I haven't done a fun facts post in a while!
That is to say, I skipped out on them during v0.4.0 and v0.4.1's release. The reason for that is: unlike the previous updates, I stopped writing them down regularly about halfway through 0.4's development due to a lack of time and admittedly quite a bit of rush-work.
So why now? Well, as I had to sift through all of the content in the game so far to write the Journal entries for v0.5, it led me to uncover quite a few details that I, frankly, completely forgot about myself.
I didn't skimp out on writing down the fun facts during 0.5's development though, but as I gathered all the previous "Fun facts" posts to put in one Collection here on Patreon, it bothered me to look at what would be a potential gap between v0.3 and v0.5.
And so I figured I would revisit what few notes I did have written for 0.4 and expand them with what I recently remembered. Now that I let you in on that bit of a background, let's dive into it!
Beginning with everything other than the main MQ3 pub content
First is an neat gameplay quirk you might not have noticed:
Did you know that your opponents are also capable of doing mulligans? A lot of the characters have cards they will attempt to mulligan for at the start of a battle, which is why sometimes, your opponents don't start with a full hand!
The Big Beau Section
This update actually saw a full redesign of how progressing Beau's storyline works. It even rolled back progress on saves that got too far beyond a fight whose aftermath scene ended up being rewritten and changed!
In the newly added scenes, there are several points at which Beau acts differently based on your Wgt:
During the first date, if your Wgt is too high, it will interrupt the date, causing you to miss an extra scene if you flirted with Beau earlier.
During the first gym scene, he will flirt with you only if both of you have low Wgt.
Actually, quite a big chunk of the first gym scene is completely different depending on whether Beau's Wgt is low or high.
The low Wgt variants might be particularly rare because of the extremely slow rate at which Beau loses Wgt... that is to say, he almost never loses any if you don't help him out by dragging his lazy ass over to the gym.
Beau's "Wgt loss mechanic" was changed to work that way in v0.4.1 to compliment the long-teased addition of going to the gym with him. Before the update, it was as steady as most other characters'! Are you curious as to how the new mechanic actually works in practice? Well wonder no more!
If Beau's Wgt is below 8, he will stop accepting invites to the gym and just let the rest naturally melt off of him at a rate of -1Wgt per day.
Otherwise he will lose it at a default rate of 20%/-1Wgt (read as 20% chance to lose -1Wgt every day)
When you go to the gym with him, he will lose a guaranteed -3Wgt in addition to a 50% chance of losing an extra -1Wgt.For the next 6 days, he will then continue to lose weight at a rate of 90%/-1Wgt.
That's what happens behind the curtains for all the characters when they lose Wgt in the background! Beau's just happens to be the most complex due to how it is intrinsically tied to and affected by what you do.
Arnold's Alcoholic Additions
This version also saw the addition of the 2nd Arnold event! There's one very specific set of circumstances you can run into involving Arnold and Hammond.
On days when Arnold's 2nd encounter is available, if Hammond has already taken over the pub, it will be uniquely closed down. This is because during Arnold's encounter, Hammond is also there alongside him, spending time at the bar. And so it is implied that he closed the pub down early to visit his good ol' pal Edgar.
(For "some reason".)
If you lose to Arnold during this 2nd encounter, there are three variants of how that can end up playing out:
The two of you start getting real intimate (this happens if you said you found Arnold attractive earlier.)
The two of you don't do that, instead Edgar just throws you out for ripping out your clothes and flashing everyone (or... that's what it looks like to him, at least.)
One where nothing particularly scandalous happens, which happens when your clothes don't break because you were wearing Gordon's clothes.
Names! Names galore!
In a lot of the dialogue, the game checks for if you have the same name as an in-game character and points it out. The most fun one is probably in this very Arnold encounter, where if you choose stay with Edgar, Hammond and Nicole; Nicole mentions a "Ben" that Edgar used to have a crush on:
"Is Hammy wrong, though? He kinda looks like Ben from university, doesn't he? You know, that Ben? Oh you were head over heels for that guy."
If you're also named Ben, she will then add this little quip:
"Oh, or maybe your type is just people named Ben."
MQ3, or: playing mind games with myself
Now let's finally tackle the monster that is MQ3. Allow me to take you along for a ride that I myself went on several months ago when I worked on it.
The branching and optional scenes in MQ3 were perhaps the most elaborate out of any other storyline in the game. There are also quite a few unique combinations of circumstances that require some manual handling.
(Note from post-v0.5-release Oak: the above line was written before v0.5... and it turns out that update ended up having quite a few elaborate branches too.)
In the previous update, the cake scene with Russell required some setup by only triggering when you are below a certain Wgt to make sure you are always able to see the scene through to the end.
The reason I'm bringing this up is because MQ3 required a similar thing: during the investigation where you reunite with Cedric, there is a special rule in the battle that follows: you're only able to go as high as 40Wgt. There's a justification for this story-wise: you don't want your clothes to be destroyed.
However, if you're wearing Gordon's clothes, which covers the entire range from 20-54Wgt, this problem doesn't really arise... and so, originally there was simply a warning that didn't let you investigate, encouraging you to lose Wgt first. Doing so assured that you would always have to be in small-sized clothes during the scene for things to work.
Now let's overthink it
In the end, I decided that this limitation needed to happen more organically... leading to the entire alternate investigation scene where you get distracted by the tantalizing thought of food. This also had the added benefit of building up towards the eventual reveal that Norman was behind it all.
Of course, I had to overthink further it for no reason, and I ended up putting in two variants of this scene: a regular one and an extreme one for 40+Wgt, where you're even forced to pay 3¤ to Norman!
But what if the player doesn't have the money? Well, alright, why not add a branch where Norman lets the player pay it off later? Ok, but now I have to add a check to the future investigations, as well as the regular pub entrance dialogue that handles this and gets the player to have to pay. That's fine, right?
(As a side note: somewhat amusingly, if you end up finishing MQ3 without paying Norman back... then you of course no longer have to do that, considering everything that happens.)
Dig myself even deeper
What if the player continues to come in at 40+Wgt even after having experienced that? Feels like a lot of work to write another entire variant of the scene to loop infinitely, let's just prevent the player from doing it then. But narratively it's not very compelling for the player to want to go in and be told "You can't walk in cause that'll break the game", we need it to happen organically.
Ok, add a scene where the player is stopped by a fellow Stout and warned about it, now they have an in-universe reason to not go in!
That not only serves as a flat-out explanation to people who still haven't realized they're not supposed to keep blindly going in, but it also allows for as a brief appearance of another Stout to really flesh out the world and show you that there are other people working at the Stout Group besides you and like the 3 people you've seen!
At the end of this swerving road...
None of these (in hindsight) quite narratively significant scenes were originally there when the overall outline of MQ3 was written. Why did we do these again..? Right, because I needed to create a more believable way to railroad the player into the right state for Cedric's encounter... and it ended with the addition of two completely unique scenes that also required small checks and unique lines of their own to be added to existing dialogue.
This kind of "realism" that I ask of myself while writing for the game is probably unsustainable. At the end of the day, it is a video game, and looping/unnatural dialogue is eventually going to happen, but hell if I won't do my darndest to prevent that.
My god, there's even more..!
At this point, it's just bad design. There's another glaring issue I ran into while writing MQ3: the 7 day countdown until the confrontation with Norman.
Because of the very strict requirement that it needs to happen exactly when it was scheduled, there are many problems that arise: the player needs to be available on that day and not skip over it. But guess what? There are multiple ways that can happen!
If the player loses a battle 3 days before, they'll be in the hospital while it happens! This was fixed by not allowing any game overs during this time period, instead showing a retry screen similar to scripted required wins like the Russell and Matteo battles.
Many other events can advance the day! Such as staying over with Akello at the cabin and Arnold at the pub! This had to be manually remedied by not allowing either of these events to trigger the day before the pub battleFor Arnold's scene, this simply means not showing the Event on the map.In Akello's case, when you call him, he will say that the campers are not there on that particular Wednesday (you'll notice that in the intro he says the campers are only there every "other" Wednesday or so)... or he'll just flat-out tell you he's not in the mood if you already lost to Borik and disappointed him before.
All of these branching requirements were quite a headache to cover, and they are the main reason why v0.4 took so long... In the future, I'll probably want to avoid any wildly branching and complex paths like these, as well as anything that would use the countdown that the final confrontation uses.
(Post-v0.5-release Oak here again: the above, too, was written before the release of v0.5, and is an utter lie.)
Some remaining details about MQ3
After the end of Russell's MQ, in the days leading up to the pub MQ, you can actually see Norman's Wgt slowly rise over time.
There was also the matter of handling incorrect times: one of the conceits of MQ3 is that you have to arrive at the pub at the right time of day to find new information.... in practice, this time check actually only occurs in 2 out of the 4 investigations you have to do, and one of those will accept either daytime or evening, so it's actually not even all that strict.
Once you order food, you're locked in on investigating for the day, but you also have the option of escaping commitment by just changing your mind and leaving the pub.
This opens up a bit of potential for meta-gaming, where some people might try to predict whether they should order food or just leave depending on if unique text appeared right before that, which would give away that something new was about to happen.
This meant that the preceding text had to be at least somewhat unpredictable and generic, so that it wasn't obvious from the get-go whether the investigation was going to lead nowhere or not.
The case of the Cedric
Here's a bit of a fun storytelling detail that doesn't appear in the actual dialogue itself. During the first fight in the intro, Cedric's deck consists of:
3x Feed2x Menu for Two1x Abs... drool1x Drink it All Up1x Exercise1x Fat outbreak1x Keep Pumping1x Seconds
In your rematch fight at the pub, his deck is the following:
3x Exercise3x Menu for Two1x Abs... drool1x Drink it All Up1x Fat outbreak1x Keep Pumping1x This hand sucks!1x You want more?
Notice something interesting? Well, the deck has barely changed, of course, but there's something else... all of the new cards in his 2nd deck are, in fact, the ones you get from Gordon at the start of the game.
This is a bit of a storytelling through gameplay moment. Because Cedric hasn't gotten any new cards, it means that he hasn't used The Fattening at all... and more importantly: he hasn't even touched the card crafting mechanic which requires you to hit the pub a few times!
And with that, I'm all facted out...
I hope you enjoyed this clobbered together menagerie of fun facts. I sure enjoyed writing them, especially since I managed to cram in so many details in the update, and it ended up being a bit of a technical look into how things had to be designed to work, too!
With v0.4 out of the way, I can now move on to properly formatting and editing down the fun facts I wrote down for v0.5, so look forward to that coming out in a week or two!
And so we find ourselves at the end of a post once again... and you probably know what I'm going to say now: thank you for reading and for supporting the project!