Esoteric Update #253 - Loading...
Alright, today's update is pretty brief. I've spent the last week mainly working on three issues.
Firstly, I've been writing on item descriptions for ambience in the adventure. Additionally, these items will be usable outside of it, but for now, we're trying to fill out everything needed for what we're currently working on and then just add things as needed. I've added 6.5k words across around 200 items, which also adds to the thousands of words of descriptions we have already, like the tools or the books, that sort of stuff.
Secondly, I added a loading screen. Ok... this will need some explanation to make sense. In some cases, the game has to perform many operations to generate something, like an adventure. In these cases, if the engine attempts to execute all of them, it would appear to have crashed (became unresponsive). We needed a loading screen to ensure this does not happen, and the game can do what it needs without causing undo stress/frustration to the player. This is the first time we're having the display and the engine pass control between themselves without player input. We'll see if we can make additional use of this technique later.
Thirdly, we've started work on an electrical circuit system as an extension of the fuse box problem presented in the write-up I posted on the server a while ago. This system will let us build electrical puzzles in the future. But let me be clear what this is about. This is about circuits built from breakers, fuse boxes, wires, light fixtures, etc. It's not about building or manipulating small-scale circuits. It just seems like the logical thing to do here; if we're already putting work into making a single instance of this, we might as well generalise and not need to repeat it in the future.
Plan for next week: write more and code the circuit system.
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Oh this looks pretty good so far, is the electrical circuit system thing for planning out how the plot and choices will work, or is it smth else?
It's primarily for controlling how your choices in regards to one object in the game world affect other objects in the game world, that might additionally be located elsewhere than the player character. However, as an additional benefit, it allows NPCs to also interact with these map-spanning constructions in a similar way.
A simple example here is that if you do something in location A which causes a short circuit, this will effect a fuse box in location B causing it to blow and burn a fuse, which then causes the lights in location C to turn off.
Without a system that controls this, each of these objects requires adhoc coding which will handle all of the above. Essentially, this kind of interaction is hard to efficiently define if we have to do it individually for every map. However, with a system, each part can be responsible for its own behaviour and the system manages communication between the elements.