Esoteric Update #??? - A Digression In Time

Ok, ok... how do I put this... I know I said I would work on something specific, but I randomly came up with an idea. This led me to prototyping, implementing and writing content for a new feature/mechanic. I'll talk about it for a moment.

First, let's go with the little things... I made minor changes to some systems, just tweaks to make them run better. Like optimising the circuit system to avoid superfluous state updates (if a part is already in state X and is then set to state X, there is no need to propagate a state change since there is none), cleaning up dialogue effects so that they have full access to dialogue text (that is to say the effect of a dialogue option can now fully manipulate the dialogue text, this is needed for some tricks), or added a wrapper for tutorials that set flags so they aren't repeated (so that the whole process can be done using a single token and not a combination of many tokens or a compound token) — just little things.

Secondly, I did some work on that whole novel thing I wrote. I Encoded a few chapters and want to get up to the first book before giving it a rest again. It's not hard work; it's just tedious and stresses me out a little bit.

Now, let's get to the new mechanic. So, it's just a fact of the matter that the plot of the game revolves around some concepts related to multiversal eternalism. However, we've never planned to have any mechanics related to it. However, I talked about it with someone (the concept of eternalism in this case) and later came up with a possible implementation. It's a bit of a  strange mechanic and will probably be hard to explain concisely.

Still, during the last week, we've managed to prototype it, then do a full feature implementation, write the tutorials and documentation for it, and then also add some content to the intro that uniquely interacts with it. Generally, this now works with all of our GB system events. However, since this is what we intend to use for everything in the game, it will eventually have universal applicability to the game content.

I'll not spoil what the special interaction is, though. It's just something that works best if you figure it out yourself at some later time.

I am going back to writing for the test adventure.