Today marks 18 years since I started coding SOAT. That's right, SOAT can now register to VOAT! There are some adults in the U.S. who hadn't even been born when the game's introductory scene and first few conversations with NPCs had been typed out. It would have of course been better had I not taken a lot of long gaps between periods of working on the game, especially in the last decade, but that's how things go sometimes.

Latest numbers: 17533277 bytes over 1582 text files. Again, not a great rate of progress since last time, but this time I really do want to get on a roll - starting this weekend! - especially since I may have a nearer-term target of making a third "preview" edition of the game available. If so, it would again be a complete section of the game from the start, but extending much further than the currently available preview. It feels like I might be able to finish by summer if I can keep up the pace, but no promises.

Highlights since the last update:
(1) in April 2017, I wrote some functionality in Mathematica (no particular reason other than it being my currently most-familiar programming environment) to allow me to analyze the possible courses of action that can be taken in a number of combat scenes in the game. Unlike most Smash combat sequences, where you just have to navigate a "maze" of possible states and perhaps trigger a few specific actions, a few in SOAT will feature standard RPG-type fare such as hit points, availability of different weapons/armor, and a few special actions. Because winning will require reducing your opponents HP to 0 before yours, it can be difficult to determine by hand what the optimal sequence of moves for completing a fight is, or even for which combination of starting HP, weapons, and armor it's possible to win. So I wrote some code which lets you input a battle's information (conceptualized the form of a flowchart with boxes representing "states" differing by game description, along with arrows representing effects of different actions) and that explores the effect of any arbitrary sequence of moves. At each step, it keeps track of "possibly optimal" combinations of your/opponent's HP that can be achieved at any state, and if a state is reached that has you with fewer or equal HP, and the opponent with more or equal HP, in comparison to a "possibly optimal" sequence, the new sequence can be pruned out. I wasn't sure whether keeping track of everything would be combinatorially explosive, but it turned out to be quite manageable. By this time, I had only written two such fight scenes (years ago) so it was good to be able to verify computationally that the optimal sequences of moves I had determined (manually, by trying to prune out what *looked* like inefficient loops through the state space) were indeed optimal. This will be important in particular because, as people who have played far enough in Preview #2 know, there is a way to effectively skip certain types of puzzles at the cost of forfeiting any points. To allow this "skip" functionality, I need to be able to determine at the start of a fight whether the player could theoretically win with the values of his maximum HP, weapon/armor sets, and other available actions, and only allow the "skip" to proceed if so. All of this went pretty smoothly; most of it was done within a single day.

(2) played through the game twice more, adding extra scenes, puzzles, and locations here and there, and checking off various "to-do" items when I reached them.

(3) took a "break" to make a more up-to-date "walkthrough" of the game as it stands so far (in conjunction with the second of the two playthroughs mentioned above); that took about a month and ended up being 1.2 MB.

(4) started consolidating "to-do" items from various text files, flow charts, and spreadsheets into a single spreadsheet tab to make things easier to keep track of (currently 1528 open items, but there are probably still a good number of things I haven't collected there yet from more obscure notes).

Moving forward, in the interests of getting the next preview version ready relatively soon, I'm planning on putting off further development of the late-game gaps and instead only polishing the parts that come before the preview ending point, along with the (relatively) fewer number of gaps before that point.

A lot of the polish will be adding more NPC conversations. Recently I decided that there will be two tiers of this, one in which your character will directly interact with NPCs, asking them specific questions (most of the dialogue in the game is of this type already, with options representing different lines of questioning), and another which will be more like traditional console RPG NPC interaction, where you'll basically just hear what the NPC is thinking, without any dialogue from your own character. This form might be reserved mainly for the heavily populated areas of the game, where instead of an option to specifically talk with someone, you'll be able to, say, eavesdrop on the local gossip.

(There's actually a third type of NPC conversation, I just realized - discussions you can have with NPCs that are currently following you, which was already implemented for three NPCs in the existing Preview version. These conversations fit more closely with the second pattern in that you just cycle through applicable snippets of conversation relevant to the current area/situation without choosing explicitly from lines of questioning.)

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> 37 locations, 319150 bytes (8625 per location) [2001/03/25]
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> *, **, *** = change of metric for game size