Nested scenarios as hermetic puzzle rooms/dungeons

[kostmo]

We are amassing a collection of disjointed Scenarios that are accessible from the toplevel game menu UI. For its part, this UI does facilitate a sense of "progression" and grouping by theme.

However, it would achieve a greater sense of immersion to embed self-contained scenarios as a sort of "dungeon" or "minigame" within a larger overworld. We could design scenario files to be composible with one file referencing another as a "child".

It raises a number of design questions:

• Are sub-scenarios conceptually orthogonal to sub-worlds (Sub-worlds #144)?
• Puzzles are often designed around some constraint on available devices/entities. What mechanism(s) can be used to restrict the player's devices after having accumulated them in the overworld?
  • Can the player take control (including piloting it directly with a keyboard) of some device-constrained robot other than base to play the minigame? C.f. the view command, which allows inventory inspection of other robots but not piloting.
  • Can a system robot "steal" devices from the player, to be returned upon exiting the minigame?
  • Alternatively, we could forego the idea of constraining device availability altogether and just design minigames/dungeons within a particular world to have a certain visitation order by unlocking each other
• Aside from constraining available devices, there is a performance advantage to excluding computation of any ambient content of the overworld while participating in the mingame.
• How should the completion of a minigame be reflected in the overworld?
  • Should the player be able to keep any items obtained in the game?
  • Can the "objectives" of a sub-scenario be grafted on to the objectives tree of the overworld?
• Can nesting of scenarios be arbitrarily deep, or should it be restricted to one level (a la dungeons in Legend of Zelda)?
• What should the file format look like?

[kostmo]

This idea of hermetic puzzle rooms is conceptually related to the smaller-scale idea of algorithmically-solvable door locks described in #1591 (comment)