Any good story has a narrative and some good world building to get you into the game. Clarice Clairvoyage should be no different. In order to make story segments work, I need to have several things setup: a way to store stories, a way to render them & a way to interact with them.

For this system, I chose to use a long array/list/table of multiline strings. Every “story” (meaning a small interaction per island) is basically 6 items out of that list. The only thing I need to do is take a random starting point that is dividable by 6 and run a piece of code that interprets those items. That sublist consists of:

  • Prompt

  • The correct answer(s)

  • The success message

  • The failure message

  • Success entity (scroll/other adventure/ability/etc)

  • Failure entity (remove spell/combat/lose health/etc)

Then, I render some text and give the player the option to craft a spell based on their current inventory of scrolls/pages. When the spell is cast, it’s revealed to the player if they used to correct spell for the situation. In reality, I’m looking at the 6 items to check if the result matches one of the expected ones. When it does, I give the player a reward otherwise the fail condition is met and run.

I can use this system to do small one-off choices like this, or to provide a deeper lore to the game!

Another important part of the game is being able to craft spells together permanently. Yes, you can combine spells at any point of the game, but longer chains take time (which you won’t always have)! Besides that, it’s nice to sometimes not have to combine all the parts of complex spells. Some spells aren’t even possible without a crafted component involved! Another use for the crafting island is a way for you to make your consumable spells permanent. Consumable spells will have a whiter looking scroll instead of the current color and can only be used once, instead of repeatedly. So will you use this spell once? Or will you wait until you come across a crafting island?

It’s based on the same underlying combination system as the combat system, but this just deletes the ingredient spells from your inventory and rewards you with the outcome! With all the scrolls/pages you’ll get in Clarice Clairvoyage, you can build your book of spells in whichever way you want!

I’m already working on another overarching system that’s a little bit more complicated which I’ll cover next week: puzzles! I found out that the systems I’m showing you have a lot of similarities, which means smaller and more efficient code and more tokens! I’m currently hiking against a strong 7200/±8192 tokens! Which is getting too close for comfort.

Next week, I’ll share more about puzzles and saving some space off of the cartridge.

Thanks for reading!

~ Bram