A Waltz with the Erolich

I've been trying to get into something of a Halloween mood...

Hello everyone,

It's been a pretty damned eventful week here in AW Land, but things are finally starting to calm down a little bit. (If you don't follow on Patreon, I made a few posts about super typhoon Yutu there.) It seems we finally have NPCs roaming about the place according to their own schedules, as well as "fake" NPCs that convert into full NPCs if the player feels like interacting with them (there's a post explaining them here).

There have been some other neat things happening over the last week, aside from crazy storms and crazy digging in the code mines. One such item is the often-requested explanation of different male mutations. There's been a few random explanations of a particular mutation in the past, but now there's a full entry in the AW Encyclopedia.

I also fixed some issues with scrollbars in Firefox, though unfortunately it still isn't feasible to provide any styling, as the only way to do so is to manually draw scrollbars using JS for every element that needs one (so not going to happen).

There's also a little bonus something that is really cool:

This is an arcade game that you can find in the Pleasure Buzzer Arcade at the mall downtown. Besty took the initiative to make a few arcade concepts, and I helped out a little with AI during my time off. I also did some art for another arcade game tentatively called Cockmongering (it's a gloryhole-based game). Only WEEGIRL is playable in the game right now, though I might spend some more free time to get the other ready.

WEEGIRL is actually surprisingly fun for a simple little one-level arcade game. As a W.E.E. employee, you're sent into the maze of the Institute tunnel network to fix broken vents. Unfortunately, this time you aren't alone. A certain cuddlefuctopus, which you may remember from the female start, is down here this time. Unfortunately, deadly monsters don't let you skip out on work... It's basically a game of cat and mouse, with a monster that gets better and better at hunting you down. :D

Up Next:

Only a few things are left in the to-do list for version 16.0, though that's still a good amount of work. Mostly it's creating the NPC viewer, and creating some buttons and basic interaction options for the world NPCs. And of course... testing. and bug fixing. Lots of those. We're doing some thorough passes to get things as bug-free as possible before adding even more stuff next month. 

So, let's do a few random previews, mostly random screenshots like usual.

Just an early look at what I'm thinking about for different NPC lists.

And icons for representing gender and general age group in the above menu

Twatter showing a bunch of people... Which reminds me, I still need to set the time and location ratios for NPC presence... ugg.

A random gray-scale sketch used for 'fake' NPCs, as they don't have enough data to generate normal portraits. I'll probably figure out a better solution later on.

Of particular note are those blue circles at the top left, which are a quick addition. I wanted to have a way to represent how many NPCs are in the area in a visual way. It's nothing too special, but does solve the main issue with keeping the portrait fixed on the player's last selection. Here's a quick look at how the circles work.

0 to 5

Okay, that's it for now, see you next week!

o/