I've been working on a game similar to one I first played over a 2400-baud modem. Most of it survived the trip. One part of it didn't, and I've spent the last two weeks on the replacement.
In the door games I grew up on, the town square was a paragraph. It was the same paragraph at dawn and at midnight, in the first week and the last, on your first visit and your fiftieth. You stopped reading it around the third. The game knew you'd stopped. Neither of you brought it up.
I didn't want to ship that. So the town square in Solus isn't a paragraph — it's five layers, and it gets assembled fresh every time you walk in.
Layer one is the base: what the place looks like right now. Every outdoor location has four of these, one per time band, and each one is written against the art for that hour rather than extrapolated from a neighbor. Morning reads "The town wakes in pieces. Most of the windows are still burning the light they kept on all night." Night reads "Sleep's claimed most of the roofline; a few windows hold out anyway, and they're the brightest thing out here." Same town, same buildings, and the sentence has changed its mind about what matters.
Layer two is rotation — three or four interchangeable middles per band, there so the fortieth visit doesn't read like the first. The important part isn't the pool, it's how it's picked: a seeded index over the day, the location and the band, never a fresh roll upon entry. A screen that reshuffles while you're standing in it reads as a slot machine. Walk out, walk back in, and you get the same line — because that's what a real place does.
Layer three is where the clock stops being a clock and starts being a calendar. The town changes as the cycle runs down, but not daily — in stages, at thresholds that mean something, because a player compares this screen to last time, not day twelve to day thirteen. The first week is blank on purpose: the town is fine, and saying so out loud would be saying it twice. Then a shutter that used to open every morning hasn't, the last few days, and nobody's mentioned it twice. Then people walk a little faster between doors than they used to, and slower once they're inside.
Layer four is the one I'm not going to explain. It's written, it's sitting in the file, and it only turns on under conditions I'd rather you meet than read about. When it does, the town starts sounding like it remembers you. That's all you're getting.
Layer five is state — things the world says only because of something you did. The market's morning pool has a cabbage vendor insisting his are "the finest in the frontier — bar none, ask anyone, go on and ask." If you're there when he says it, the world files it away, and that afternoon a cart clips his stall and half his prize crop goes rolling across the stones. He does not stop talking about it. If you weren't there in the morning, the cart never comes.
That pool is also the one place I broke my own rule about how many lines a band gets. Three or four is standard. The vendor made five, because none of the four he'd have pushed out deserved to go.
Here's the part I didn't expect to be the hard part.
The rule that costs the most is: look at the picture before you write the room. Not the neighboring band's picture. And not the one you thought about in your head. That exact one. I've broken it three times and caught it three times, always in the same place — Evening. My instinct, or brain, told me the tall thing keeps the light longest, so I wrote a bell tower holding the last of the day. I also started writing some of the narration before I made the picture… And then started work on it again much after. In the actual image the tower is a black silhouette, and the lit thing is the sky behind it. Same instinct, same failure, at three separate locations. Evening is where this thing goes wrong, reliably, and the only thing that catches it is looking at it directly.
There's a lovelier version of the same problem. Every window in town is lit at midday. Lamps burn at noon in Solus. That's canon now but wasn’t when I started writing. Then the very next location I checked had every window dark in the afternoon, which killed the tidy world-rule I'd just invented and left me the only one that holds: read the band's image, write what's lit in that picture (are we seeing a pattern here?).
The rotation pool has a morning line that reads "The road out of town sits empty in both directions, which won't last." Late in the cycle the town has its own quiet answer, and it isn't about the road at all: "More windows sit dark some nights than lit, and the lit ones stay that way till morning."
Same town. Same windows. It just means something else by then. The moral of the story: Document everything. Then go back and REREAD it.