Esoteric Update #147 - Content? Content.

So you might be noticing that I'm posting this update one day later than I should be. It's because I was at the doctor's yesterday and I'll also be there tomorrow. And then probably a few more times during the next few weeks. I don't want to get into the issue exactly, I was considering if I want to talk about this openly, but in the end, I'm choosing my privacy in the whole matter. Unfortunately, this also means that I will likely not be able to make an update next week, and I'd expect another update to be posted on the 23rd.

Alright then, back to the regular update material. Firstly, there's no lore; I just got too caught up in trying to finish something. I'll post something next week, we have a few lovely new pieces, and I'd like to post something from that batch.

But for the update... firstly, character text colour is now customisable:

Secondly, the first part of the intro to the game has been remade and expanded. This was a nearly complete re-write and might still need an editorial pass over before it's done. But let's talk about what this is and quote some statistics.

So, the original intro was one of the first bits of content written for the game. And it sucked. I've looked back on it from the position I am in now, and it just... doesn't fit with the vision I have for the game. The writing was poor, and there was a total of three paths through it, with only two different statistical changes across the lot of them. Could I have done better back then? No, I don't think I could. When I made the initial intro, I didn't have any of the systems I spent the last year developing and had to do everything by hand. That was horribly constraining. It was a premature bit of content that I couldn't correctly support by systems, and as such, it was not only of poor quality but also impossible to fix without remaking it from the ground up. Now, I won't get into my exact feelings as to why at the time, I felt pressed to release it. The point is that I did and that it was a mistake. A mistake I now rectified.

Let's talk about the current version. It's built from the ground up using systems I've developed at different points in time. The goal-based AI makes an appearance since it turns out to be an excellent system for structuring scenes just in general. Ther are dynamic paragraphs, automated, high-level skill calculations for checks, text filters, semantic implementations for interactions, the insight icon system (the original one was written so long ago that it had manually placed icons, can you imagine that?), etc. All this culminates in the new intro having a lower bound* of 1584 different paths one may take through it, about two dozen skill checks and nearly three dozen various adjustments to the player's statistics that happen along the way.

This was the way the game was always supposed to be. And it's what I always strived to accomplish with my systems. Because of the work on the game's base mechanics I've managed to put in up to this point, it's now possible. Now, this was the first time I've worked on a whole sequence of interactions using this system, and there have been some issues I had to solve along the way. Things I didn't think of before and things that ended up not working the exact way I wanted (and yes, there were some things I ended up needing to correct, in particular with the skill system). And despite that, I found working within the confines of this framework to be very pleasant. I could do everything I wanted easily, and I've figured out many different complex interaction-building patterns for future use.

Look, I don't feel good today; I didn't feel good yesterday either. But despite this, I've felt satisfied with what I accomplished over the last few days. A lot of theoretical work came together to bring practical results, finally, after so much time dedicated to this.

*) Lower bound of 1584, as in, there must be more possible paths than that. The upper bound is 7920 different paths. So I think there are about 3000 actual paths in total. But it's not worth spending the time to calculate the exact number.