I'm working on putting these mechanics into practice and also put some of the mechanics we've built recently into the intro (for testing) so when that's there we'll see if it's cool or not. It might be totally NOT tubalicious, or whatever those kids from the 90s say.

Usually people can get over prefix notation fairly quickly once they realise that it's just more or less treating everything as a function. Main thing about it is that it's a lot faster for the computer compared to infix notation. It's why I use it myself. Postfix notation is even faster, but it does get a bit less easy for humans to follow and also it lacks certain formal qualities I like about prefix notation.

I'm not sure I'd say Narrat is a Ren'py alternative, I think it's aiming more for the Twine space but with its own twist on things.

That's fine.

A lot of my same thoughts and opinions.

At base, for the kinds of needs most users will have, the language works great. It works great as an addition to other systems too. The more advanced syntax though is not only a mess but functionally broken and there's a lot of things that inexplicably cause either the IDE (Inky), the compiler or the runtime to hard crash. Told the devs about both a load of those and how to fix them, got ignored, decided it's not my problem. The shame is that I feel this could be basically narrative gold if they actually resolved a lot of the bugs and reworked the syntax. Heck, just... implement an array datatype.

For the best "up and coming" narrative engine I've seen in a while, I have to say, I'm impressed with the progress Narrat v2 made compared to the state in which Narrat started in. It's essentially Ren'py but stripped down of the VN bullshit and with a few neat pre-defined modules for narrative games. Also really good for beginners, but I think it's more possible to strike out into something more advanced using it.

ChatGPT I have no faith in, however.

So I'm curious, what are your experiences with Ink? You struck me as having some ah... experience with its god awful design.

I got it to work but it wasn't easy. That said, main interest for Ink was providing other people with a semi-visual interface for writing story fragments (mostly as a replacement for TreeNote, which we used before). In terms of procedural text generation it cannot particularly compare with my own systems but that's fine, the implementation of it I have right now has full interop with my own code, including a very easy way of handling procedural narration calls. Including the features you mention Ink to lack.

Incidentally, I part of what I was doing with Ink included an idea I had for assembling sub-stories into bigger stories but it's something I'd prefer to discuss on Discord if you are interested.

Overall, I think I got what I wanted out of Ink but it didn't surrender it freely and it wasn't at all any kind of extension to what I could do, just a different way of visualizing it.

For the moment, several more weeks of hospital visits before me. I hope things get easier for the summer though. So I can just lock myself away at home where the blasted heat can't reach.

I am happy with how this is going, yes. And it is rather technical.

Yeah, I do, it's @EsoDevOfficial (don't laugh, there's a reason for the last part of the name, it's not just self aggrandising). I asked because after I posted the update I had problems sleeping so I actually did do the part about images where they are generated in-memory.

Wait, did you actually see the follow up to this I posted on Twitter in the dead of night?

And I appreciate the effort to comment.

I feel good about it, despite the issues with it. I might actually use it extensively myself since it makes organizing work easier.

Like I mentioned, we're doing what we can.

We hope to start moving to content soon, at which point public updates would make sense again. But that's all I can promise, due to how things are going pinning down specific dates is hard.

Ah, I hope you weren't too disappointed with what you found there.

That is a rough story and unfortunately one I've heard from quite a few people. But then, if there is a way to describe the world, unkind and uncaring would be up there in terms of accuracy. I'm glad to hear things have improved for you in the end.

I'm doing better myself, to some degree. There is still no happiness to be had, but I endure. And while that's as much as I can do right now, at least I'm not failing at it.

Maybe not soon, but I'll settle for eventually. If that would happen, everything would end alright.

It's ok, I'll endure.

I'll endure, I always do.

The first thing you say is "It's completely unnecessary". You very much acted in such a manner, yes.

It's a non-obfuscated C# executable. If you don't know how to get at it, I'd suggest just not trying to get at it.

Ok, now that it's not the dead of night, let's go over what the installation does and why it's needed.

Firstly, the exact details of what the installer does are described in the game's read me. You do not need to run the executable with admin rights if you don't have to. You have it stated plainly what it does and what it needs to run, and you can do it yourself if you prefer. This is also the exact same thing every other application that uses these features of MS C# libraries requires to achieve the same effect.

Secondly, if this were possible to achieve without using those registry-based flags, I'd have done it already. But it isn't. At the very least, not without completely uprooting the game's HTML engine and swapping it for something else, out of which there are only two real choices, Gecko and Chromium. The latter of these I categorically refuse to use, and the former already being on the TODO list as a possible future development.

This has the issue that it would require me to spend a lot of time to get it running, both in terms of the effort needed to add and configure Gecko, which requires to be linked as external code to work with C#. On top of that, it would also require me to go over all HTML and CSS elements due to minuscule differences between browser engines. Especially since I know for a fact that Gecko is incompatible with some of the techniques I use for procedural content generation.

In that sense, making an installation-less version of the engine would technically be possible. However, it's just not feasible to do under the time restrictions I'm currently working on, nor do I feel any particular need to do this, considering that I am also pleased with the behaviour of the current engine. The only reason I want Gecko is to have access to the newest version of CSS and SVG, which I don't really need, it would just be nice to have.

Thirdly, the whole aspect of it "raising an eyebrow" does not concern me. The code is open for anyone who wants to investigate what the installer does, and it's very much a minor thing. What you are asking me is to effectively make a version of the game that still, from a security perspective, does the same thing, except it does it entirely without the user's permission. I get where it might seem that if the engine didn't need administrative rights to set up properly, it would look "safer", but the reality of it is a little bit different. And this comes down to both openly asking for consent to enable the specific browser feature set emulation and explaining the situation with GPU acceleration and why someone might not want to use it.

And before you say that, you didn't know what I wrote above. It's in the instructions. The process is, in fact, transparent.

It's actually completely necessary.

Don't like it? Don't bother, and don't act as if you know what's happening under the hood.

Thank you, though I doubt it's worth 20-40$.

I could be doing better, but thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for the kind words at least. I'm not sure I can agree doing great though.

I hope so too, I'm rather tired of being sick.

I'm not sure I can agree, but thank you for the kind words regardless.

Got vaccinated and then got sick? That's a bit of a yikes.

Thank you, I'd say that after resting a bit through Christmas I feel a lot better.

I tested the issue of the ankle boots and they seem to work just fine, you'll have to help me a bit more and be specific about what's up.

I need the "some other things" to understand the first one. I fixed a bug a few days ago concerning that, you can get around it by just talking to Cornelius, backing out of the conversation and going back to it and it should be fine.

Concerning the ankle boots I'll see what's up, that should be easier to fix.

Thank you for the well wishes.

When you open the game you get a cover letter explaining what you can do (also in Bonus menu if you missed it) apart from that there's nothing in the game an pretty much everything that is there is slated for removal/restructuring anyway.

It's not burnout, I think that would be easier to deal with.

I implemented some changes to importing characters. While the main reason was maintaining compatibility between older saved characters and the new character generator (which has two more steps), I also ended up making it easy to change or edit the comment on a saved character.

To be a bit blunt, I'm not exactly getting funded either. The money I get from Patreon goes towards covering expenses only to the point where I'm not longer paying for developing this game (there was a point when I did actively lose money on this project). I am not reimbursed for the time I invest into this project. But that's fine since I think it's something worth making and the few people that help don't seem to be complaining either. If you have a project you think is worth making, the reality of the situation might be, that you need to choose if you pursue it without earning money from it, at least at first, but possibly at all.

I'm working on a new update right now, updated character generator and whole intro redone using my v2 mechanics (to hopefully get some input on how people find those), but I also have a clashing medical situation happening that's sapping my time and making it hard for me to say when I'll be able to release it. Sometimes soon though, definitely.

The v2 mechanics are important as they make it a lot easier to build far more complex interactions than anything I've tried before.

As for burnout, I've been going at this for a long time, I'm too stubborn to give up.

They are not. Fox-like specifically refers to eye shape.

I've added four options for red eyes:
pink, crimson, wine red, sanguine
As well as an unique response from the narrator.

Just to clarify, if you do not set your eyes to have any colour related attributes the game makes no assumption of such.

I'll think about adding something for editing saved characters. But I don't have time to do it at the moment.

As an immediate fix to the problem, you can do it manually by navigating to user\characters and opening the file Character Name.char.comment with notepad.