Esoteric Update #146 - A Faction Of Advantage

Lore first:

Lore: Narodnaya Titan
Lore: Traversing The Spider's Web

And now for the update. Last week, I said I've been thinking about adding one more customisation step: factions. And to start, factions were supposed to be in the game from the start; however, the initial concept of how membership would work turned off not to be such a great idea. Specifically, initially, you were supposed to declare belonging to a faction through dialogue, but that doesn't quite work when information about your membership might be needed sooner than you can textually declare it. So I decided to switch to a traditional interface. As a result, there are eighteen factions in the game, though it might be more accurate to say that there are six, and one has thirteen variants. The bonuses are also actually implemented in the game, apart from two, which we're still working on.

When making a new character (or loading an old save), you will be met with this menu:

As a side note, you might notice that most factions are locked; as a minor indulgence, there are conditions based on in-game lore that must be met during character creation for some of them to become available. So you can think of it as an unconventional Easter egg of sorts.

Your faction is afterwards listed on your character sheet:

But that's not all I've managed to get done over the last week. On one side, we did a lot more with body language and procedurally generating simple elements of a conversation. But in particular, the focus was on the PC side of the generation. As it turned out, it was a bit more of a challenge than I expected to finally get it to a functional state.

As I've made as an observation to someone, this actually functioning take on the system, compared to the old busted one, has a lot less code for the NPC side of things and considerably more code for the PC side. In the former case, the overdesigned code was stifling what could be done with it; for the latter case, there was a lot of finessing the correct order of operations and future-proofing the features. But I think it's working now.

That said, there's still a good number of things to write for it, but it's now content.

Also, I will briefly mention that I had a few less days to work on stuff this week than I expected. Those who were in the Discord heard the tale of the pigeon menace...

So now it's just dealing with the content and converting the old conversations to the new format.