Esoteric Update #125 - More About Social Skills

Another week and another progress report on social skills. I kinda thought I was done with that for the moment, but a sudden bout of inspiration hit.

In any case, let's start with the lore:

Lore: Did We Worship An Elder God?
Lore: The Gods Cannot Die

Now, what exactly happened this week?

Well, it started from where we left off last week. Having done all that I figured I might need to abstract experience. So I did that. There's currently a system for assigning experience points to various actions, allowing me to pin bonuses and penalties to it. Just like the designs pointed to for a while having a bad mood or being tired impairs your ability to learn. Due to that, you need to take care of yourself to grow as a person... or rather mage... a horrible, manipulative dream-spawn made flesh.

I then cleaned up some code, gave some extra touches to the interactions, and finished out what I started last week.

From there, a few things strung out as I fell into a kind of rabbit hole. I noticed that the experience code now basically defines everything I wanted from a skill modifier calculator. It's capable of factoring in various bonuses based on conditions and context passed on to the code. With that, there's basically nothing I can't do with it. The base calculation is essentially:

skill' = (skill + a) * b + c

The three values (a, b and c), can be all incremented and decremented in whatever way I want based on any conditions I want.

So, being satisfied with this scheme, I quickly did a similar thing for the NPC skills (the initial version was just for the PC skills) and proceeded to get creative about how different things can affect the values. There's a bit more to it, at one point it turned out that it might need NPC traits to handle some things. I did indeed implement that, there's a bunch of stuff already plotted out and ready for implementation.

And that's really the issue right now and why this post will be so short. I didn't have enough time to do the implementation...

So yeah, I'll get back to this in a week when this whole chunk is done and explain why I'm so happy with this system using some examples.

Oh, also I did some bug fixing and general testing. Caught a few things, in particular from the code I wrote over the last 2 weeks. Lore's been going kinda poorly though. Feeling very writer's blocked at the moment.