Chests, keys and a backpack

The roadmap after the break opened with chests. Astra had already delivered them: four tiers (Plain, Fine, Rare, Storied) with a lid on a hinge. The rules were mine. A chest's tier is a floor: it pays that tier or better, and the roll above it is the gamble. It's locked until a key opens it, there's a 20% chance of one per room, and keys are items you carry into runs and bank out of them.

Slice one

The first slice went in on 27 September. A chest is dealt at 20% per room, somewhere with clearance for the lid's 0.71 m sweep, facing the middle of the arena. Its tier is rolled Plain 50, Fine 30, Rare 15, Storied 5. With a key in your carry you press the use button: the key is spent, the lid swings open in 0.9 s, and one item at the chest's tier or better arcs out of its mouth, along with 10, 16, 24 or 36 coin by tier. Keys drop from kills on their own 5% roll, about one a run.

Almost every number in that paragraph is a guess, and the notes say so: the tier odds, the coin, the key rate. The only ones that aren't are the 20%, which I chose, and the 0.71 m, which is Astra's measurement of the lid. Its 18 tests were watched going red with four rules broken at once, and eight failed, each for its own reason.

Pass 23 took 116 seconds. I could tell the tiers apart by colour, and opening one "feels like a reward with the item and the money coming out." But the lid just swung open. "I don't want to do a whole Legend of Zelda animation for it, but maybe a bit more anticipation with the animation, a bit slower, to then lead to the loot popping up." I wanted "some kind of a glow or emission from the chest that gives it a nice feeling of 'Oooo, what's in there!?'" And the order to work in: "locate the sound of a chest opening and then based on how that sounds, match the chest animation to that."

An audition with marks

Pass 24 was an audition. Each candidate was a clip plus three marks measured from it by a script: the latch (the lid rattles), the lift (the swing starts, and the gap before it is the anticipation) and open (the loot pops). The lid follows the marks, so each sound gets its own animation. There were five candidates, all loudness-matched: two cuts of a chest recording I had found (CC0 at its Freesound original), three chains built from Kenney's RPG Audio latch, click, creak and door sounds, plus pass 23's silent swing for comparison.

I rejected both cuts of the recording. The whole take "sounded more like a metal locker." The three Kenney chains were "good", but "needed to be a bit louder", so they went up 6 dB, level with the gem drop's chime. And I said "I don't think I saw any effects happening when the chest opened." That was on purpose: the glow was left out so I would judge the sound alone.

The glow in the pause

The glow went into the pause between the latch and the lift, in the tier's colour, with no real lights, because the hub's light budget has no slack. There's a seam of light along the front where the lid meets the body, appearing at the latch and brightening toward the lift. Then the inside lights up as the lid rises, a short haze spills out of the mouth, and glints rise from it until a second after the loot.

Pass 25: the glow "absolutely gives a great effect." The sound came down to one answer: "my favorite clip of the 4 was the 2nd". The row read 2 of 4 on latchDoor, so latchDoor is now the only chest opening, and the audition is gone.

The backpack

The pack came next because I asked for it: "start on the pack now so I can see it in game." It covers two of four layers of access: after the instant body slots come the pack's outside, which you take it off to reach, and its inside, the full inventory grid. This time the brief asked Astra for concepts first, not a model. Of two, I chose B, the Field Folio: a tall rigid folio whose cover swings open to frame the grid.

The first slice wears it over the left shoulder, following the body's turn. You reach back, feel a tap, and grip. The pack comes to your hand by its handle, wherever you grabbed. Pull a tab about 10 cm and the cover finishes opening by itself, with the carry grid sitting in the frame. Let go and it floats where you left it. Bring it back over your shoulder and it's worn again.

Pass 25 found the problem. The grid "sits properly in the frame, it honestly looked great," and the size was "large, but whatever, I think it's alright." But taking it off was "so difficult to grab. I felt the haptic and tried to grip when I felt it, but it just wouldn't grab."

The cause was predicted from the geometry, since nobody could see it happen. The tap fired within 0.25 m of the handle, but the handle sits above the pack's only collider: the core box's top is at 0.66 m and the handle at 0.74 m. So the tap was saying "grip now" to a hand that could be nowhere near anything grabbable. That's a proxy that disagrees with the thing it stands for. The fix puts a 0.15 m grab sphere around the handle, and makes the tap zone that same sphere, so a tap now means a grip will work. A test checks the handle is inside a grabbable volume, and it was watched going red with the sphere removed. Every grip near the worn pack that misses is now logged, with its distance from the handle. Putting it back got more forgiving too, 0.35 m instead of 0.25, because pass 25 released it at 0.26 and 0.29 m and it floated.

Pass 26 asked one thing first: can you take it off first try now? I could, and I called it "fantastic" and "effortless". Gripping the open pack to close it, and an X at the top right of the grid, went in at the same time.

Still open

The chest's tier odds, coin and key rate are still guesses. Bringing a held key to the keyhole and lifting the lid by hand are slice two, and aren't built. On the pack, the camera in its cradle and weapons on the carrier come next.