Awareness of Death and Afterlife

Storyteller development advances in two different modes: stability and expansion. When working on stability I hunt for bugs in the simulator, fix and tweak levels, add usability features and visual details. When I am in expansion mode, I add levels and new concepts into the simulator even if they break everything else (which they invariably do).

These past weeks I noticed my list of ideas for levels has grown too big and decided to add a bunch of them into the game, along with the simulator concepts they require. It happened that these levels dealt a lot with death.

Awareness

People get heartbroken when a loved one dies, and Storyteller has been handling this case for a while. But now characters may *ignore* other people's deaths unless they find out in some way:

Most common way to find out: seeing the gravestone.

Well that was convenient... (Being told)

Ermm... (Believing somebody died)

Criminals can get away with murder...

Afterlife

My favorite concept of the afterlife is that of ghosts: an incomplete echo of ourselves that flicker in and out of the world in unclear ways, somehow affecting the living.

In Storyteller ghosts are invisible and unable to affect anything, unless they are angry and villanic:

But they keep their ability to be heartbroken and horrified:

I think I've seen this in a movie...