Esoteric Update #298 - I'm Back, At Least Most Of Me Is

I return.

So, I feel I should briefly explain that my time at the hospital was somewhat rough and that even now, I still have some regular medical-related things to take care of over the next few weeks. I know that the last time I went to the hospital, things weren't even that bad, and I just continued working on the game while there, but this time was a bit different as I was partially immobilised and very strongly medicated; there wasn't much I could do about anything (and I hated it). Getting back into the swing of things isn't exactly easy either. I'm tired, so very tired, and the therapy sessions are exhausting me in particular, but this is better than being there at least, and I can at least start working on things.

Picking up from where Bear left off with the last update...

Some minor interface updates continued. Item descriptions can now contain special images that have been so far used to add brand logos to the locks. The point here was disambiguation and removal of repeating images.

I've also finalised the changes to how keys are generated, reducing the number of items by some 90% by moving some of the features from pre-generated to dynamically generated based on item parameters.

Furthermore, the way the points were set up in the Index didn't look quite right, and though I knew about this for a while, I guess it took a bit before I got tired of it. Speaking of the Index, it now contains a new entry for something that was always part of the game but wasn't very well explained or communicated to the player.

I attempted to integrate everything from when Bear worked on coding. Most of it went well, but one of the elements needed re-writing to extend and change its functionality, that being related to the mouse gravity features that the "adversary" he mentions uses. The current implementation is much better, and I've been sketching out some potential patterns for specific cases where it appears in the game.

I've also tried to revise a few unsolved issues from the past, failed on one, and succeeded on another; regardless, both are very technical and not interesting to talk about.

Oh, and I guess I wrote some lore. But who cares about that?

I'm doing what I can. I am not well right now, but things should get much better soon.