Esoteric Update #120 - Automated Shoggoth Summoning Procedures

This week was rather weird. So it started with Monday. And I was supposed to stream on Monday, but it didn't work out. How badly did it not work out? I ended up with a computer with a fried GPU and MB. Now, just to be clear, this is not the computer I use to work on the game, it's a separate thing. That said, separate or not, having your PC fry on you is a rather stressful situation. So I spent some time just getting increasingly stressed and anxious about the whole situation. Fortunately, it turned out the data is fine, even the stuff I don't usually back-up through my usual means. So I will likely just need to replace the parts, and I can take care of that later.

That being said it opened up the week kinda badly and sets up the context for what I did next. I wanted something fun I could do with the game to cheer myself up and calm down. And I figured there was something I wanted to do in a while that I might as well work on.

Well... I did this:

Now let's hold up a moment and explain what this actually is. It all started a long, long time ago when I started working on my custom programming/grammar languages. I figured that they could be used to make parametric, procedural SVG images. But also at the same time, I had no idea what I'd use them for. Over time it crystalised that drawing arcane circles might be a sensible use for them. Unfortunately, I was busy with other things (parametric book page templates), and I ended up dropping it... until now!

So yeah, what this is is a procedure for drawing random magical circles. It's deeply customisable, modular and expandable and produces SVG code as the output, making it just that little bit more useful in the future. For the images I'm going to be presenting below, this procedure is being used to create random "maps" depicting dreams floating about in the Dreamlands. There are also two set nodes - the Dreaming City of Queensport, which is a location mentioned in a few places in the game, and one I'll be implementing in time, as well as the PC's personal lucid dreamscape that you can use to stage your exploration of the other nodes.

Have a few more examples (this time without the nodes):

In the future, I can use this to generate magic circles for books and use it as the basis of a magic circle generator for the ritual magic system. Since it's SVG, this procedure's result can be easily stored for the future, and the style (the colours and effects) changed to suit whatever use I find for it.

Here's an example using a different style for the output:

I should also mention that while the algorithm and data are done, I need to still refactor the code since it's a bit of a mess!

Hopefully, this week will be better for my mental state, and I'll be able to get back to what I was doing before my PC broke.