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I’d originally intended to spend the day adding a few new pages to the PDA, but I was struggling to get started until I stumbled upon a very cool extension that allows one to quickly and seamlessly embed a fully-functional Chromium browser into GameMaker projects. It was very straightforward to set up and get working with the in-game computer, and because it draws the browser render to a GM surface, it was also easy to apply my dithering shader over it, rendering it more in line with the game’s visuals overall. I’m really surprised at just how high-quality this asset was for something I just came across completely accidentally, and it’s immediately expanded the range of potential activities (as well as implementations for older ones) I can feature for the in-game computer.

I think moving forward I’ll spend some time building a couple of locally-stored HTML pages to form a small repository of documents – some linked, others which must be accessed by finding addresses out in the wild – which will provide some further worldbuilding not directly related to the main plot. Because it’s Chromium, it may even natively support PDF displays, which would be really useful as I could then load the reference and instruction manuals directly in-game without forcing the player to switch to a different window on their machine.

At some point I’d like to explore the possibility of creating a special visual effect when accessing non-local files (basically, anything addresses on the real internet) to suggest extensive data corruption. I also have to implement a feature to prevent the player from “connecting” (in other words, just being able to access) to the browser when the in-game network is down. It should be pretty straightforward: I think I can build it into the splash screen that I have to make for it anyways, and simply have it destroy the instance and display a special error message if outside of the range of hours in which the network is active.

Lastly, while I was getting ready to go to bed at the end of the night, an idea for Estelle’s section came to with sudden and startling clarity. I was almost immediately certain that it was the best implementation of the idea yet, in terms of both thematic fit, and efficiency of design. I’m looking forward to getting started on working on it now.

All in all, pretty unexpected progress on multiple fronts today, although certainly encouraging.