Esoteric Update #138 - Draft Mode

Lore for this week:

Lore: Magic Genes
Lore: Why Are There Norma?

And now for the update! So last week, I didn't manage to get as much done as I was hoping, but that's because one of the things I was planning to do turned out to be a bit more complicated than I expected it to be. So maybe before I get to that, let's go over a few of the more minor elements I worked on and then I'll get to the issue. I've built up a little system that lets the NPC and PC make a note of observations. This isn't anything particularly complicated; signals are sent, received and stored for later usage. I've divided these signals into a few categories as well, but I think I'd prefer to write a more proper introduction to the whole system rather than get caught up in these details right now. The point is I want to talk about it; I'll just need to find time to properly organise my thoughts once at some later time. I've also encoded a part of Corny's apartment into a game-readable graph for experiments, and I'm moving towards just having a tool that bakes graphs into a more easily readable format (for the game). I've also found myself wanting a new graph operation, so I added that too.

Now the big things. So the huge issue I've had relates to user interactions. Something I wanted to have available, is allowing the player to combine multiple inputs to define what their character is doing. This turned out to be a bit more complicated than I expected. After a few failed prototypes, I had a bit of an epiphany that having a draft mode for paragraphs might be the right way to go here. So I made a drafting mode. Now, looking at it, it might be easy to miss what's happening here, so I'll try to explain what the main functionality here is. The drafted paragraph has a segmented structure where each segment is tagged to describe what it is. Doing this allows me to automatically apply certain transformations to it.

A simple example is adding together two bits of dialogue and having them merge together into one segment. Another relates to changing dialogue to have narration leading on from it. Another still is a series of operations that organise and cull indentations. Of course, I could still add further options to it since the reason these operations can exist is having exposed the paragraph's structure. And I likely will, when I need them. Now, this might sound somewhat self-congratulatory, but I'm pleased with this solution. While I developed it to handle player input, it's striking me that this can be used in many different places. Below you will see the paragraph being peeked as it's edited (or really appended), but most of the applications I'm considering don't involve that. It's just a better way to assemble many paragraphs, even if it's just done as part of a construction procedure that's never in any way exposed to the player.

Anyway, here you can see some simple, example operations being done with the drafting system:

And after that was done, I moved on to combining it with the new menu system. The menu I built is just for testing, so don't assume this will work the same way in actual gameplay; things will be divided differently, and you won't need to string the narration and dialogue yourself from single sentences. That said, it does a good job of showing how the system works and testing all the edge cases.

I'm not holding out much hope to get a lot done this week. It's going to be a tough week for me regarding my regular job. But I'll see what I can get done. It might be best to switch into tying up a few loose ends, like the new clothing items.