Esoteric Update #266 - Oh, Divination

Alright, update time. It's a little bit late, but we had a heat wave yesterday, and it took a lot out of me. Indeed, it made me feel like an undercooked egg — soft, flabby, and liquid on the inside.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, I had a situation at work, and between the 15th and the 21st, I didn't touch the game. Thus, this relates only to the last week, when I finally had a chance to work on things.

Mmmm... I tried to write, but it didn't work. I think it was just exhaustion, but it meant I had to turn my attention to some other things, and fortunately, I did have a few things to take care of.

So, it has come up previously that I was working through a batch of assets for documents. I went through everything we had saved up. Lots of new decorations, but I had to scrap most of the textures because they were just... overdone. I still managed to get some new leather textures, and I also went through some of the existing textures and introduced some colour balancing to make things look less... neon-toxic at times. I'll get back to these assets in a bit.

Another asset-related bit of progress relates to... Tarot cards. It's actually really hard to find public domain or otherwise open-for-commercial-use decks of Tarot cards, especially actual decks and not just a set of Major Arcana. Most of the time, when you see Tarot cards referenced anywhere, it's just the 22 Trump cards, and not the 56 remaining cards.

Anyway, it turned out that the 'Pictorial Key to the Tarot' has a full Wikimedia Commons entry. Along with the 'Illustrated Key to the Tarot' and the original Rider-Waite deck. However, the 'Pictorial' version, unlike the other two, is one I can easily work with to make the assets we need for the game (that's the right version of the card here):

We'll explain why this is important/useful in a moment.

For now, we are getting back to the document assets. I've also worked on a v2 of the random document generator and have been getting places. The current take produces much more reasonable results by having a higher degree of control over the various elements of a document. It's still the same coprime approach, but some assets now share the same number, thus being linked together. (That is to say, if two assets, A and B, have n variants, selecting aⁱ from the first asset will also select bⁱ from the second asset. The two will be linked for all generations so long as the ordering of the assets hasn't changed.) Anyway, here are some examples:

Now, why the Tarot exactly? Well, for a while now, I've been developing a divination ritual for the game's ritual casting system (something that comes up occasionally; we're still working on it, ok?), but I had some issues with the assets. It should be capable of accepting different divination systems as long as they are tagged using the same pool of tokens. We definitely want to do Tarot and, most likely, Rune Casting, but then it gets a bit foggy. Yijing (Chinese Cleromancy) and Ilm al-Raml (Arabic Geomancy) are definitely on the table, but if they come, it will be later than Tarot and Runes.

I also flailed around with some code, buuuut I'll leave that alone for the moment. I'll talk about the more interesting things once they are done.

Anyway, the crunch is over, and I will have the rest of the week off. I plan to invest as much time into the game as I can muster to regain some of that lost time.