Esoteric Update #312 - Wrapped Up Like a Present

Alright, it's time for that two-week update. I'm doing somewhat better right now, although the last weeks have left me exhausted. I will make a small note on personal affairs here - I'm approaching the end of my employment (as some might know, I'm retiring for health reasons - this should be good for the game) and subsequently have a lot of loose ends to tie up. You know, on top of my health issue, a.k.a. the reason I'm retiring.

Anyway, the first week was mostly spent on research and data entry. It was boring and tedious, leaving my eyes hurting from looking at Google, but I roughly priced out all the clothing items. Several hundred of them, in fact. And yeah, that doesn't take into account colour variants since we decided not to apply different prices based on colour, even in cases where it would make sense. However, it considers material variation, which is how those 200 templates become several hundred different items. I'm still sitting on the data because I asked someone to fact-check me, and I might also further abstract it (i.e. item type × material modifier).

With that done, I spent the remaining part of the first week and most of the other week redesigning some aspects of the item system. As stated, the main idea is to move from the current array-based format to a new dictionary-based one. However, I've decided to think about how else to swing this in my favour. I've come to some extremely interesting conclusions regarding item wrappers and parameters. This allowed me to resolve conflicts between item features (which previously couldn't be used together) and also opened up the possibility for some more nuanced wrappers... if you are interested in the details, they're on Discord.

I've also done some minor things not worth noting here, wrote some code, did some prototyping for the features described above, and got temporarily confused about how my own engine works (it was brief, but wow, what was I even thinking?). I wrote a lot (at work, whenever I could), too, trying to get back into a writing groove after feeling writer's blocked for a while. Thinking about writing some smut material again, but we'll see how it goes. I've done some thinking on this recently, and it hit me that the interactions I've had that led me to stop writing it fall in line with people who have, quite frankly, been abusive to me. And I shouldn't legitimise what they did, or at least I should try not to let that happen.

I know it was a very visually uninteresting update, but the work was crucial and needed to be done.