Was not able to stream today unfortunately (had to be up late and just couldn't swing 4 hours of sleep), but I did manage to make some good progress.

We have a new ledger: the "opinion" ledger, which loads "opinions" from JSON and makes the determination for what opinions any given character has based on their role and the game state.

Long story short, we have a basic first pass at our King of Dragon Pass style "council advice" system. It's actually going to be dramatically different, it's not a variant of that system, it is very much it's own thing, but it's the closest comparison point I personally know of.

Similar to how events are chosen, any given opinion has a set of filters, requirements, and priority in order to be valid to display to the player. They tell the player certain things about the game state; for instance the only real one implemented right now is "MY LIEGE, you don't have any other councillors assigned!". But that's the core idea: keep the player informed of game state and nudge them towards the things the game expects them to do and care about. Of course, character bias is going to need to be a very strong highlight of this system, but the primary purpose of the system is twofold:

• Have a another orthogonal system to combat "what am I doing". This one is particularly strong because it doesn't rely on player input: the advice will be there at turn start, and it's in the top left so it should be the first thing english speakers gravitate towards.
• Have another character-based system to make you feel personal connections to your characters and express personality.

There's lots of other fringe benefits: another place to have flavor text, selling the fantasy of "holding court", that sort of thing. Those are no less important conceptually but gameplay needs to take precedence in all things and the way I'm approaching this system is very gameplay focused.

More to come!