Esoteric Update #173 - All These Emotions...

Two weeks passed, and... well, some stuff definitely happened in that time. Obviously, the update is also late by a day, but let me start by explaining that. Yesterday, I got a model kit, and I was really excited to put my little plastic doll together. It was really fun, and she's very cute. Anyway, since things have not been going great lately, both for the world and my personal life, I decided to enjoy my time with the toy instead of doing the update.

Furthermore, it's been two weeks, and I'm still not feeling great. I don't have a fever anymore, and my flu symptoms are gone, but the strain put on my body led to other problems I'm dealing with now. So, due to my generally bad state, no lore today, but let's try to make a bit of a proper update.

So if you've been paying attention to what we've worked on lately, you'll notice us talking about character psychoanalysis. Specifically, we've been dinging into ways to study the general state of the character and issues like personality modelling, emotional modelling, that sort of stuff. Over the last weeks, we made a few pretty important moves to capitalise on that. The first is that we now have a kind of heartbeat script, which is of general use, but right now, it's periodically checking and recording the character's state. So that's really the little thing here. The much bigger aspect we've implemented was incorporating emotional expression into the game.

This was thrown around as a possibility since the very start of development, but no functional implementation ever coalesced (possibly because it was always focused on NPCs rather than the PC and player expression). After going through multiple models, not all of which were related to emotion, in particular, we circled back to this idea, but this time with a working system. The coding was somewhat challenging, if brief, and might still be revised later, as is the presentation, but the idea seems solid enough and will stay with the game.

To explain what's exactly happening, let's go over our test implementation and make some comments on it.

This uses the fake bill event as a basis for testing. After examining the bill, the player is prompted with a new set of thoughts. With how the system is implemented at the moment, up to eight thoughts might be generated, but not all types of thoughts (not all emotional classes) apply to every situation. The goal of the thoughts is to allow the player to define the character's state to contextualise their reaction to whatever prompted the choices to appear. In essence, it lets the player slip their subjective interpretation of the character's mental state (the context for the actions taken and words spoken) into the game.

For this test, we select the 4th option. I'd like to bring attention here to the reply. We've taken great pains to ensure two things with this system. Firstly, the way the options are presented is consistent (if a bit more verbose) with other choices you are given across the game. However, the text woven into the narration has different formatting. It's a split between the intent of action (do something) and the outcome of pursuing that intent (you do something). And while that might sound trivial, to ensure high-quality writing/output, we found ourselves having some difficulties working around it, but we hope that we managed to avoid the main pitfall with narrative game choices. That is to say, we hope there won't be cases where the player selects one of these choices under the assumption of an outcome different from what the game offers.

Following the rules for think actions, emotional expression still allows speak and do actions. In this case, we select the 4th option again. The order of execution for the internal logic allows us to then modify the outcome of these actions with additional narrative detail to tie them into the selected emotional context.

Now, this isn't the only thing we've worked on for the last two weeks, but I'm not feeling well. This is a nasty morning for me, so I'll leave it here. I'll try to finish off the other changes for next week and do a round-up of them while also continuing with this implementation and the event changes.