Esoteric Update #221 - Knowledge And How To Represent It

Ok, so I'm back from my hospital visit... and let's start with that. I got held over for almost twice as long as initially intended due to complications. It sucked. I wouldn't say I liked it. I'm home now, though, and I got back into the fray with game development as soon as possible.

There will be no lore today, as I'm just a bit on the busy side, and I can't invest the time into uploading it to WordPress. I'll see about doing a multi-feature next week, though. (Also, you can just read lore in our Discord as it gets posted, which is more often than here, albeit in preview format.)

Now for development updates, that's a bit on the complicated side. There was some progress from other people working on the game while I was gone, but it's modular writing and coding, and that's not something I think worth showcasing, considering I have some mechanics and UI topics to cover. In any case, there were bug fixes and code expansions, while some text also got written for the new areas/events as we progressively hash out the process of writing modules.

Now in terms of those, we've finally started introducing arcane knowledge to the game as a full-blown mechanic. A while ago, there was an attempt at this, but it didn't go over well. It was severely underbaked and too simplistic to correspond well to our design goals. So this time, we went harder on the issue and used some of the new features we implemented to get around the problems. And it worked.

I won't talk too much about what we ended up doing. But I'll hint that the problems were mostly related to defining the PC's knowledge as a data structure with fact precedent (i.e. you need to know A to know things that expand on A).

Let's see how this looks in UI:

(Character knowledge - a preview with a few implemented facts, note below that the same fact can fit into different fact hierarchies.)

(Character knowledge using the Global option - a preview of facts you know from other characters. These facts are not available to your current character.)

(The game options UI got a little refresh. Knowledge toggles between the options above, but I've also fixed the Hammerspace option that was broken for a while.)

There's still a lot to do with knowledge, but as it turns out, it's really necessary for us to do anything deeper with the game. Too many interactions rely on checking the PC's knowledge about specific topics.