Esoteric Update #196 - At Least Vodka Was Simple

Alright, a slightly early update this time, but I have something to do on Monday and would like to post before, especially since it's relevant to next week.

So basically, I'm going to the hospital on Monday, nothing big. Usually, for healthy people, this would be an outpatient procedure. But it's a bit riskier for me, so I decided with my doc that I'll stay over under observation for a day after that. However, I decided that since about half of my free time this week is going to be burned on the visit anyway, I'm... going to take a break from working on the game. So basically no game dev for the next week, and I'll get back to it around the 5th.

I'll spend the time doing nothing, maybe playing some video games, petting the cats, rolling around in bed, that sort of high-quality time.

So, for the update today, have some lore first:

Lore: Polczlek – A Nightmare Study

We manage to get a good deal of writing done, though not everything is in the game yet. A big part of that writing has to do with the subjects I'll be discussing below. However, most of what I want to mention today is making content for the various systems we've accumulated over time. I've gone into more detail about the whole thing in two Twitter posts:

Consumables

Intoxication

But really, you don't need to do that. What it says, is that we now have pretty universal templates for handling things like food, drinks or even drugs.

Anyone remember the Diet Water joke?

Furthermore, to account for these templates, we've been doing writing and research on a few topics, like coffee and alcohol, ensuring we can offer an interesting choice of items for the bar and have the bartender accurately discuss them. This actually turned out to be harder than I expected, but we're close to having all the information we need for the first batch of alcohol, and we already did some work on coffee before that, including writing.

We've also been further experimenting with AI generating some art. And fortunately, someone's been helping with that because everything taken off my shoulders helps a lot.