Esoteric Update #99 - Nonverbal Communication

Alright, time for another update.

So first off, I was sick (food poisoning) for most of the weak, so I couldn't really focus on one thing. Thus, instead, I decided to work on several smaller items. Let's go over those and then get to my main work I did over the weekend when I felt better.

First off, I decided to prepare more coarse archetypes. Went through a few design iterations and reviews, covers a lot of stuff. I'll definitely add more to it, but it should make building conversations a lot faster. Plus semantic coding and all that.

Secondly, I noticed I have an unfinished piece of erotica, so I finished that, means I might need to throw in the current backlog into the game soon, there are a few items here.

Thirdly, there was a bit of abandoned work from way back that never got finished. Specifically, it had to do with the comments the narrator makes about adjective choices. This is now resolved, and everything has associated comments. Not that important but I'm glad to have it off the TODO list.

Fourthly, Lala decided to take over the ASMR writing for the moment, but it's likely she's going to bounce between that and other stuff for some time. For the moment, she massively expanded one of the implement usages and the lines the girls say. But there's still a lot of work ahead before it's a complete system. Helps her get a hand on how to write these things at least. Desert has also decided to fill in one of the planned activities/events, at least to some degree. We're taking it in chunks.

Now to the more mainline stuff. I sketched out about 200 conversation nodes to get a feel for how this chunk of interaction would shape up. The main focus was on nonverbal cues and how they are conveyed. The issue with mixing narration and dialogue on top of having a dynamic character system is that you can't precisely predict in what situation will something be said. And there's a good number of factors that might affect it, like the type of relationship you have with the speaker being the most significant thing, but there are also some physical considerations.

Ok, lemme explain.

Let's say you have a situation where Cornelius laughs. This laugh might benefit from different narration if it happens when he is sitting in a chair than if he is walking next to you because you're out on a date. But then it gets a bit more complicated. What if he laughs while you are sitting in his lap. Perhaps he might hug you. But if he hugs you, what's stopping you from getting a random chance to insert a kiss right afterwards, before getting back to the flow of the conversation. That's a single concept, many interactions can be interjected in this way. Kissing and headpats are already available under the DEBUG mode options.

In any case, the point is that this gives me a good starting point for the kind of library of nonverbal narrations I need to start building. So that's probably gonna be next week. Also, just to be clear, the stuff above? It's all covered under the systems I'm planning. As in, by all means, it will all work, I just need texts, not code. Realistically speaking a good limited number of these that are parametric, randomised and can be inserted where needed in the text should work better than trying to write everything from the ground up for every conversation node.

That was a bit rambly, but here's the simple reason why - I'm excited. I'm coming close to actually making my theoretical musings into reality.