Post by MoralHazard in Orgone Collector -- Browser Edition comments

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Thanks for the feedback! I'm trying to thread the needle between a permissive narrator that allows nearly anything (as it was before) who therefore incentivizes bulldozing over the game's mechanics rather than engaging with them, and ab overly pedantic and restrictive narrator.

I haven't had the level of pushback you're describing, but these things are very sensitive to how you play, which is why I value outside feedback so much. I've pushed a small change to the prompting to hopefully make the narrator less aggressive while still policing jailbreaking attempts. Let me know if you're still having problems!

VotP131 days ago(+1)

I'll give it a look. If it was day 3+ it wouldn't be such an issue as you'd have tools to handle extremely resistant characters, but this was both with, and without, spells being used on what were often first/second encounters. It was genuinely, and unpleasantly, difficult just to reach the second day.

Is it having spells backfire "in a chaotic mess" if you have more than one active intended behaviour? Because it seems to have been detecting permanent effects for that purpose as well.

Additionally, the twists system unfortunately often creates situations that are simply not possible to handle with current game mechanics/do not have the effects described, or are not functioning correctly. Suggesting that certain characters can give you new spells, enhance your extant ones, or making an attempt to introduce male characters that, as they don't "actually" exist, cannot be targetted by magic or engaged with.

I've experimented a bit with Command-A via Kobold's interface, you might want to consider playing around with the current system in the latest version of Command-R for a bit instead to see if it cooperates a bit better, as Command-A seems to have a lot of hitching/repeating problems that Command-R seemed to resolve, and that seem a bit present here (what A.I. interfaces use the "slop detection" functions to prevent; latching onto certain phrases and repeating them, and self-reinforcing every time it happens). Some of this might not even be your doing so much as Command-A behaviour.

MoralHazard131 days ago

The chaotic mess part is not intended. Hopefully that won't happen now.

I've changed the twists prompting to hopefully prevent infeasible twists--though some of what you've mentioned is actually okay: enhancing a spell can work fine; it won't change the spell description but the narrator can generally handle it. Male side characters can be added as long as they aren't central to the story. Additionally, I've adjusted the twist mechanic to give you a choice of 3 twists, which should hopefully let you avoid any twists that break or undermine your run.

Going back to Command-R+ isn't really feasible as the API is still broken (4096 input tokens max for structured generations) whereas Command-A works with long contexts, allowing for much better narrator memory. Additionally, Command-A performs better along a lot of metrics, and a lot of the slop issues were very present in R+ as well. I actually do have some anti-slop built into the engine, but because I'm working through the API rather than a local instance of the LLM I can't use the most efficient measures (constraining the generation itself). I am adding a little more anti-slop though.

VotP131 days ago(+1)

Good to hear, then.

Recent "fun" issue; if you've already taken out an Iris, it becomes... extremely difficult to do anything to a second one, as it'll keep trying to ping the first, it's possible to resolve it by getting the other Iris to chase you to a different location, but it's still a bit silly (and undermines having yours, if you broke her, grab the other unit to restrain it). I ah, eventually just reloaded to reroll a different attacker for that day because it was getting so goofy.

Beyond what's already been said, the only other inputs I can provide are;
Trying to use money is... a roll of the dice. I managed to make it underflow into the negatives more than once in spite of having a very large quantity. Additionally, fully mindbreaking/slaving/whatever have you a rich character and having them hand over their wealth does not seem to carry the expected finances. Perhaps adding a financial character tag to refer to would be advisable for that, if money is going to remain a thing?

A "default location"/"home location" option that can be directly influenced by the player, as opposed to just "current" would be useful, I can somewhat work around it through traits, but it's still a bit annoying to move a character to live or be confined at a certain location, only to have the narrator grumpily tell me they're not there when I try to interact with them (seemingly having reset). Send-to, while accepted and acted upon by the NPCs, also does not seem to actually move them to a given location. That might be a parsing error on my part.

Are there plans to use money more directly like with the bionics, perhaps on home upgrades? For a description change, if nothing else.

Possibly unintentional behaviour (please don't remove it, it's super useful for skipping greater spans of time than sleeping, especially with how often twists can proc in a single day otherwise); mentioning waiting or doing something for X hours advances the time correctly.

MoralHazard131 days ago

Thanks for all the feedback! I don't actually get much of it and it's very useful for me.

I'm not completely sure what issue you're having with the Irises from your description. I think I will rename them, however, as "Iris Alpha" and "Iris Beta" can complicate some of the substring matching that I ended up adding to manage NPCs, particularly if the player or narrator truncates the name to Iris .

Money is still not fully implemented, in that there aren't many uses for it, the defined uses are bugged, and the way the game manages money hasn't been sufficiently tested and debugged. A big to-do for me.

With respect to NPC movement, NPCs can currently follow you, but can't be sent to a third location. Automating the process of sending NPCs based on input text would be very error prone (the current system can already fail sometimes based on how the player's response and the narration is interpreted), so if that were implemented it would probably be through the NPC UI.

Being able to advance time is absolutely intended.

itch.io

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