Esoteric Update #156 - 3rd Year Summary

Alright, unusual post today, this is my 3rd year on Patreon (discounting the few weeks here and there that I took off), and I'd like to take this chance to discuss the current state of the game and my feelings about it.

Regardless if you read the rest of what's written here or not, I'd like to invite you to ask questions in the comments or on Discord, if you prefer.

Last year was definitely a fruitful one, at the least ultimately. The big thing is that I finally have systems that meet my requirements for how I want the game to function. To explain this, I'd like to talk a bit about the game's history and why I feel I didn't start it off right.

v0: Why the push for content hurts you in the long term

So from the very beginning, I knew how I wanted the game to work and what I needed the code to do. The issue is that I was rushing too much to get something out in the hopes of attracting attention to the game. Please understand that I never intended to make this game for money. My desire was to have a team and a community. But for that, I had to show people something, and at that time, I was in company that gave me the advice to push out some content as fast as possible. That was terrible advice, and I should have known it. I've spent roughly the last two years slapping myself for falling for it.

While the first iteration of systems I had in place was sufficient to get everything rolling, there's a difference between being able to do something and being able to do something in a way efficient enough to be conducive to game design. I assumed that I would be able to somehow go back and correct my mistakes in time. I was right, ultimately, but I shouldn't have started off like that, to begin with. I should have at least worked on some systems to make the process of content generation more manageable. Additionally, I was struggling with the issue of man-hours that could be invested into the game. This is still a huge issue, so let me get into it a bit more.

As you might have heard me mention before, or not, this game was initially supposed to be made by a team of people. Initially, there was seven of us, and only one of those people still works on the game, though this was definitely a left-and-returned kind of thing. Everyone else left the project, and I've been the sole person working on it for most of the game's existence. But I also have a job I can't abandon because I need to somehow make a living. That means that the number of hours I can devote to the game varies between 7 and 21 hours each week. Much less than the ~100 hours a week I was hoping we would be putting into it as a team.

At this stage, the most important thing I needed to do was move on to a proper system.

v1: Why significant improvements can not be enough when you are starting from a bad place

Everything I did with the first version of the system behind the game was genuinely a vast improvement over v0. Unfortunately, it suffered from some choices that seemed promising at first but turned out to be a problem in practice. The huge thing here is the reliance on recursive calls between modules. And the reason why this doesn't function is that with more and more complex dependencies between different modules, the practice of recursive calls led to issues with inter-module communication. In essence, I could replicate the behaviours of typical RPGs or text games quite easily. I had tools for building conversation trees and executing them, and even jumping back and forth between trees. But making those trees was still an issue; the communication of each tree with its parent and children had to be hand designed and began to quickly grow overwhelmingly cumbersome.

But those issues were mostly a matter of the core structure. And I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out ways to get around it.

At that point, though, I just wanted to find a better way of handling the sex scenes, and I had this idea about a goal-based system to drive it. I've done a lot of experimentation. There are many fleshed out implementations of various systems in the game's code that I saw as having the potential to solve practical problems. I still believe almost all of them will be useful in the future. However, this specific system I just had a particular intent for. It wasn't meant to become the basis of the whole game. Except that once I had it implemented and I started playing around with it, it struck me just how much potential it has to do just that.

v2: Where we're at now

And as such, I managed to get to the v2 systems. If you've played the intro in the newest version of the alpha, you can see precisely what those v2 systems let me do. Very easily, actually, as I've found them to be easy to work with once, I figured out how to do it effectively. Sometimes when you make something complex enough, you might not understand the full scope of its functionality until I interact with it a bit.

In its current state, the intro is far closer, spot-on actually, to how I wanted the game to function from the very start. I went through many use cases in the opening, and I could quickly and successfully build all of them in these systems from the very beginning.

To be honest, a lot of it is still just the v1 systems that I'm adapting to work with this new baseline method of steering events. And a lot of those systems still need to be adapted to do so. But, it all felt like a giant leap forward.

The future of the game

There are two significant issues with the game right now. And it's not the lack of content. That's a symptom when you get down to it. The actual problems are the lack of man-hours being invested into the game and... well... me.

The first thing is quite simple. Man-hours can come from people joining the project, but that also has its caveats. But as simple of a problem it is, the issue is not simple at all. I've gone through about three dozen people at this point offering their help with the game. Very few of them stayed, considering that the current team is still only five people, three of whom don't contribute much to the content (they still help in their own way, and that help is greatly appreciated). Few people are willing to help (due to the relative lack of popularity of this game, no pay and the relative difficulty of working with the game), and even fewer still of those people stick around, much less manage to contribute to the project.

If you'd be willing to see if you can help, I have a post about the kind of people we need right now.

The second problem comes down to my poor health. The last few months have been a struggle. A constant uphill battle with pain and neuropathic degradation. My quality of life feels low lately, even though I know that ultimately the situation I'm in isn't the worse and that there are people who struggle and succeed against worse conditions. Still, whatever my problem might specifically be, it makes it challenging to find the motivation to work sometimes, not due to the work itself, but the way I feel on that given day. It's the constant feeling of emotional and physical exhaustion and discomfort.

However, that's my issue to overcome. I'm not asking for pity; indeed, I do not want it. I just want some understanding as to why I sometimes might need to take a day off or have a weak where I'm not managed to get much done.

Moving forward

The game isn't going anywhere. I'll still be here working on it whenever I can, and I hope to invite more people to collaborate.

Currently, I'm dug in with working primarily on some baseline modules, tools (you could call them) used to build more complex interactions. There's a "top-down design, bottom-up execution" approach to the game's design I'm working with right now. Working on bigger elements, breaking them down into smaller ones and then working on the smaller ones until they are sufficiently fleshed out to become usable.

This comes down to content surrounding daily player character activities and interactions with Cornelius. The whole social simulation aspect of the game. It's going in exciting directions, I believe, if perhaps some of you reading this have seen my recent progress reports on the Discord server.

However, next week I want to present something a bit different. Something more visual to do with the books you find in-game.