DOUBLE VISION

20 April 2022

Did you know Neopets lets you have up to 20 pets at once now? It was last upped on the 20th of December last year too, of all dates. 'Least it isn't free though…

Anyhow, today's article is a long one, featuring a talk about the odd titles of the virtual pet applications of this project: Riftcast and the mildly recurring RVRGZR, and the operative numbers of Recut.

Riftcast is a mishmash of a synonym for spilt and view, what with the application having two screens unlike most other vpets of any sort. With Recut's interface taking inspiration from the Dreamcast's Visual Memory Unit, the title's only a little more sensical now.

The latter title on the other hand, while also a bit of a word salad, is just a little bit more thought out. Since I got into thinking up and drawing lots of species, I'd often have daydreams about them in action. When the time came to name the application, I put together "reverie" and "(star)gazer" to make ReverGazer. Problem was, that doesn't fit the two screens I had to work with all too well, and Riftcast quickly came to be.

Still, that title stuck in an abridged form, with the word RVR in particular sticking around for certain extras, mainly music players. The original had the executable name of RVRGZR.exe as a bit of a memento, too.

Recut also had a few working titles too, including Mega Riftcast and 1.5. A particularly noteworthy one is Riftcast '22. considering how significant the numbers 2, 20 and 22 are among species, locations and other elements. Not much reason for that beyond the release date of the original on 20/12/2020 and Recut's impending 22/12/22 release. Hopefully.

Starting on the 21st of February last year, the first concept for a Riftcast follow-up was a game called R2K. It never went far beyond menu mockups, if only due to the majority of work going into a huge spreadsheet containing species data, location info, items and many other elements. The number 20 was somewhat significant across development, though that was eroded as the scope got bigger.

The most that remains from that recurring number is the amount of Stage 3 species biased towards a version (20 for Red, 20 for Blue), as well as many internal variables capping at 200, and the upping of parties from 2 Reverians to 20.

That last one took a while to settle on, especially what with the original forcing you to care for two species at once. This time around it's solo from the get-go, with only your active Reverian experiencing stat decay.

How save files were handled also had a part in this decision, ranging from everything (core data and party member) being packed into a single file (a la the original's memory.rvr) to unlimited team files saved and loaded by typing a name. Now there's only one core save file and two team files a player gets on one platform, each based on two new modes of play. That'll be elaborated on in the next article.

Also eh, Big Book of Beasts had a goof for a bit where the text meant to link to the spreadsheet snippet wasn't hyperlinked, among other oddities including weird text sizes and mild grammatical errors. Oops.