Weekly Update #2 - Holiday

Again, no content this week - just posting this update to make sure I stick to posting updates every week. And, to plan out what should happen in the next seven days in CULT!

First off, I have thought more about the personality system and decided that there should be two main parts to every person's psyche. The first of these I will call mindspace, and will have as input a set of personality traits + a set of stimuli from the game world, and will compute a list of desires. These will be ordered in order of importance. Imagine a desire for food, a desire for warmth, but also desires that may result in more long-term goals such as a desire for a bigger house, a desire for a person, a desire for power. 

The next layer will compute from these desires + again a set of observations about the game world, a set of next likely actions. A desire will compute an action based on practicality (you want warmth? go inside! you want to sleep? go to bed!), but can trigger causality chains when blocks are reached within the action space (you want food? get food! no food? buy food! no money? get money / beg! etc.) These trees should also partially be based on personality.

Essentially, a person will form a complex set of thoughts before any actions are taken. It will be a challenge to determine how far I can push this system without reaching  a bottleneck for computation, but I think it should be doable. For this week: I will create a basic idea for a mindspace map, and start working with basic personality and stimuli to simulate a mind with desires in each person - although they won't be able to project their desires onto the world just yet, I would like to see how detailled we can get their thoughts to be before I move on to the next step of connecting their thoughts to their bodies!

And then, of course, I've also got some lovely updates from the thriving CULT community. The theme song is still being worked on, and is sounding creepier than ever, while a new logo is also in development. Hopefully by next week there will be content to share there, but you can't rush genius!

Thanks for reading!!