#sugarcube

Inland Ocean now has UI settings:

Themes: light & dark

Fonts: serif (georgia), sans serif (arial), OpenDyslexic

Font sizes

If you're interested in sugarcube code things, keep reading.

A small thing, but it took 9 weeks to build:

The sanity system in Maximilien isn’t a simple “madness meter.” It represents the character’s overall mental state, and the lower it gets, the more directly it starts interfering with the experience of the interactive novel itself.

Visual artifacts begin to appear — subtle at first, then increasingly intrusive depending on the severity of the character’s condition. But the text is affected too.

Sentences can distort, fragment, repeat themselves, blur intentions, or become harder to interpret reliably. Not in a random way, but in a way tied to the character’s actual psychological state. The goal wasn’t to make the prose “glitchy,” but to make perception itself feel unstable.

In this example, the character has been drinking heavily, and the narration becomes altered accordingly. Certain words slip. Thoughts lose precision. The text remains readable, but no longer entirely trustworthy.

Under the hood, the system uses sanity as a continuous narrative variable that dynamically influences which prose fragments are loaded during scenes. There are hundreds of alternate text variations written specifically for these states — not just darker rewrites, but fundamentally different interpretations of the same moment.

Writing them was probably harder than building the system itself. Each altered passage had to feel psychologically coherent, emotionally believable, and still narratively functional.

One of my favorite moments during testing was when someone replayed a scene and became convinced parts of it had “always been there,” even though they were seeing completely different prose variations. That confusion — that uncertainty about memory — was exactly the effect I wanted.

— Yohan

CYBER_SHELL | v1.2 is out!

This update is all about performance. In the previous update I've optimized NPC logic, including location loops, to prevent freezing in passages with multiple active NPCs.

Now I restructured how the template stores data — static config objects like NPC schedules, definitions, and item prices have been moved out of SugarCube's history cycle into the setup object. Saves are now significantly lighter.

What's new:

Config migrated to setup (upgrades, buildings, NPCs, prices, ranks)

Widget arguments updated from deprecated $args to _args

CSS typography variables added

¡ Saves from v1.1 and earlier are no longer compatible !

While I've been satisfied with CYBER_SHELL's performance, I've been thinking a lot about how scalability would work on bigger projects built on the template.

Currently my main concern is that, whenever I want to track NPC's accross the map the loop <<for>> runs through EVERY SINGLE NPC on the schedule list. This is unnecessary and may make the game laggy if you have like, 10 characters in a single passage, or if you have a visual map that tracks every character's location. That is why I added <<break>> inside the loop, so it stops once it reaches the npc schedule it was looking for, but does it solve things? NOPE.

The tendency is that as the game progresses, the $variables inside the widgets will make save files get huge and drop performance if we are talking about a big sandbox world. So I came upon this life-saving post on reddit.

It states that for Sugarcube 2, while we have temporary _variables that are cleared upon passage transitions and are not stored in a game's history, we also have setup.variables that persist across passage transitions, but are not stored in the game's history. This might solve problems not only for widget tracking the npcs location but for any widgets using $variables to call static data.