Esoteric Update #97 - Organised Chaos

Alright, new update. I was starting to get worried because the beginning of this week was nasty. (Weather, I'm sure you can imagine... actually, I'm not sure you can. Look, I live in central Europe, we shouldn't have anything resembling monsoon season rainfall around here.) But after the first few days things calmed down and I could get back to work.

This update will touch on a lot of minor things, so it might be a bit of a mess.

Let's start with the main thing - conversations. We've currently processed around 200 conversation nodes in total, that's actually not that much, but the main reason for this is that we encountered issues and resolved them. The first issue is that I completely rebuilt the conversation wrapper to play better with the recent changes I made to... a lot of things actually. It now uses the new choice code, and it also has a much more robust and flexible format for defining topics. In the process, I also ended up looking into how the PC poses questions and completely redesigned that module. Right now, there are six different question cases that with a bit more content will let the system build more naturally flowing conversations.

Thinking about the conversations, I've also noticed that there's a distinct lack of tools for defining options that can only be picked from time to time. I could of course always write such code manually, but that felt... not how we do things around here, so I resolved the whole issue. There's now a set of tools for defining timers and also a tool for manipulating time that has a more semantic syntax than the raw code underneath it.

Speaking of semantics, I extended the number of existing archetypes for insights, specifically in regards to NPC social skills. Because NPCs can have social skills now. And we can easily reference them for insight checks that can be generalised between NPCs by using specific skills as the targets.

And on the note of semantics again... I went through the in-game pornography (the stuff that appears on the in-game Internet) and tagged all of the existing files to include mechanical effects. I've discussed this before but to keep it short, watching things containing specific kinks will make the PC appreciate them a little bit more as long as she likes them to begin with. Other videos might cause the PC's mood to improve. This is still very much a work in progress, though, over time I might add in a few different behaviours as well. Maybe mood gain from watching things the PC enjoys.

Right, I think that's most of the more relevant news, now on to the other, less important stuff.

I added a gallery into the game as futureproofing for some stuff happening on Discord. If anything comes to pass, I'll most certainly make a note on it here as well. But for now, let's just say it exists and move on. I've stabilised the code, essentially elevating the world-state by another number, this mostly introduces the clothing-related data, but also gives Cornelius a set of social skills. Obviously, there were bug fixes, and there's new lore. If you are interested in the background fluff, I post something related to it on Discord every few days, that's the best way to catch up until I can finally shove it all into the game.