Spry Fox Making Happiness

If you’ve met Roomie (and if you’ve played even partially into Spirit Crossing‘s opening onboarding tutorials, of course you’ve met Roomie), then you know Roomie’s fondness for bagels. His dialogue lines referencing bagels during your very first meeting were originally written when we added Roomie into the onboarding experience, to express his personality (and love of food) with a little humour.

As far as I know, the choice of bagel by the original writer (Jake) instead of any other food item was fairly random. Though who amongst us hasn’t occasionally craved a bagel? But it established Roomie’s fondness for bagels, a fact that tended to stick in the mind even long after Roomie was rescued.

As future writers added to Roomie’s quests and dialogue, it was natural to occasionally throw in other mentions of bagels. Searching our dialogue files now, I see that currently there are 5 quests where Roomie mentions bagels in some way, and no doubt more will be added over time.

In a recent milestone, I was implementing a Roomie’s daily quest called “Honk If Hungry” in which he wants you to craft him a bagel. As I searched through our test level that contains all our decor items for easy browsing, I realized that despite the wide range of food decor items that we do have, the one thing we were lacking was … bagels!  How could you bring Roomie a bagel if we had no bagel art?

Roomie would indubitably agree with me that this was a serious crisis. The closest I could find was a stack of doughnuts. I submitted an art request for a bagel, but since I hadn’t noticed this until literally the same day we were locking down update 14.1 to send the new Roomie quests live to Alpha, I realized there would likely not be time to get bagel art made. 

Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and thus was created … the Dubious Bagel:

And I rewrote the quest slightly so that you get the bagel from Hardtack. Since Hardtack is generally a source of extremely dubious quality goods, it seemed highly plausible that any bagels Hardtack sourced for Roomie might in fact be rather less authentic than one could desire.

The “Dubious Bagel” quest item almost went live to Alpha like that, except for the fact that we have an amazing art team who can sometimes turn requests like that around in an amazingly short time; and also, who love Roomie as much as we all do.  And thus, at the 11th hour – in fact more like 11:59 – our amazing Environment Artist Natalie managed to cobble together genuine bagel art. She dropped this image on the request thread with the comment that it was just a plain bagel, “I figured we’d want room to grow!”

And thus, instead of the dubious doughnut-bagel you see above, Hardtack now provides a dubious bagel that is, at least probably, something resembling a real bagel. 

I asked the writer of this quest’s dialogue if she’d like me to rename the bagel to something less dubious now it looked like an actual bagel, but she thought the name was still funny, and Hardtack’s goods are often dubious in one way or another anyway. So “Dubious Bagel” it remains.

Will Roomie one day get a less dubious bagel? Perhaps with cream cheese, or even lox? That remains to be seen! As we continue adding new quests, Roomie will just have to keep hoping. In the meantime, at least one bagel does exist, and if you get lucky at the Wishing Well, you may just get the recipe to make some of your own also.

Happy snacking!

This blog was written by Emily, a Senior Content Designer at Spry Fox.