Esoteric Update #260 - Adventure Progress and Cyphers

Hello, we have an unusual situation today, for this update.

I'm not Eso, you can call me Bear if you want. I work on the game with Eso, though I wouldn't say I contribute much, I manage some things for her and serve as her rubber ducky when needed.

Eso is not doing well. I've asked if I can talk about what's happening and got permission, so what's written here is with her consent. On Monday she had minor out-patient surgery. On Thursday she experienced issues with her social phobia and experienced a DPDR episode. On Saturday she seems to have developed a food poisoning, but she will be seeing a doctor about it tomorrow.

It's not a pleasant situation, and as such Eso asks for your understanding that she will be taking a few days off development to recover. The next update, done by Eso, will be on the 17th or 18th this month.

As for the update on game progress. Eso has stated that she seeks to get the adventure running so she can do live updates/presentations on the locations in the adventure, and has worked on this over the week, though the issues above have stopped her from finishing it.

A number of elements that have been tackled and mostly finished:

• The location has been transformed into a graph representation with location attributes. This tells the game not only where things are relative to each other and how to move between them, but also to assign attributes and further data to the location, such as from where you can hear or see things.
• She also started on a set of observations and inferences that will use the mind map to help guide you through the adventure. The mind map lets you make decisions about what you think some things you encounter in the game mean and based on that gain bonuses to passive checks and experience if your assumptions are validated.
• She has began working on a door system, but before she could finish it got hung up on figuring out doors that require different ways of opening them from two sides. Imaging if a door is locked with a padlock, that padlock can only be accessed from one side.
• There is also a new system for cyphers, though I'm not sure if it is actually to be used for the adventure. The cypher implements crafting recipe templates that allow documents to be used as "keys" to read ciphered data in other documents. The full scope of the system is not yet set in stone, but it will likely include the ability to learn simpler cyphers by memory so that books are not needed and also some cyphers that require additional steps to be unlocked, like specific key numbers, phrases or even additional items needed to decode them. I was also asked to specifically point out that the crafting here does not destroy the component documents, as the crafting implementation is a bit broader than most games use. In this case combining the items returns the items into your inventory while also producing an effect of being able to read the ciphered text. This was probably explained somewhere before, that this kind of interaction is possible.
• Finally, the handwriting system (v2, I think) has been completed, however only one of the several characters whose writing you will be reading over the course of the adventure has a defined writing style file.

Finally, some screenshots for the handwriting system. The character is repeating the same paragraph, working under higher levels of stress and thus with messier handwriting:

And a test file for the cypher implementation. If you just open the book mousing over the encoded segment doesn't produce any results, however once it is "unlocked" using the matching document, you get a tooltip that explains the meaning of the cyphered text:

In any case, I'm sorry that my writing isn't as good as Eso's but I hope everything can be understood. I know that she wants to write more about the handwriting and the technology behind it, so hopefully next time she makes an update that will be there.