The further you get through the maze the more it changes, eventually turning it into a whole completely different maze. There are 4-5 floors, some underwater, (With plenty of opportunity to get air) and there is literally NO light at all, said for whatever torches, spells, potions or scrolls you bring with you, however, there is an already supplied amount of torches in vast quantity that are much weaker than normal ones... also spells might be a little useless because you are completely silenced the whole maze through to avoid overuse of Night's Eye.

 

In certain areas of the maze you can and will pass through a triggerbox that teleports you to a random location within the maze. These are also spread out and there are a lot of them, however, they only work one time, so passing through them again (if you are lucky enough to find them again) will not teleport you. Now, normally this would mean just redoing or rewalking the same paths, but again, the walls shift, so the further you go, as said before, the more it changes, meaning if you are cast randomly to one specific point in the maze you might have already been to it will be completely different.

 

Most of the teleporting triggerboxes are set in place to such a point, and work to such a point, that you can barely, if at all, notice that you indeed did teleport, making it all the more difficult, however, in some cases can actually be helpful, as sometimes the way you go is not the way you came, meaning, if you try backtracking you will not always actually be backtracking but be taking a completely different path.

 

To solve this maze you must try to find many levers within the maze, rather than one specific "out" or "exit". There are many levers, and each is very hard to find, some almost impossible, and each one opens one gate at the "end". The end is a hallway with many many gates blocking its path to the finality of it all. Once a lever is pulled you may not pull it again, and it will be forever stuck in a downward position, thus allowing you to not accidentally pull the same lever twice and trap yourself.

 

At the end of this hallway of gates are 6 or 7 levers if I remember correctly. Each one doing something else. And it's quite apparent. There are many many MANY unactivated traps right where you are, and there is only one lever that solves the puzzle. Trying to go back from this trapped area is useless as you need to pull the lever first in order to backtrack at all. One lever kills you, another lever kills you, another lever kills you, they all kill you! Except two. One actually teleports you to the VERY beginning of the maze, where all the walls are reset, and the other solves it, opening the very last gate and untrapping you from this dangerous hallway. (Should you pull the lever that teleports you to the beginning and you solve it all again, you can not pull that lever again as it is stuck in the turned position.)

 

At the end of the maze you get.. absolutely nothing!!! Yet. I haven't gotten past the end yet lol. Idk what the prize should be. I have ideas but meh.

 

All in all when it's said and done this maze should take at the very least, if you are REALLY LUCKY! an hour. If not, two to three hours to solve completely. And looking at the "map" of the local area is useless, as, again, the walls shift and change, changing the maze and allowing access to new places and disallowing them to old ones, so that can't really help at all. It only helps playtesting for me so I know exactly where I am when I want to test something out.

 

I built this whole danged thing, and I get very lost very quickly.

 

Although there are not a whole lot of dangers here aside from frustration and the very end, there are some. When certain walls shift they open up pathways for things... to attack.. you.. Most of those things, like zombies, are fairly weak and easy to kill. Mostly there to scare the living crud out of you. (How did that become an idiom? The living crud? I did not know excrement was alive..)

 

This mod is about 80% complete, maybe a lil bit more. I am opening this page up so that people can discuss what they think, tell me what they might want, share ideas with what they would like to see, or give advice on certain things, or, for the love of god, help me with these broken scripts and their solutions!!! lol. There are only two that are broken thus far, and not too much so.

 

One, the triggerbox for shifting the halls, only does it once.. Unfortunately that means I need to put a timer on it. This I don't need help on, but it is what bumped the maze from being 90% complete to being 80% as I need to actually change the maze a bit in order to cope with the timer. This, unfortunately, means that it IS possible to get completely lost for eternity, or even stuck in small places. But it isn't all that bad, as there are triggerboxes every now and then to force an autosave in case you should get yourself stuck. As well, you can't go more than like 10 or 20 seconds before realizing your stuck so you don't lose too much progress.

 

 

THE MAIN REASON: The main reason I am opening the thread is for suggestions on how else to scare the living crud out of people. I already have it so every now and then depending on where you are or what you are doing you will hear my morphed, sound effected demonic voice either whispering to you or telling you I AM GOING TO FLIPPING MURDER YOU. Boy, does my voicemod make some quarky crud. Some of those sound files are really creepy lol. Also got south park Michael Jackson's "hee hee" edited that will play a few times :P

 

So ya, keep coming back to check the progress as I will be stating any updates below the yellow line. Just know the main reason for this mod is for something for bored people who have done it all to do something they haven't. The entire maze is VERY challenging to perspective, so much so that I, it's creator, get mixed up way too much. Once certain scripts are completely fixed and the maze is mostly complete it will be open to any willing playtesters, as I myself doubt I will ever actually be able to playtest the entire thing. The more people that playtest it the more I am assured to have it all right as everyone will more than likely take different paths, and thus each person will have a different maze, and any bugs that could be would be found like this.

 

One bug that is now unavoidable: Because of the way the Fort interiors were designed some places actually blip over eachother, causing a collision of meshes. While this is not always very apparent, it does exist. Sometimes it was caused by my misplacement of the halls and too late too little to notice it to fix it. The maze is VERY massive.

 

On a last note: One would think that something so massive would cause major lag or an overloading of Data all in one, it does not. This is thanks, mostly, to the fact that the maze is completely dark, devoid of any light, and thus taking a major toll off of computers to process the light on everything. Also it is thanks to an extreme lack of cluttering. No webs, bugs, boxes, crates, portraits, mating mammals, leppers, gnomes, Canadians, televisions, potatos, shovels, spray bottles of water and vinegar, potato gnomes, Canadian potatos, boxed up lepper zombie Canadian potato gnomes from Poland, or other random clutter one might inconceivably have in a maze mod.

 

OPEN TO SUGGESTIONS!

 

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UPDATES

 

Update 1: Okay I decided I am going to add booby traps. But not those generic ones, at least not mostly... that you see. These traps are more subtle and impossible to see coming. Some.. impossible to escape.. hehehehee..

 

 

PS: This mod will be merged with Fort Death with slight tweaks as an Easter Egg, but will first come as a standalone mod.

 

Be well, sleep well, fight well, live long.

~Ranokoa

[Ranokoa]

I wrote too much...

 

EDIT: Hehehe... I may make this a little more challenging...

EDIT2: OMG! While playtesting, even with TCL I scared the CRUD outa myself with something in there. My heart skipped a beat, and a minute later I'm still a little shaken. I got lost trying to find a specific location and totally got turned around and was ambushed by one of my "hope this scares them" event. Zomg. Totally unexpected.

EDIT3: My god I'm a sadist...