Engine Rewrite... 3

The engine architecture has, again, been rewritten from scratch.

Whilst the previous engine did work somewhat well, it had some issues dealing with the way itch spins up a new game, making it difficult to save/restore progress. That was because the only underlying save mechanism was localStorage, which is isolated by hostname, and itch spins up a new instance from AWS in an iframe.

The new engine, on the other hand... Well, it has a whole bunch of ways it saves data. It does try localStorage as the primary mechanism. But it also supports cookies, the browser history cache, and URL parameters. Which means it does work under itch.

It has also been written to be able to fully run offline. In point of fact, if you leave the tab open, it'll try polling for updated data every hour or so that it is allowed to. So you can go offline, online, and back offline in a number of sequences and without reloading end up with the latest set of data.

Which is good. Because Choices is huge.

Each individual room is small - just a fragment of text and a three or four choices. But in most cases about half of those choices will be unique, allowing for a massively twisting web of stories. Playing every possible path in Choices is extremely difficult, and would probably require mapping it out. As it stands, today, you can make roughly 18 unique choices in the first 5 minutes of gameplay.

Another major change, is the stories. Rather than the player being named "Rag" with the option of renaming, they pick a story where everyone is already named. This removes half the headache of the dynamism in the old engine, and let me cut it's size down by half. Now it's basically just a fancy if/else/goto engine.

I'm working, currently, on the Violet & Cassandra->Beserker->Newbie timeline. Which should let you know how wide branching Choices intends to be. I think I'm getting a fairly good grasp on how combat should look, and how the story should progress as a whole. It feels like a very constrained form of DnD, on some levels.