Esoteric Update #202 - Unleash the BèωáST

Definitely one of the weirder weeks of development... anyway, before we get into that, let's start with some lore:

Lore: Valerian; All Of Me

And also have an article:

Voices – Part II – Voices With Dialect

Right, now, we can get to the actual update. While we did the usual part of doing some writing, design, coding, fixing bugs, etc., there was also this thing constantly bumping up into various issues.

So I had to slightly re-write how area transitions work because they were causing locations to reset their state if you cancelled travel... and that became a problem. I've also had to work the code properly into the new systems, as there were some issues with that. It requires a different way of handling the whole issue of selecting a destination. But it works now. I also had to adjust food/drink because there's a fundamental aspect the original design didn't consider, and that's temperature. But I really used it as a chance to re-work the whole thing a little bit, and it also works much better now.

But now, with those things fixed, I can continue with a few more aspects of the game. One thing I can show off is that we now have resource management items:

While the coffees might seem similar, most of them actually have slightly different effects, whereas the energy drinks are all identical, but we thought it would be cute to include a few flavours. The way effects are represented is still not final. I want it to be a bit clearer as to how they work. This mostly has to do with most items in the game (as per our designs) having effect timelines. That is to say, unlike most implementations of consumables, where you impart some instant or continuous effect onto your character, these work by triggering a series of smaller changes to your stats/resources over time. For example, both coffee and energy drinks impart an initial large boost to stamina but then, over time, causes you to lose some of it. Overall, you still get more than you lose, but the initial burst also offsets stamina penalties from the skills system, etc. I won't get further into this, but I hope that more or less clears up how it works.

I think that might not have been super coherent, but I am very, very tired.

Now, have some more AI-generated art: