Esoteric Update #257 - Bold Face Font

Oh boy, that Monday snuck up on me this time!

So what's up, you might possibly ask?

A few things. Firstly, lots of writing is getting done. We currently have approximately twenty thousand words of just descriptions and enough material to start proceeding with the implementation of the adventure. At this point, we're still missing various bits of text, but we can deal with that on the fly while also testing everything we've been cooking up. I'd also like to comment that while 20k words might seem like a whole lot of writing for just a little test adventure, this is largely a collection of reusable modular text that we will be returning to draw from in the future. It's just that with this kind of development, there's a flywheel effect for some things, both coding and writing. You need to get that flywheel spinning before things take off. It's also worth noting that out of the 20k words, around 3k were written with AI assistance. This text represents background noise, and we have had some success in using AI to pad out this background noise. The rest of the text is handwritten by us and constitutes the main content of the adventure as well as the less essential but more reusable content (the AI writing is too specific to use elsewhere; this is part of why it was done with the help of an LLM).

If you are interested, I posted some snippets of the written text on our Discord; of course, you can also find near-daily updates on our progress there.

Secondly, I returned to the Glimpse mechanic to implement some quality-of-life features. This involves some general polishing to the writing and presentation, but primarily, this is about this new feature.

A Glimpse can be accepted as long as there are no factors at work that contribute to the butterfly effect and, as such, can save you from re-threading your steps. This does give you some information about what's happening, but I think it's better to have this break some mystique rather than layer tedium onto the idea just to prove a point.

Anyway, thirdly, we've added some assets to books. Again, this can be seen in more detail on our Discord, and I'll just post this one picture here:

I really like how the cover texturing brings out the 3Dness of the image.

Finally, we've done some work on automated text transformations. This has to do with stretching the available handwriting fonts in a way that offers some more verisimilitude to our handwritten material. After all, there might be many characters writing, but we only have three different fonts at the moment. As such, the idea of introducing stylistic diversity to what we do have came up and well... we did some experiments:

We likely won't use the smudge effect for anything, but the rest came out well.

Note that the font in question does not support bold. Instead, This is orchestrated using various CSS effects, particularly transformations. There's also the question of stylistic differences in the errors different characters make, and we've done some planning regarding automated error introduction, to have parametric means of inserting such imperfections into the text. Especially since an automated system would be impartial to a writer's bias.

Part of this has sadly proven a bit more complicated, and as such, it will require some more time before it's fully implemented. Especially since some features are font-dependent and must be customised for each font.

Anyway, as mentioned before, next week, we will begin putting all the pieces together.