Esoteric Update #279 - Finally, This One Has Pictures

Alright, update time. This one will be a bit more visual.

So, let's get the matter of writing out of the way first. Or rather programming the game to write. I think I have the issue with countable and uncountable item categories sorted out, but I have to say, the English language can be pretty frustrating. Anyway, having realised that this countability thing might influence how we describe certain items, I looked back at what we were doing before. I realised some of the more awkward wordings came from trying to force uncountable items into descriptions in a countable form. I'll need to change how certain things work overall, but I have a template for it now. I'd have already finished it, but looking into the grammar of the English language is exhausting, and I wanted to do something else this week, too... which brings us to the rest of the update.

I got inspired recently from watching someone play a silly little game to include wallpaper customisation for the in-game PC (I'll do it for mobile, too, just at a different time when the phone actually does anything). It's nothing too special but...

You'll notice there's an options button here:

This brings you to a small mind map that currently just lets you select the wallpaper. It has basic functionality like previews and keeping track of your current selection. Something I want to note here is that the layout is largely automatic. We've shown these expanding in one direction, but in this case, it goes in two:

Here's an example of how a selected wallpaper looks like:

And here's the selection of wallpapers overall:

They're just AI-generated simple things, but that's all we can afford right now. The system is pretty extendible overall; I might throw in a few more at some later time.

Additionally, you might remember that I shamefully lost the map for the test adventure. It makes me cringe internally whenever I remember being stupid enough to do that. I sat down to remake it, but I also decided to correct certain things. So I optimised the code that draws the map a bit, introduced some rotation, and had to scrap automatic boundaries but introduced a simple manual boundary mechanism to replace it. Boundaries are not that important; they don't need to be precise. In addition to these technical changes, I adjusted the map to scale better (the original one was a bit too cramped for what it was supposed to be) and improved the shape and size of rooms and door placement. I still need to remake the interiors.

Here's the current state of the map:

I should probably explain what boundaries represent. They exist to tell the game how big the drawing space for the map should be. That is to say; the whole view adjusts to the segments of the map you are aware of and grows as you discover more parts of the map. Here are the manual segment boundaries:

And for comparison, here's a picture of the old map:

I'll go back to fixing the container descriptions and item interactions now.