Esoteric Update #330 - Reactive Character Creation

Jeez, this whole character creator thing got complicated, huh?

So I spent the last week working on the character creator. After some serious talks about the current state of it, we've identified several problems I'm trying to address. At the current moment, we're blocked from continuing by several features I need to update from the Alpha to the Beta, nothing that should be that difficult, but it will take some time to check everything over.

I'm not sure if I have the energy to really post pictures, but if you want to see, there's a good number of them on Discord.

For the moment, I'd like to just talk about what the progress looks like. I'm actually not sure where to start, so maybe I'll tackle the top-level view of it. In essence, we made the character creator general and configurable within the scope of the system used by the game. This means that while we're using it in a specific way (for example: only female characters), the creator now supports much more (so if someone wants to make a story exclusively for gay, male wizards, that's possible to configure). To accomplish this, we had to change some structural aspects of the creator, how the blank character is defined and how the different selections are made. That was the big thing, writing the configuration, the safety rails for the UIs (so JS doesn't balk), etc.

Furthermore, we made some changes to how the creator works as well. Sexuality is now explicit. Intimate skills are slightly different. High and low magic are explicitly displayed, as well as your current Karma state. There's a lot more help, with more in-depth explanations for what everything does.

Currently, we're moving to Languages, where we need those Alpha features plugged back in. Hopefully, it won't take too long, but I do hope there will be some stuff I can show off soon. One thing is optimising the terms functionality, because, quite frankly, what we have right now is just not scalable. So we're moving to partitioning with it, like with a lot of large lookups. Another is idiolect support. Which I need to think over and smooth out, as some issues with it just don't lend themselves to ease of use.

Obviously, we've also been working on things further along in the background, so it's not just the character creator. But this is the part we're advancing most publicly.

Eh... I just feel really low energy today. I've not been sleeping well lately due to some issues related to my health. I really want to go to sleep... So sorry for the state of this post. I assure you I am far more excited by what we've managed to do (big thanks to Bear here) than I might sound.