Esoteric Update #286 - Hyperplanar Orthography

Update time~

So, this week was pretty rough overall. There's a flood happening here, I'm sick, and the weather keeps giving me migraines. Despite this, and despite managing to lose the ability to write, I managed to get a good chunk of work done. I'm not even joking, b.t.w.; my ability to tapa-tapa at the keyboard and produce coherent sentences has just been in gutter for the last week. I think it's just a side effect of the migraines, but there have been way too many cases where I wrote something down or in chat, then looked back to it and cringed with embarrassment.

Anyway, I continued making minor changes to the engine, cleaning up the code in a way that didn't meaningfully change the input-output relationship but improved the complexity of the operations or, more so, the memory handling efficiency. While not a huge difference when observed individually, these functions are called tens and hundreds of thousands of times when the game runs, so it adds up. The one bigger change is that [?|] and [??|] non-terminals can now handle ? in the text without encoding shenanigans.

Additionally, I worked on implementing a few features for books that I wanted to include in the game for a longer time. The implementation isn't finished, so please keep in mind this is all temporary until I can flesh out the appearance and mechanics (a discussion of this is on our Discord). I'm only showcasing this to explain what we're up to. I'll also add that these are features we've wanted in the game for a long time, and they will be relevant to the test adventure, which is why I finally worked up the courage to try and implement them. Unlike most of what I do, which relies primarily on C# or my own programming languages, these features required JS, just by the nature of what they do. And unfortunately, JS is JS.

So there are actually two related but not quite similar features at work here. The first was an idea for representing some magical shenanigans being used to hide text within a page. You can read the explanation here:

In this test case, the interaction starts with a blank page, and when you move your mouse around, the text begins appearing and moving around in response to your pointer position until you can find the sweet spot, which freezes the text in place. These motions are actually very deeply customisable, allowing for many different effects; thus, this is only an example of what this mechanic is about.

As I was writing the code for the above, I realised it could also be adapted for a different mechanic I've spoken of before: UV inks. So I gave it a try. The effect was much harder to get right than expected, and I almost gave up based on the graphics. But I eventually came close to something that worked for me and could be further refined (I already have plans but have yet to implement them).

The big issue with these mechanics is that they appear only for specific "special" pages. What I need to do here is to have some kind of menu where you can use these mechanics on any page in the game. I'll probably still limit it to some extent, but right now, the appearance of the mechanic makes it evident that there's something to find. It should be an action by the player to try and find something, and there should be a natural possibility that there will be nothing to see for most pages (the majority of books, in fact).

I've also been speaking with someone, for the last few weeks, who wants to help with writing and design for the game. This seems to be slowly bearing fruit, and hopefully, if their interest doesn't wane, they will be a valuable asset to the game's further development. For the moment, I'm refraining from speaking in more detail, mostly because I don't want to put too much pressure on them. So, I just asked if I could mention this in this update, and it was approved. I've been teaching them to use Type-2 Chomsky-Schützenberger grammars to express writing, which are shaping up to be the bulk of our corpus — definitely an interesting experience (possibly for both sides). We could use more such people; there's always more writing to be done.

I also received a very nice letter (or e-mail, really) with some encouraging words about the project. This also makes a difference.

Anyway, I'm not sure what I'll be able to do over the next week. My health isn't great, and it's getting better or worse at seemingly random. If anything particularly bad happens, there will be a message from me or Bear on the matter.