Esoteric Update #303 - Unrandom Randomness

A bit awkwardly, I'm in the middle of a few things. One of them is the designs for the page and the book cover. I've more or less figured out how I wanted them to look (I might still change the details once I have a moment to sit on the general design), but I'm missing a few things... in particular, I needed to prepare some assets for the cover and figure out how to work them into the design, especially for the cover. Another thing is animations. I have about twenty different prototypes for canvas-based animations, though I won't be using all of them; some of them are just variants, and I don't want them to be too repetitive. Instead, I'll pick one from each category and most likely end up with six different animations. Unfortunately, for now they exist as separate HTML files, and I need to wrap them for the JSGen stuff.

Something I managed to finish, on the other hand, is taking care of automated UV staining for pages. Obviously (I hope), I can't just have the UV option show up only when there's something to find, but that makes it somewhat too obvious. Unfortunately, that means I needed a way of mostly automatically generating filler for UV on pages that are not supposed to have any hidden content. Nothing complicated, just things that make it look like the UV light works and give somewhat plausible results. That's actually simple; the more challenging part was to make this stable so that the effect doesn't change when you reload the page and see different stains. Fortunately, I managed to figure something out, and it's a very flexible solution, too!

I've also written some lore. I've not written in a while, especially not something this in-depth. I know people generally dislike the writing, but it's unfortunately a part of the game and its design.

I also did some other small things and tracked down a few minor bugs/coding errors.

Have a few pages to see the staining - it's currently not set to be stable but to generate different pages entirely (as should be seen from the text and the magic circle).