serenitylost - Tumblr blog

serenitylost · 6 years

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I couldn’t stop thinking that Faust was with Asra in Lazaret :< :< :<

#welp my heart is broken again #pretty art #faust #the arcana spoilers

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serenitylost · 6 years

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it him…,.

#pretty art #julian devorak

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serenitylost · 6 years

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MC: I mean, you only live twice, am I right?

MC: *High fives Julian*

#this is beautiful #resurrection buds

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serenitylost · 6 years

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psssssst @pioggia-di-notte that post is right here

I know someone made a post on the background music for the arcana and which song was was each persons theme etc but i cant find it...help!

Hmm, I’ve done some tumblr searching and I can’t seem to find the specific person’s theme but here is someone’s playlist of The Arcana music (it’s by Kevin Macleod, I’ve used his music before) on Youtube and here’s the main theme music transcribed by me with sheet music

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serenitylost · 6 years

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ah it looks like someone else also pointed this out (much more concisely lmao) while I was busy typing this response. I’ve got some more info to share, though! I don’t know how helpful it will be exactly, but maybe a little bit at least?

in writing the previous response, I began mulling a bit about other/additional ways to find information about these choices, and ended up doing some digging through my arcana save files to see if there might be useful information there.

here’s what I found.

first, the save file itself: (link)

so there are four sets of saved variables, and I’m gonna guess/assume that each set corresponds to a different character’s route. (with the first set obviously being the prologue.)

sadly, the prologue is the only set that has actually intelligible variable names, so I’m afraid there’s little to be gleaned in terms of which choices/events/etc are being tracked once the routes split.

what we can do, however, is speculate on the types of things that might be tracked, given the prologue variable names.

it looks to me like they’re using a combination of binary variables (”gotbread” for example pretty clearly refers to whether or not you got bread from bread guy, which is a single choice you make) alongside variables that likely represent some kind of scale (”respect” might be a measure of how many times you made choices that showed respect/deference towards Nadia - it could be some other measure too, it’s not exactly specific, but it seems unlikely that it references a single standalone choice you make).

I don’t know if that’s helpful. I don’t know if there’s more to be gleaned from this file - maybe the number of tracked variables is interesting? I don’t know what those negative numbers are tracking, maybe 0 is considered the midpoint on scales?

anyway, make of this what you will. I thought it was interesting, if not nearly as enlightening as I had hoped it might be.

Testing what choices influence the routes

Who want to help?

So recently @stormsandsea had a post about how some dialogue in Julian’s route changes depending on your choices. Now the question is what choices make what dialogue happen, and are there more changes not just in Julian’s route but in the other routes as well?

I’ve seen some interest in banding together to find out, so that’s what I’m suggesting we do!

My idea is: first we have people go through the complete routes and pick certain choices - for instance all the top choices - and collect screenshots of the entire route. Then we get people to go through the route with all different choices (for instance the second choice every time), and have these people compare the dialogue they get with the screenshots, and only take screenshots if they get different dialogues.

We’d have to go through every route at least three times, maybe more (I know there are routes that have 4 options for some dialogue choices).

But eventually we’ll know if anything changes, what changes and how to get the dialogue you want. If we manage to get all the info I’ll put it together in a guide so we can all use it.

Now this is going to be a lot of work. Especially the first group of people who have to screenshot every single dialogue (you could also record it of course).

I think the first group should be the largest, just so it isn’t just three people stuck with this task of screenshotting an entire route.

I don’t know how many people are up for it, but I’m hoping to find at least three people per route willing to screenshot all the dialogue and text and choices as they go through the books.

So if you’re willing to go through a bunch of books screenshotting everything, and sticking to set choices, shoot me a DM/ask! If I manage to get 9-12 volunteers for this first step I’ll set up a plan so w can get this done. Once we have all the screenshots I’ll ask again for volunteers who want to go through different choices and compare them to the original screenshots.

On a side note, you do need to have the premium scenes for this (because they als have choices in them).

And we’ll see if there’s enough interest to get this done!

#the arcana #arcana info

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serenitylost · 6 years

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this project sounds really cool and I hope you find some interesting info!

I wanted to take a moment to point out that, though this is likely the cleanest, most methodical way you can structure this project, it won’t necessarily guarantee that you find every single existing dialogue change, depending on the system the devs use for choices.

if any given change was always based on exactly one previous choice, then yes! this would find all of them. but there’s a fairly good chance the devs use some kind of scale(s) that measure more qualitative aspects of the choices you make and add them up over time. (possibly alongside/in addition to more binary choices/events.)

playthroughs that exclusively choose the 1st/2nd/3rd/etc choices would not be guaranteed to explore the full breadth of a scale like this, and therefore could not be considered exhaustive.

please don’t let this discourage you though! I still think this will be a really useful, interesting experiment, and you likely will find at least a fair portion of the dialogue that changes. I just thought you might want to be aware of some of the limitations, so you don’t go in with the assumption that you’ll necessarily find every single little thing there is to find.

regardless, good luck with the project! I’m afraid I don’t have the time and patience to participate, but I’m excited to see what you uncover!