ReBoot

Yo. Professor WhizzyWig here. I just had a chat with On-FireWire Wagemen and we've decided that we're going to pair smarten's new art (likely 3 new character sketches) with a text update that addresses a bunch of tweaks that people have convinced me were necessary. That means we've got a real V3 coming early-mid next week.

We're coming into the home stretch here and things are starting to heat up. I just got an interesting note from Rainmaker saying they're going to officially weigh-in on the pitches, so keep an eye out for that. This is bound to be interesting for us all.

There are a few people that deserve praise (actually, there's a lot) for ideas presented in some of my previous blog posts. Here they are along with the idea they suggested that hooked me:

Astragem14 argued that Enzo as "sadistic" was over-the-top. I've changed it to "psychotic" for V3. A small but important difference.

TurtleDreamer suggested that Bob and the gang might fight the Avatars best by creating code-sampling weapons. Thus, they could later recompile the code stored in the Avatars and possibly still allow for some fun action scenes without the fear of murdering innocent Sprites.

Haruhi proposed that the heroes in the Web Game might be limited to a certain number of "lives." I like this because it allowed me to skirt the issue of infinite lives, which is common in MMOs lately. This would give the heroes something to fear (nullification after 3 deaths). Plus, actually killing Matrix and bringing him back seems like an exciting moment.

etoile37, who is quickly proving to be a master of character interactions, proposed that Bob might not, at first, believe that Matrix would make a good fully-fledged Guardian. But Enzo asks Bob if that means he will never become one either. This prompts Bob to give Matrix a shot, and he sends Matrix into the Web Game as a final test. Sounds awesome to me.

BobIsSoHot made a suggestion that led to this idea: Maybe Enzo and Matrix enter the Guardian Academy together, but Enzo is determined to learn and so advances quickly, while Matrix gets expelled for roughhousing or something. However, Turbo takes Matrix aside and makes him the first of a new group of deadly Guardians - ones that work by different rules from the regular Guradians. Kinda like a Special-Ops division of the Collective, all of them licensed to delete whoever they must to protect the Net. Don't know how it fits into the present story, but it's kinda cool. Actually, I just got a kinda cool idea how to do it...

endian proposed that the heroes may have to capture an item of grand power from the Web Game and bring it back. This might also be why Vector wishes to join them - he seeks the item for himself so as to make up for his lack of supreme viral powers. endian proposed that it might be a mega-keytool of some sort... an ancient weapon? It follows that items might be able to travel back and forth between game and Net since Sprites can, so maybe I can work something out.

trdgr777 suggested that the Web Game heroes might try to pass themselves off as User players in order to infiltrate the game and force a game over situation. I love that idea. No idea how it will work, but still cool.

That's all! Thanks to everyone who commented on the previous posts!