Esoteric Update #116 - Charting Relationships

Ugh, of course, on the day where I do the first post in 2 weeks, I still have a migraine. So, let's get through this.

And let's start with my health. It's better. But it's not perfect. As such, I'm making an executive decision to take another two-weeks half off. Thus next update is in 2 weeks, by that time I hopefully finally will be free of any holes in my body, yay. Well, extra holes.

Oh, also, no lore this week, I just don't have the energy to deal with WordPress.

That out of the way, let's get down to the updates from the last two weeks. I'm going to be glancing over a few things that will only get finished in the future. We've made a lot of changes to the character's apartment, including adding approximately 4k words of descriptions and fleshing out/expanding the functionality — more on that in the future, when we're done with that.

Next up, we're working on Cornelius now, as the focus for the immediate future. This means a lot of new conversations and interactions and also sex. However, got get everything rolling smoothly there were a few things that needed to get addressed in the form of new mechanics. To test some of the new mechanics I added a kind of test toy to the game, it's name is Petri, and it represents a method of guiding AI using Petri Networks. I'm still fleshing it out, but if you want to see how it works, a test version of the game including it can be downloaded from Discord.

The reason this came about is that I'm working on the generic AI that is meant to steer NPCs through the game, in particular social and relationship-based issues. Each of the NPCs will have a specific variant of this AI that will represent their personality. We're making some good headway with that.

Similarly I'm working on the problem of tone in free form conversations.

So yeah, I'm probably underselling what happened during the last two weeks. But I'm too tired to get into more details. Excuse me now I'm going to go lay down.