Dev Journal: Cold Forged (Patreon)

Struggles and triumphs, my friends! I know it's been a while since my previous, public dev journal, but it feels even longer for me. I've been flailing my way down a strange and difficult road.

The work itself has been plenty strange enough, but life has also thrown its challenges at me. The holidays got a little crazy, and seeing family left me sick a while, leading directly into a small weather emergency. I think most Americans had a rough time in January, but Portland in particular was... intense. Power outages and freezing temperatures put us in something close to a survival situation for a minute, and then we entered this magical era in which every surface in Portland was covered in snow, topped with ice, and it proceeded to hold to basically two degrees above freezing while raining constantly for a week or so. The basics of life become difficult when the world itself has become a zero-friction environment.

But we survived, and the work goes on. Last time I mentioned doing a lot of work upgrading the Core components of my text parsing system, especially those dealing with logic, to serve as a more generalized logic system I could incorporate into the upcoming AI overhaul. I reached a good stopping point for that where I realized this should also open up more options for easily expanding the text output system itself, and I'd decided I'd go ahead and focus on adding some more content to that so I could ship a quick update!

Well, that was the plan, and I was right that I had more options, but when I started to experiment with adding content, I realized that there were some things I really wanted to be able to do with it-- things that would have been nearly impossible before, but which this latest upgrade now put in my reach! So I let myself get diverted somewhat into upgrading the text parsing system itself more thoroughly.

Well, I say diverted-- the upgrades I worked on ended up being so wide-ranging, I think I ended up getting more work done in preparation for the AI as well! That last chunk of work had simplified the process for, in the future, adding more options for what kind of data and logic this General Logic system can handle, and these new changes take that even further, much moreso than I'd thought possible!

Honestly, I've been very proud of the work I've accomplished in the last month and change. There was at least one occasion on which, once I finished replacing the old, bulky mess of code with a sleek, versatile set of lines, now so easy to read and meaningfully modify, that I found myself literally exclaiming aloud: “GodDAMN that is satisfying!”

The improvements, on my end, are substantial.

But what does this actually mean for the player? Well, let's take a look at some examples of what has changed in how we can describe an orgasm. As a reminder: the big idea of the text parsing system's logic components is to read a spreadsheet of instructions and follow them to interpret what's happening in the game right now and choose the sheet's text description that is the best match.


Before: If an Engagement (like Sex) isn't the focus (starting/stopping) of the action you're describing, you can't really talk about it. “You have an orgasm.”

After: You can find and bookmark other Engagements to refer to! “You have an orgasm mid-combat!”

Before: Since an orgasm isn't something you do TO someone, it doesn't have a target, so you can't really refer to anyone but the person having the orgasm. “You have an orgasm.”

After: You can bookmark other characters to refer to, OR refer to characters just by the Engagements that relate them to a character you know! “You blow your load in the Golden Dragon!”

Before: Even if you can refer to characters that aren't directly related, you can only describe things from the viewpoint of “the one having the orgasm” or “the one not having the orgasm.” “The Golden Dragon blows his load in Wild One.”

After: Expanded viewpoints allow bookmarked characters as viewpoints! “The Golden Dragon blows his load in you!”

Before: Even if you can find other Engagements, what if you're having sex two ways at once? You can maybe pick based on everyone's Intent, but not on actual enjoyment.

After: With a more robust math setup, you can score each instance of sex by how pleasurable it is and modify that by how willing everyone is to be involved to pick the “best” sex you're having right now!


Each of these was a big paradigm shift, either to make it possible at all, laying the groundwork to make features like it possible to add without being a massive ordeal. It still sounds so simple and small when I lay it out like this, but there's a lot it's almost impossible to describe here, both in terms of how much has been consolidated and simplified, and how many layers of strange things off to the side had to be fixed or adjusted to make all of this work well.

It's been challenging in the best way, and at this point, my code looks so much better I feel at times like the whole thing is basically running on black magic. There were several instances of me mumbling aloud, “You can DO that??” as I explored and experimented with how to open up my options.

Now, I'm finally reaching that point where I feel like the code is ready to handle all the content I want to throw at it. It's possible I'll need to go back for some small additions as new ideas come to me, but half the point of these changes was to make those future additions as fast and easy as possible. Hopefully, this is the turning point to finally writing up new content to really flesh out the descriptions and add more variety and specificity.

And once that content is ready, fingers crossed, it should be a pretty short testing phase before it's ready to ship! This update has taken longer than I wanted for a few reasons, but I do feel like it's been a lot of huge progress for the game, both for the text output system and for laying the AI overhaul's groundwork. I hope the new stuff I add can reflect just a bit of that to whet your appetite before we hit the real action down the road!