Esoteric Update #133 - Exploring Poses (New Indev Release)

So I'm back from my week-long "vacation", and I can say that everything turned out fine, if anyone is curious. Problems were resolved, and I spent time with my parents, which is not a bad thing at all.

So for today's update. Let's start with lore. This is some older writing, so it might not be as refined as my most current entries. I think I can say that my writing has somewhat improved over the time working on this game.

Lore – On Life: Volume I
Lore – On Life: Volume II

Before I get to the bigger things, let's start with some follow-ups to the update from 2 weeks ago about random conversations. We had some momentum with it, so we further improved the number of additions, with some surprising additions from people here and there. This included extending the emote and mood lists with new entries and... a conversation composed only from emotes. This didn't work at first and led me to re-design and vastly improve some facets of the conversation generator. Additionally, when working on a different emote, I noticed a game in my functionality - no way to address the rest of the group. I fixed this too.

Additionally, I did some bug hunting and managed to remove some 20-ish errors from the game, all of them pretty much just related to over-relying on loading the game and never checking if everything works for a game that's just been started. However, there are two exceptions here. I restored functionality to the WnD animation showcase, something that's been broken for a while due to my negligence, again. And secondly, there's a visual error with the weight display in the inventory. I'll fix that when I have some free time.

But... let's move to the main point of the update today. So two updates ago, I mentioned that I've finished designing the pose graph for the AI. Today, I come to you with this graph in a game-usable format, with a viewer that lets you see what poses are in the game and how they can be navigated. And I'm posting an update. But, let's be clear about something, this is not a content update; this is an indev update aimed at possibly getting feedback on what I've prepared, including any errors or omissions I might have made.

So, if you want to take a look at it, go to the Bonus menu and then...

Which will bring you here...

And from there, you can look through the poses.

I hope I can get some decent input on this chunky bit of data. Meanwhile, I'll be working on another aspect the AI needs - detailed character locations, which will likely involve mapping out (part of) Corny's home.