Esoteric Update #203 - I'm Sorry, But... I Need A Break

Starting this update is already giving me some issues... Well... guess it's best to rip off the bandaid already. I am very unwell. The last few weeks have been a struggle, and I've now reached the place where I can confidently say that I cannot continue on. I'm just too tired, too sore and too sad to be productive. As such, I am taking a break, and it will most likely be a whole two weeks. For the first, I want to just rest and try to maybe do something fun if I can muster the energy. Lately, I've not had the strength to do much to entertain myself, save for watching people play video games. For the second week, I want to spend a few days with my family and go to a certain graveyard... it will be the first time I have a chance to do that in a while.

I'm sorry; I know it's shitty of me to say this and that it will increase the negativity I get over this project, but I have to cut my losses and just take care of myself for a bit.

Now back to our regular content... I have some lore:

Lore: The Fortress of Solipsism

I have an article. It's a bit of a long and angry one:

Sex: Sex, Culture and Fiction

And I have a few things to say about everything I've done over the last week. So first off, I did a lot of refactoring of older code. There was just a day when it felt like the only thing I could do. I found two more significant issues that got fixed, and one of them also prompted me to write some code that automatically monitors the health of some game data.

The rest of the time I spent on writing and refining mechanics. In particular, the mechanics for consumables. There's now a more expressive scheme for defining how the player sees the effects of each item:

There's also a much-improved system for generating the description for consuming an item, but I want to still build on it some more. The cool thing is that once it's rolling, adding each next item is easier:

But there's also better communication between the stipulation system and consumables, and I've managed to fix issues with world-state stipulations not showing up in state-change messages. That's separate from the fixes I mentioned before, as it wasn't a bug as much as a coding oversight.

I'm still experimenting with a few things, and if I have the strength, I might try to tackle some of it while I'm on my break.

Taking a break will be anxiety-inducing, but maybe that's still much better than what I'm experiencing right now. I wish I had more people to delegate work to while I'm not fully functional...