Esoteric Update #192 - Serious Systemic Progress

A bit of a late update but yesterday was the 1st of the month, and as usual at this time, Patreon wasn't super cooperative about not throwing time-out errors. Anyway, have some lore:

Lore: On Economy And The Magically Inclined

Now, for the update. I know I said I'll try to focus down the map, but for reasons partially related to having a few things I wanted to do and partially due to slowly cooking inside of my outer meat shell, I ended up doing only a bit with it and dedicating the rest of my week to other things. Anyway, as far as the map goes, you can see the progress below, and I'll also add that I went on to establish a few more locations in the city.

Now, what are those other things I've been working on?

Let's start with language use. Not only have we introduced the previously discussed (on Twitter and Discord) separations to dialogue generation based on ethnicity, but I've also gone on to sort out issues related to this found in the generic conversation module, which did previously severely underutilise dialogue generation and its options.

Secondly, I returned to skills to sort out some critical backlog features. From the beginning of development, we've had plans to include things like perception and effort as mechanics in the game, so I went ahead and codified them. A large part of this was just setting up bridges between coding that was already done and fleshing out some minor issues I've noticed along the way. But I've also introduced some new mechanics. One is light levels, which gives a bit more detail to how well the various locations are at different times of the day. Of course, this was prompted by working on perception and is one of its unique factors. I've also officially introduced the concept of low and high magic checks. Low magic is basic magic that all mages should know and, as such, uses the max value among your skills, while high magic is the opposite. Some checks just make more sense when framed in that way.

Finally, since there are now environmental factors that affect the player character, I've also decided to bring them into view, similarly to many other stipulations, which you can see here:

And while we're on emotions, I've also made some changes to that. Currently, the character's emotional state undergoes normalisation during sleep, which resets the total weight of emotion back to a common starting point. So what does this actually do? It means that the current emotional decisions you make have the most influence on your emotional state, instead of how previously, over long-term play, later choices would experience a diminishing return. This is also relatively realistic, in the sense that the player character uses sleep to organise her thoughts.

Since I mentioned perception previously, I also rounded out oculomancy with some new features. You can now use it to do psychometry and aura-reading. These features close out our current intentions for the school, so one down, three more to go (and rituals). It's a relatively bare-bones implementation so far, but it runs o the GB system, making it functionally infinitely expandable as the need arises. It's definitely one of the things I like about the structure of that module.

Finally, I'll also mention that I've been fighting with a visual bug for the last few weeks, actually, but finally managed to squash it, sheesh. Of course, the solution was something dummy simple, like placing a single function call in the right place. This was an engine (C#/WinForm) issue b.t.w. and would only show up when acceleration was enabled... and even then, only sometimes. As far as I can tell, though, it's gone now.

This finally puts me in a place where I'm comfortable showing people this new, accelerated version of the game, so maybe some light testing this weak?