Esoteric Update #201 - One Rain Check, Please

Alright, time for an update, and I feel pretty ill. I've been at the Doc today and announced that I might not do an update, but I decided to push it after all. If anyone is curious, the issue is that I overdosed on painkillers while trying to manage my chronic pain issues.

Have some lore:

Lore: Hyperreal

There was going to be an article too, but I don't feel that editing it right now should be a priority. It's on Discord if, for some reason, you really want to read it.

Have some AI-generated art we're exploring for the game:

Now for the update. Apart from the usual like "we worked on writing" and "we fixed some bugs", I will focus on changes to how some of our mechanics work. And those mechanics are mostly related to things like coffee and alcohol.

The most significant revision was something I detailed on Twitter. So you might want to go to that thread if you are interested in the nature of the change:

Twitter thread on Indulgence changes

However, a few other things followed. The effects of eating/drinking are now affected by temperature, so I've started working on a temperature system. It's not quite there yet in terms of implementation, but the design is finished. There are also other revisions to the food/drink format, which include a better system for describing food items or specifically generating narration.

I've also backed out of the idea that resources are capped in the <0, 100> range and went back to a more flexible system. Currently, most of them are capped at <-50, 150>, which allows for some lee-way into very low and very high states before it starts normalising things.

I feel too exhausted to continue, so I'll end it here.