Latest numbers: 17713834 bytes, 1584 text files.

Only about two of the last five months have been spent on SOAT (which was anticipated), but I should be able to spend a good amount of time on it for most days in the foreseeable future, other than a few weeks in October-November.

Since last update:
(1) implemented the "listening" conversation system in the game, where you hear what generic people are saying/thinking in your particular area, without actually having a dialogue with them. Basically, whenever you choose the associated "listen" option, the code compiles the set of possible conversation snippets which can be heard at the particular location/time/situation, then chooses one randomly. It's fairly quick to add in new snippets whenever I think of one. Not that much content so far (only 40 snippets, out of hopefully a few thousand in the finished game), but the proof of concept is there. I'll probably mainly be adding them during playtesting, when I'll have the game situation well in mind, and any time I think of something new/interesting a person in the area might be saying, I'll write it down.

(2) wrote another one of those complicated RPG-style fights, requiring modeling the fight with the Mathematica code I discussed in last update to calculate the optimal outcome of the fight for any given set of maximum HP, weapons/tools, and skills, to verify the fight can be done at a certain point and not *before* a certain set of conditions is satisfied. As well, in case the fights end up being too hard for most players, added an in-game hint system which (in prose, via your character watching other people fight) looks at how your last fight went and describes where you must improve on to succeed next time. In any case, these fights are in the category of "optional" puzzles (mainly set pieces) in the game which can also be skipped by the player at the cost of forfeiting points (only relevant to Hall of Fame bragging rights), so getting stuck isn't the end of the worlds.

(3) decided to change the game's name from "Starlight Sacrifice" to "Stygian Eclipse", of which I like the sound better, and which somewhat better fits a few major themes/circumstances in the game story. Also, kind of a nod to the "Stygian Abyss" of Ultima lore.

(4) over three evenings this week, implemented a new feature I thought of: a toggle to switch on highlighting of area description names of people/animals/vehicles in the vicinity (basically, things which can be considered potentially "mobile" as opposed to static features of locations, which the player might want to quickly ascertain when navigating old locations). When enabled, this option will wrap "mobile entity" names in the chosen style, e.g. a bold blue font. Currently doing a quick playthrough to make sure I didn't miss "tagging" any entities in area descriptions along the way, and interestingly it's already revealed a few minor bugs such as entities having been described twice in the same paragraph, or left out of descriptions when they probably should have been there.

(5) miscellaneous fixes/additions in a playthrough, trying to tick off as many "to-do" items from my spreadsheet as I can and being particularly focused on filling in any "gaps" that absolutely *must* be filled for the part of the game to be covered by the next preview, before it's released. Some to-do items I'm still skipping over for now, such as those I labeled "Idea", which are things which I might want to add to the game at some point, but which stand on their own and aren't required for patching in existing holes.

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> *, **, *** = change of metric for game size