Esoteric Update #177 - A Diegetic User Interface

Another update that's a day late? Well, it's because I ended up spending yesterday coding. I just wanted to get something done, and it took precedent over doing the update yesterday.

No lore today; I feel sick and tired. And this update is going to be difficult as-is.

So what happened last week? A lot, oddly enough more than I expected to get done. To some degree, though, it's also stuff that I didn't expect to be working on (at least not yet). So let's start with the general, minor updates. A few bugs were fixed, some writing got done for the emotion system, and I wrote some lore. But that's just a part of what I've been up to over the last few days.

The big stuff starts with a bit of a technical bit of legwork. I have a working translation between the Backus-Naur Form and my own grammatical notation. BNF is a relatively popular way of writing down grammars, and for simple usages, it's a better way of doing it. Not to mention there are resources for BNF, and more people know how to use it. But that was just a bit of work around Monday... things escalated from there.

After that, I decided to take the falls and write something I've wanted for a while, a fake filesystem. This was a part of the game's design since long ago, but I never had the time to get to it. So I ended up doing it. The file system is accessed from USB drive items for the moment; I'll likely go on to make it possible to access other people's computers eventually, too, I guess? But for the moment, a USB drive is functionally a different form of a document, containing a hierarchy of files and folders, much what you'd expect from one. It implements some files offering integration with the GB system, the web browser (through link files), the text editor (through text files you can access and optionally save on your PC), and additionally, the archive files can have password protection. This might not sound like much, but since most specific interactions can be handled by the GB system, there's no need to add more unless I add more applications with associated files.

In the process, I cleaned up Jotter and added a much-needed option to quit without saving. But mostly, it was just minor changes to the UI that made it more uniform.

Finally, since I was already digging in the Internet module/browser app, I also cleaned that up a bit and finished a feature that was hanging in the air for a while now. It's a simple one, but because of how much I did to make the filesystem user friendly, I decided to push and finish this implementation... That is to say, the browser now has correctly working back and forward buttons. The buttons were there for a while but weren't clickable, but now they work, and after pruning out any degenerative cases, they work well.

Oh, also, the Itch and Patreon pages have new text. Soon they will also have new images that better reflect the game's current state.