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i've had so many of these working on imsims. my first was the guards in my stealth game who could hear each other's footsteps and if they didn't already know roughly where the other guy was they would investigate each other and be surprised to see each other. in first person this looks like nothing

the idea (and this worked) was that if the player made a noise and a guard heard it and then investigated and didn't find the player but did find another guard they would assume the guard made that noise and not be alert anymore because "oh it was just bob". "cool" but basically never ever legible

another one was, i made the rain in Weird West, which wets things and fills containers and puts fires out and whatever. for a long time i had the rain coming in at the correct angle based on the wind, so in a storm you could shelter behind a building and get less wet. "cool". not legible, not useful

the player only ever assumes the place you'd stand to get wet is "outside"; the cool behaviour only ever reads as a bug, "was outside, didn't get wet". or "got wet inside" because you were near a window. i changed it to a straight-down line trace

not quite the same but also in WW, if a barrel is full of water you can drink it. if it initially has oil or poison in it, you can tip it out and set it upright and wait for rain and it fills with water. for a while, the "drink" verb was on the barrel no matter what. you could drink oil or poison

I spent a good amount of time messing around with barrels in WW, and remember thinking how cool it would be if I could carry one up to the roof of a building and dump it inside

theoretically you could devise a reason to do that but we took it out. not sure if at any stage it was advantageous to be poisoned ever. i *think* if you drank the oil you vomited? no good reason to vomit though

Couldn’t you drink oil to vomit after being poisoned?

also on WW for a long time there was a much more elaborate "elemental" system where the (still present) puddles could be heated or cooled. heat would evaporated water and make a cloud. cold would make an ice patch, you could slip. not just water, other stuff too. very many interactions. mostly cut