Esoteric Update #259 - Penmanship

This week wasn't good for productivity. A few things happened, but they're not that important; they're primarily just minor issues with my health. Regardless, when I counted up my hours, it turned out that I spent less time working on the game than I originally planned to.

That's not to say we didn't get stuff done. We progressed the writing by another several thousand words and got a few other things down (which I'll go over since I think a few of them are interesting). Still, we haven't gotten enough down where we could get our prototype online and interactable. And that was my goal for this week.

So, what would those minor interesting things be? In no particular order:

A) We have new resources for a bunch of things; these are primarily for the document system, both for pages with writing and for covers.

B) There's now an icon that shows up in the corner tab informing you when the game has autosaved:

Autosaving is now a fully standardised feature with a dedicated call for both regular code and the GB system.

C) The engine has support for SASS, or specifically SCSS, so it's easier to integrate things found on the Internet into the game.

D) Pizza!

It's just some stock assets/fonts and some AI-generated imagery. But if you were to find something written on top of a pizza flyer, it would at least be cool to actually have the flyer visible when you investigate it, right?

E) And now we come to the part I'm most proud of. So, a while ago, I think I noted somewhere that we're working on a system for giving characters handwriting with unique traits or something of this sort. I'm still working on that since it turns out to be a complicated issue. But for the moment, I concluded that the style should be split between the character's personal handwriting style and the implement used for writing. 

So that's what we did:

Many tricks are used here to achieve these results, but it is, in essence, pure, if somewhat non-standard, CSS. I know it's not much, but I think the effect is cool.

The personal writing style is nearly finished, but some of the math in there requires more testing and experimentation. It's about translating mental state (writing in a hurry and writing under duress) into text transformations.

Ah, and as a final note, I decided to discontinue my blog:

A Goodbye, Of Sorts

I'm going to the hospital tomorrow for a minor surgery; this is why the update is early. It's nothing major, just something that needs to be done.