Esoteric Update #302 - Letters Go BRRRRR...

For this week, I focused on the antagonist book.

This has two aspects: the design and implementation. In terms of design, I'd prefer to show off the specific concepts later, but I want to highlight a few of the core principles I'm working with.

1) The book is dynamic and changes constantly, even as you flip through its pages. This tome is a genius libri - a book that is, ontologically, sapient and, to some limited degree, also sentient. We wanted to reflect this. The book will thus use generative pages that change as you flip through them and as certain states are changed. Essentially, this has also already been implemented; I just need to hash out some specific pages for the various stages of interaction with the book.

2) The book has certain specific methods of interaction that are a subset of the ways the player character can interact with documents in total. We're leaning towards hyperplanar orthography, playing around with the mouse cursor in many ways (both on the book's pages and outside of that), and interacting through conversation. On the other hand, we're choosing not to use UV/visible light mechanics to investigate the book.

3) The book acts as a character (agent) and can be interacted with through the player character's initiative and takes its own initiative to achieve its own goals, too. We're leaning strongly towards this concept in terms of our antagonists; they have goals and things to achieve, and the player character might stand in opposition to those goals or perhaps can be used to attain them.

So far, this all requires using many things we've developed before and some things we're still working on, and it's a pretty complex problem. Still, we're getting there, and it should get easier each time we need to use these systems/concepts again for another character. Some of these new developments include the first instances of canvas use. We're using them for dynamic text effects. I posted an HTML demo of one of them on our Discord, but there are two. Unfortunately, some things I'll mention here don't look right without animation, but let me try to present them anyway. We currently have two canvas-based effects: a text rain and a text trail.

The text rain produces a constant series of random texts (they don't need to be letters; it can also handle longer bits of text, up to short sentences). And yes, it can be used to produce a rain-rain effect.

The text trail produces a sequence of texts (works best with letters, but it could be whole words) that appears on the mouse's path.

Both of these will be used to reflect the book's ever-changing nature and slip in communication with the player character, which requires a degree of attention from the player to catch, understand and interpret.

I've also made it possible to easily use our magic circle generator with document pages. Patterns can randomly generate on the fly and appear on the page, either without or with some simple animations.

You can also see here that some of the page's aesthetics are in flux, but I'm not quite sure yet which style we'll be using; it might be something entirely different from what's shown here. I've also cleaned some code up, cleaned bits of the interface, introduced a QoL option to affect the mouse cursor influence strength, added a proper warning about the mouse control to the game's content warnings and added a way of rechecking the content warnings, in case you missed them or just wanted to re-read the text.

I've written some lore and designed a talking board mechanic, which will also be used with the antagonists of the test adventure... but more about that a different day when I can show it in action. For the moment these are the more important things to mention.