Archmage Rises - Jokes and Performances

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Archmage Rises integrates jokes and performances into its world.

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In this update I show what I was able to accomplish this week despite being out of town for 3 days. The broader context of this piece is in having many realistic ways to interact with NPCs, and many ways to build or harm relationships. All this is within the pursuit of making lasting friendships that mean something over time.

If you are interested, here is the list of outstanding tasks for Build 11. It is still at 27.

This week's progress:

1. Found and fixed a major fishing bug
2. Put in fish images, one for each species of fish, and a special image for empty hook. Fish image size can now reflect the weight. It feels really good now.
3. Spent a day refining the conversations code from last week. There were about 20 edge case scenarios that I had to sort through, write for, deal with. It's all feeling really good now.
4. I've always intended to have "tell a joke" as a conversation option (its in the Sims). So I created a joke engine that will create a joke based on several premise algorithms.
5. Jokes are generated at time of world generation and originate with certain people.
6. The player can learn any joke by hearing it. If an NPC knows a joke they have a small chance of telling it to the player through a special prompt. NPCs won't tell jokes the player has already heard.
7. The player can tell any joke they know to someone. Each NPC remembers which jokes they have heard before. Telling a joke utilizes the performance skill, which improves with each successful joke told.
8. NPCs react to jokes based on success/failure to tell, and just their own sense of what is funny (this will be connected with personality in the future). So a successful joke can still not be funny to the hearer. Oh how i've experienced this too many times...
9. In a future build: Players can use the Composition skill to craft new jokes. For now you just have to collect the ones in the game.
10. Added the ability to insult an NPC. This will be utilized in the near future.

• Something I've always intended was to allow the player to perform in an inn: music, poetry, singing, storytelling. I decided to see if I could use the gambling/conversation system to make a Stand Up comedy act. It didn't take me too long to do so. I'm not going to spend time putting in the other kinds, but now they are possible. All this is to fulfill the original design goal of being like Raistlin and friends supporting themselves by putting on shows at various inns along the shore of the sea of Istar.