Esoteric Update #216 - You Have Mail

Ok, update time. Have some lore to start with:

Lore: Aliyat Haratzon

And now for the update proper.

The main thing we tried to tackle was an issue we were poking at behind the scenes for a bit, e-mails.

Look, this is basically an immersive sin, and as such, I am legally obligated to ensure there are e-mails you can read. However, we are trying to tackle the situation from a slightly different angle.

Let's start with the UI, which may not be final, but I don't foresee it changing much. Of course, we had to make some adaptations due to how the computer screen is displayed in-game, but we also tried to make it a lot more naturalistic compared to many e-mail interfaces in other games.

(Also, shout out to the kind cat that helped me work through the UI here.)

This comes with an additional detail - the first time the PC's e-mail becomes relevant to anything, you will be prompted to choose an e-mail address. The game will serve you several domains with lore implications and a bunch of procedurally generated user names. The system is designed to address multiple issues. It strikes a balance between just getting an e-mail address if you are not interested in the in-universe implications, customising it, but also limiting the possibility of causing any issues in-game with your choice.

This interface definitely might need some work. At the very least, we must slap down some information about it to inform the player what's happening here.

Finally, we took a shot at some procedural generation, and we're sitting on something like 200k words of procedurally generated e-mails (or, in other words, the metric unit of 1cap [Crime And Punishment] of writing) to start throwing into the system. But, of course, they still require some human supervision before they are entirely usable, and we will likely prune the results down to the best outputs.

The point of this body of text, is to fill up the inboxes of random characters and sometimes even the PC to more accurately simulate the real-life phenomenon we know as the electronic mail. The context of someone's inbox provides background impressions and information about the character, and with a volume of mail, it is easier to hide things for the PC to find and thus lean into the information game angle we're pursuing.

This said, while there's still more work to do with this, I'm mothballing it for the moment to focus on other things. I needed a break from writing for the park encounters as I felt the quality of my writing was taking a nose dive due to material exhaustion. I think I've had enough of a break, and I can continue with it now, so that's what I play to do.