Esoteric Update #69 - Shopping, Smearing and Goodbyes

Last week was somewhat fruitful. So I think I'll just go over the highlights. Firstly, I expanded the API with a few more commands. While the sequencer is purely experimental, both the consequences and nega-consequences have found their use already.

Secondly, I added lipstick smearing. Yeah, you can imagine where that comes into play, I'm sure. It's a rare effect/detail right now, might become more common as more options are added to some scenes.

Thirdly, worked pretty hard on the shopping mechanics. From one side, it seems that it's just 3k words of narration. From another, it's a lot of handy building blocks for the future. The shop itself is modular, accepting a stock list to populate itself and modular writing to narrate the process. It can be the basis of any typical shop in the game, and it can also be used for vending machines.

But in the process, I also did some other things. Things relating to using a lot of different features I've been implementing lately. Use of semantic insets to control outcomes of actions and more in-depth generators for common phrases. There's even the first generator for simple exchanges, nothing that advanced, but it's the first step in that direction.

There were also bug fixes, minor ones, but they improved the aesthetics of the game here and there by aligning colours and placements better.