void runner: Island to left of start has no function

[wjt]

At the start of void runner if you go left rather than right you get to this island:

There is nothing you can do there.

If you go back after outrunning the void and talking to the monk, you find that there is a broken bridge between you and an island in the distance:

Again there is nothing you can do here.

[wjt]

When I designed this level, what I was trying to do was give the impression that you, the player, have come from somewhere to start this quest, but that you can't go back. The technical reason why you can't go back is that our quests are linear and one-way. The in-game reason I was trying to allude to was:

a. the void has covered the path you took to get here
b. and the bridge broke while you were outrunning the void

Perhaps a clearer way to indicate this would be to tweak it to look like this:

(I wish we had half-broken bridge tiles so that the break in the bridge could be wider than 1 cell! #1854)

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If we had trinkets maybe we could put a trinket on the revealed area to reward the player for exploring later.

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But really this gets to a fundamental set of design questions:

• Must you always go forwards, or can you go backwards?
• If you cannot go backwards, how do we make this clear to the player?

[manuq]

I personally like the island, is a good visual narrative touch. I would like to see more exploration in Threadbare (the opposite of always going forward). This would be a real issue if the level lets you explore a lot in this direction without a reward. But since it's small, I don't see it as a problem.