Esoteric Update #256 - CENSORED!

Alright, so today's update might be a bit on the longer side; there are a bunch of details to discuss since I've done many smaller things.

Firstly, we've still been writing, and I think we're at about 90% of the writing needed for the various items. That's not so much less progress than last week, as much as us realising we want to add a few more things to the location.

Now it's time for the rapid-fire spray of "the other stuff".

I made some changes to the engine to introduce a way of adding generative CSS and HTML to the template the engine uses to display content. This helps with modding/customisation, but it's also used to implement the UI details listed below.

Speaking of UI details, the game can now inform you whenever you gain experience in one of the skills (this feature can be toggled in the options menu). The updates are accumulated per display refresh and automatically clear afterwards. Were the display to get in the way of anything, you can click it to dismiss the whole thing.

Additionally, there's now an option to play the game in a partially censored mode, which should make it kosher for streaming or for playing it out in public on your laptop. This is not exactly a recommended way of playing the game, as it blocks you from some options, but it will do in a pinch. The game will inform you that you're in "Censored" mode if you select the option.

Now, it's time for something relatively pedantic. As you might have noticed, the game uses a somewhat atypical font. I've decided that books within the game should not necessarily follow this trend, so I switched the default font for both covers and pages to good old Times New Roman. This can also be further customised if needed. While at it, I also addressed differences between even and odd book pages, which will now display slightly differently (regarding page number and header).

Furthermore, I also implemented a rather interesting archetype for pages. It is now possible to construct a loose stack of pages. Such a stack, when viewed, will hint at the presence of further pages underneath the current one. Furthermore, because there's really nothing keeping the pages together, as you look back and forth through the stack, the rotation and position of the pages will randomly change. Also, the number of pages displayed is capped by the number of remaining pages. Honestly, I could likely do more with this... but I'll see about it later.

I've also been looking through image assets for the game and have selected a few different additions to the game. The big two, at least in my opinion, are tape and sticker residue decals. Now, this wouldn't typically be used like this, but I don't have anything else prepared right now to present this:

Unfortunately, most of the assets I secured either didn't pass our quality standards or were unusable for technical or legal reasons.

That's all; back to writing and working with the assets for now.