A Whole Lot More of Text You'll Probably Never Read

As of today, 14 renascents out of 28 have their moods and phases fully written, marking the halfway point in this largely useless but fun endeavour.

This is a very important milestone because it allows my brain to star playing its underhanded tricks on me, proving that the remaining work is doable because I've already done at least as much, then proving I'll just have to do half as much, then a third and so on.

As for how much that work is exactly, I made some gross estimates having noticed the file sizes growing more often than usual with each backup, which turned out to be about 900kb of plain text so far, so I might have underestimated the amount of work necessary for this little feature after all. This would at least partially explain why the "To Do" counter has been moving so slowly lately.

True, I thought, there aren't that many new actions or events compared to adding new territories for example, but the moods have a significantly more narrative nature than just "You spent the week working in a wheat field.". By the time all renascents have their moods done their combined text could realistically amount to at least 15% of all the existing readable text within the game, and let's not forget that all that other text, dubious as it might be at some points, has taken almost 10 years to make with its ups and downs.

Let's not forget either that none of this text is actually necessary for achieving anything within the game, and you'll just be shown bits and pieces of it about the renascents that happen to be in the game at the time. Even if you like half the renascents, there will still be a lot of text you won't care about inside the next release. Still, I'm enjoying the challenge of fleshing out and finding interesting stuff to tell about so many different characters, call me selfish if you want.

And you know what's worse? I'm not quite satisfied with the results so far and I'm already looking forward to add several new kinds of moods that I decided to put aside for another round in the future.

Ideally, renascents should feel like fellow players sharing on our adventures. Realizing that however would probably take years, and even if I manage to do it at some point, it would only make my descent into madness harder to deny as I would have effectively spent years programing and writing make-believe people to play a game with me rather than simply going ahead and meet actual people to play other games with.


Real people baffle and confuse me though. They're so weird.