Esoteric Update #181 - Twitters And Crowbars

New week, new update, as things should be.

Have some lore. Or maybe I should call it a puzzle:

Lore: A Modern Mysterium

Also, have an article, as it will be relevant to what I have to say today:

Mechanics: CSP – Part II – Universal Solver, Good For Nothing

So now, let's get to the update itself. First, let's go over a few general things that I don't want to dwell on for too long. Content is progressing; we're working with the emotion system, the intro and the old events. Again, I don't want to talk about that too much, but I will say that we've done a bit less than I was planning to get done. That's because I got into a bit of a rabbit hole with a particular feature I was implementing... which I'll get into in a moment. I've also done some lore writing ad some bug fixing to go along with it.

The second thing I want to say before I get to the meat of the matter is that we have a new Twitter. Or, I guess I should say I have a new Twitter:

The new Twitter

Why a new Twitter? Well, to put it simply, we got locked out of the old one. We had a separate person handling it, and that person left. While he did try to pass ownership of the account to us, it didn't work, and we found ourselves unable to log into it. This time it'll work a bit differently. Instead of just dry updates, I will use it to broadcast some of the thoughts I usually write on my Discord.

Now, for the actual rabbit hole. Related to the CSP article, I've been thinking of some features I wanted, and I thought it would be simple enough to implement boxes (i.e. items that also represent containers). And while it wasn't that bad (apart from my brain being asleep or something and struggling with a particular bug for most of an evening), I went a bit further with it. First, I implemented keys and then also tools that can be used to force boxes open.

(A lockbox!)

(And then, after some interactions, pay attention to the part at the top, the writing for it is preliminary but should explain what's happening.)

The order of operations here involved opening a lockbox with a key, only to find a smaller lockbox inside. This second container was pried open with a crowbar — finally, all items were then taken and placed into the inventory.

It's... a powerful and robust system (well, a set of several smaller systems) that I have always wanted to have. I just wasn't sure it would have been so soon. But I won't sing my praises and talk too much about what this can do; I hope that that will become obvious with time — possibly somewhere around the 4th CSP article.