Esoteric Update #291 - All Keys To All Doors


Well, it's time for an update, though I find myself in a bit of an awkward position, with a bunch of things started and half-finished. But I'll try to review what I'm working on.

Firstly, progress happened with the key generation. Right now, I'm still missing some writing for some specific variants, but it's already quite a lot.


Something I've not wanted to mention before is that this was done with someone's help. Over the last few weeks, I spent a lot of time talking about modular writing with them, and now it's starting to bear some fruit. There's also something I'm interested in trying but have no clear idea as to how I want to do it: handwritten text generation for fobs containing those paper slips. The idea here is that perhaps we'd like to link the handwriting style seen on the fobs to the handwriting styles of characters who wrote on the slips. It's a bit of a silly idea, but then it's not out of the scope of things we've done before, isn't it?

Anyway, the second thing we've worked on are the old NPC conversations. I've mentioned encoding new entries recently, and I also have a hundred additional conversations ready for editing, but we've also been looking into the generation process itself. I got some help with extending the dictionaries used by the system, and we're working on some more commentary/narration to interject into the texts. This is one more task that was done with some help. Now, if you've never seen this before, it looks like this:


This is the same exchange generated in different ways. We see randomised characters participating in the conversation, including randomised appearances and idiolects. However, the narration is still limited to introductions and situations where a character's tone changes. That is part of what we want to change. The second part is that I have some additional work to do on the idiolects (b.t.w. these are the same filters the PC uses).

I've also encountered a rather persistently annoying formatting bug here; I only managed to fix it today in the early morning hours. It was a typo, of course (you may insert pained programmer noises here, if you wish).

It wasn't the only problem I've fixed, as I've also noticed a minor issue with how the radar chart was drawn, a formatting issue once more. So, I fixed that, and I've been looking into making a few more chart drawing functions so that we can put some charts in books. I've set this idea aside for the moment, as the other two topics above interested me much more.

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Comments

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(5 edits)

At first, I thought this game was abandoned but wow, you're updating at least a few times every month.  I'm sure it's a complex array of reasons, but why no new content for so long? You're obviously making this game for fun but it is just a bit puzzling. I'm not demanding new content, just asking for clarification because I don't understand.

Is it the custom engine? It's the custom engine, isn't it?

(5 edits)

I don't want to come off as rude. I genuinely enjoyed the content that was there, the prose is absolutely beautiful, and it's elegant and detailed without being overly 'wordy', exactly my kind of prose. The atmosphere of the intro scene was great! And I loved being able to mix and match what exactly I wanted to do. I don't think any game has made me this excited to play it in years.

I may or may not have spent most of my time just creating my character. This game perfectly strikes my preferences. I love long, detailed character creation that lets me fuss over every detail of my character, what they look like, what they act like, and what they wear.

I had fun just messing around reading books, lore and dressing up my character in my room not, you know, moving on to do what you do in a game like this.

Sorry about the wall of text lol, I'm just getting unreasonably excited because it's rare to find games like this.

I'm not really sure what you're talking about. The available download is an alpha for a very technically demanding project. It's not a game you can really "play".

I suppose it'll be best to describe it as I enjoyed reading the prose you had on display.

(+1)

Thank you. I don't hear that very often.

Oh, there we go, there was a third message

No, it's not the engine, while I still tinker with it to add new features or QoL options for scripting, it's largely a done deal and has been for a while.

It's the mechanics of the game and how they come together, meaning that it is very difficult to add content when that content becomes deprecated and has to be re-done as we continue to work out the systems driving the game. Essentially I'm not interested in adding content I'd need to delete later on anyway, I'll stick to working out the fundamentals first, then move on from there, when I feel it's ready.

Ah, okay. I get it, it would be majorly bothersome to redo a ton of content. Alright, thanks for answering me.

It's what kills a lot of projects like this, people rush into making content without having developed the fundamentals for that content to exist on and eventually just run into a wall where they cannot progress with the project due to such overwhelming tech debt in the early design that getting out of it is impossible.