Esoteric Update #183 - What A Mess

Another update then, and I do feel somewhat better. It's a complex issue, there is definitely something wrong with me, but I at least managed to muster the strength to get everything done this week. So first off, lore:

Lore: Journal of Anomalous Objects and Curiosities 2016Q1

And have an article too:

Mechanics: Diegesis And Mimesis In Video Games

Now for the update. The new-new intro is not done, and some progress was also made with other events, but the significant changes to report for this week are more on the mechanical/coding side of things.

Let's discuss them in no particular order, starting with the new changes to the emotional response system. This is still a work in progress, as we've focused more on the design than the implementation so far, but that won't pose much of an issue once we feel we've nailed down what we want to represent with the systems. Emotional responses now apply lingering changes to social skills in the period immediately after making them. Essentially, feeling emotion will shift your capabilities for a moment until you can get a hold of yourself once more.

Mind you, the effects are not colossal, but they can shake up situations where ambient modifiers are already affecting your character, for better or worse. At the core, emotional responses are still primarily a roleplaying tool.

Secondly, we've made some nice progress on inventory-adjacent "puzzle" mechanics. There are a few things here that take the code we've already developed for containers and spins it off in different directions. Firstly, we have a whole list of tools and their associated actions. Specifically, we have 48 tools with 9 actions (each with 3 degrees) annotated to them. This isn't where we're stopping, but it is our starting point to build up this system.

If you don't understand what the point of the above is, let me explain briefly. In a lot of games, there's an issue that comes from overly specific solutions to situations involving inventory (though the issue can be further generalised as well). Solutions to problems are coded to take into account specific item designations. Thus, if you'd have a situation where you need to unscrew a vent cover, that can be done only with the designated screwdriver item. This might make sense at a fairly casual glance, but it falls apart as a game's complexity grows, provoking a question about comparable items. For example: if I have a knife, why can't I unscrew the vent using the knife. It might not be its intended usage, but it is possible to achieve according to common sense. And that's our aim. By expressing interactions in terms of actions required and actions possible to perform by items, we step around this problem while allowing our generators to pull problem solutions from a broader space.

Hopefully, that makes sense. But also, I wanted to say that it's not everything we did regarding the inventory. A while ago, I was playing around with the concept of a mess you need to tidy to find items within it. Essentially a time sink element of a problem where you gamble time hoping to find something useful. We've tested this by constructing a pile of tools - you can look through the tools in hopes of finding something, with the content of the pile being pre-set at generation time (i.e. it's not actually random, it's only something you perceive as random from the top-level view). Thus, if you need a tool to solve some unexpected problem, you can try searching through such a pile, hoping it pops out.

Having done that, I also returned to a somewhat similar item - the envelope. I did this a long time ago while building the initial code for parametric items. This code has evolved and come a long way since there, so I revised the envelope to match. It can do a bit more now, like having parametric descriptions or inheriting the item's weight inside. In fact, the code no longer represents just an envelope. It's a much more general tool I'd maybe describe as an item-wrapper-item. It can still be used to represent that envelope we started from, but it can also be used to build a wrapped present or an item inside a box.

On top of this, I've written flexible narration hooks for all of the above. While they currently use only provisional writing, they are also relatively easy to expand and express the various situations where the above items are used.

So, it was quite a fruitful week in terms of mechanics... a topic I might write about more in the future.