And now we present a Daniel Jacobsen News Update – delivered at the speed of one of those newfangled steam-trains! What an exciting Age of Progress!

Characters now form relationships with other characters! Right now it’s sort of like speed dating. When they talk to each other, they get a chance to compare their traits and determine whether they are compatible, and within the scope of about 5 seconds, they might just fall in love. Or they might hate each other. The frontier is a complicated place, charged with emotion.

Upon creating these relationships, characters tend to prioritize any task that will involve their partner, and they’ll be extremely upset if anything happens to them. And if something bad does happen, they actually have an option other than crying, waiting to starve to death, and being driven to a homicidal rage! Yes: they can drink ale to make themselves feel better. Sleep helps too, but they don’t know it yet. One day they may even be able to talk out their problems, but not today. Oh no. Not today.

Characters can also create rival relationships and they’re similarly extremely quick to judge, though they’re not actually nasty to each other just yet.

I was going to write about how difficult it is to actually implement other emotions than happiness and sadness, but… it’s not actually that hard, thanks to our design. Given any situation, such as a loved ones’ death, we simply say, yeah, that would make a character really sad, slightly mad, and quite angry! This affects the choices that they’ll make by increasing the utility of venting in various ways. Anger increases the likelihood that they’ll start a brawl (they’re frontier people, that’s how it’s done!), sadness increases the likelihood that they’ll need another pint at the pub and a good cry, and so forth. Things are going brilliantly, this is awesome.

You’re awesome too. Thanks for reading.