Esoteric Update #165 - Hello Twenty Twenty Two

Ah yeah, the first post of the new year. So first off, since I took a break for a week, yeah, I rested a lot and felt a little better, but now I'm just falling back into feeling miserable. But I think I'll be fine to continue working on the game for the moment. So for the update, let's start with the lore:

Lore: Of Shapes and Thoughts, Glory and the Follower
Lore: Mummify So The Soul Can't Die

And for the update proper, I'd like to talk about a few technical things before moving onto the actual game part of the update.

Firstly, I added an uninstaller to the game, it's not something you have to do, but if you feel more comfortable with completely removing the game from your system, you can fire it up. I also included information about the registry key(s) the game affects, which used to be in the instructions a long time ago but were removed.

Secondly, I added a log file for the crashes since people rarely screenshot the little trace window. So if something happens, you'll have a text file with the error details you can send me.

Thirdly, an issue was reported concerning the game breaking on Windows 7. This turned out to be something so simple that I feel bad for not figuring it out earlier. Specifically, if you don't have Windows 7 SP1, your .NET libraries will not update to the version needed to run the game correctly. I'll make a note of this soon since we're gonna be re-writing the game's page on Itch and Patreon.

Now for the actual game update. Maybe starting with the little things first, there's now a few more items of clothing written up and ready to be implemented, new coats specifically. I've also added an outfit management module to the game. This lets you effectively store your current outfit and re-equip it quickly, using the wardrobe in your bedroom as a clothing element storage. It might still need a little bit of work, but it's functional. The aspects of it I'm more worried about are the narrative pieces it throws out and some details concerning possibly storing duplicate outfits.

The bigger update concerns the re-writing of the travel code. Similarly to the sleep code, it's been now fully integrated with the GB systems. This time, however, required a bit more work regarding how it interfaces with events. The old travel event code was written from a particular perspective, and it just didn't want to work well with the GB mechanics. And in the end, after trying to jank together a solution, I opted to do a re-write. Specifically, in the old systems, travel events happened during the calculations involved in time passing during your journey. Now the time passes around the events (before and after), which significantly cleans up the code.

We also did some editing on the narration surrounding travel, because yikes, that was bad. And I've re-written one of the events just to test out the integration with the GB systems. In particular, I took the karmic event for a facelift. I think it's about 300% bigger than it used to be, has interactions and various additional details now. But, overall, I think it's a lot better, and in the process, I managed to pin down a format for the events, as there were a few coding wrinkles to iron out. I'm not sure if I'll be converting the other events right now or if I'll leave it for later. The thing was that I essentially used the coding as a way to better cope with pain and my medications failing me.