Tempo Village Shopkeeper

#1

Frogatto: What’s this?
Zanzel: That is a Personal Positronic Acceleration Field.
Frogatto: I’ve never heard of those before. What does it do?
Zanzel: It polarizes the gravitational current of nearby objects.
Zanzel: It uses thermal imaging to induce a charge in the desired item.
Zanzel: Once ionized, the object will acquire a gentle vector toward you to restore equilibrium.
Frogatto: In layman’s terms, please?
Zanzel: It attracts coins.
Frogatto: How does it only attract coins? What stops it from attracting, say, toasters?
Zanzel: Calibration.

Tempo village store
#2

Zanzel: Ah, I see you’ve found the Life Expectancy Augmenter.
Frogatto: You mean this heart container?
Zanzel: It increases vitality by proliferating the nanofibers of your cardiac aorta.
Frogatto: I know what it does.
Frogatto: Well, I used to.
Zanzel: Greater tensile strength, higher melting point, and lots of molecular density.
Zanzel: Through the wonders of thermal imaging, you can dispense entire gigawatts of riboflavin.
Frogatto: Why does that make me live longer?
Zanzel: Because quarks.

#3

xD

#4

Frogatto: Ooh, a mana talisman.
Zanzel: That’s a Chakra Amplifier.
Frogatto: Come on, can’t we just-
Zanzel: It attunes itself to your chi waves and radiates your aura.
Zanzel: This manifests itself by channeling your karma into a state of mu.
Zanzel: Once you reach nirvana, your thetans will circulate more efficiently.
Frogatto: So my mana will recharge faster?
Zanzel: Hell if I know. Feng Shui?

#5

A few recent ideas:

  • a throwable item that frogatto can carry around with him and just swallow at will, to use as a projectile. When thrown, it lands at the target, and instead of dissipating like most thrown shots, it instead teleports frogatto to it at the end of the delay (and is returned to frogatto’s ‘hammerspace’).
  • some sort of boots that allow frogatto to walk on top of walk (jesus-style). This may be set up to allow him to jump higher than usual when standing on water, or to walk safely on top of dangerous liquids like acid.
  • grippy-gloves that allow frogatto to wall-cling. This could be the initial unlock for wall-clinging, or this could be used to allow frogatto to wall-cling to walls covered in some sort of slippery lichen/etc
#6

Talked with a coworker who’s into game-design, and a reasonably obvious idea came up - some sort of thrown object that allows an equivalent of “gun jumping” (gaining elevation through either the recoil of firing a weapon straight down, or through the shockwave of ordinance detonated at your feet).

Yesterday marcavis and I had a conversation where a very good idea came up - we don’t have a name for it (belly alchemy is a working title), but the notion is basically that frogatto can get some conversion formula/tool/etc, which lets him swallow (semi)-arbitrary enemies, and convert them to something else.

I parlayed on this idea and then came up with the idea that maybe some of the most basic effects, like anti-gravity, explosion, burning, etc, could be represented by some sort of basic object (something like a ‘platonic solid’ in the sense of being the absolute, archetypical representation of a property, independent of any particular enemy that might carry it (as the thunder-melons, for example, carry explosiveness)). The main idea behind this is that frogatto could call up some of these effects in various situations where he can’t normally do so.

A slightly complicated idea related to this would be the idea of allowing frogatto to swallow multiple things at once; either by some lucky grab with his tongue, or more radically, allowing him to swallow a second object after having swallowed one, and then become double-fat (and hopefully, hilariously immobile). It would be a lot of work, but there’s a modest humor possibility, and the business of “combining” multiple enemies as ingredients offers a lot of additional possibilities over our alternate idea of combining a specific “transform” command against various enemies (we’d have multiple transform commands).

Another related idea to this was of frogatto, when carrying certain “transmuted” enemies/objects, not having the objects act as an active projectile, but having them exude some sort of passive effect on him. Anti-gravity was the obvious one we already came up with, but there’s also the strong possibility of new things, like resistances to specific kinds of damage (consider some magic seed that makes you immune to acid whilst held).

This, then, leads to an idea of a possible upgrade where frogatto’s natural “flinch and spit out what I’m holding when I take damage” reaction can be turned off with a purchase.