Course of Temptation Dev Diary #33 (Patreon)

Hello friends! The time has come for another progress report.

First of all, over the weekend I made a handful of very small additions that will go into the April update. Though small, I hope you can agree that some of these things are very important.

After that, I continued work on 0.5, the relationships update. Conceptually, the events I've been writing for this update mostly end up in one of three categories: entering a relationship, exiting a relationship, and about an ongoing relationship. Games seem to often treat establishing a relationship (especially a romantic one) as an endpoint, but I feel it's important to have several events unique to ongoing relationships, that having lots of friends, lots of enemies, or a romantic partner should change your gameplay in some noticeable way.

This week I added some events unique to established friendships. Friends will be sources of Relaxation and Attention, and can even bump your Composure up when your character is feeling stressed.

Mostly, though, I focused on entering and exiting relationships this week. This is sort of the bare minimum to actually implement a relationship, so I wanted to get it done and make sure I had those bases covered.

Some will just sort of fade out. For example, if you haven't interacted with a friend in a long time, it's a natural to acknowledge in a moment of reflection that you're just not really that close anymore.

Romantic relationships, of course, tend to have more distinct and very memorable endpoints... and, yes, that means I had to write breakup events! If you don't keep in touch with a romantic partner or do something they really don't like, then you may be on the receiving end of a breakup! On the other hand, if you want to end things yourself, you can initiate that conversation through your phone.

Other events were a bit more fun to write! For example, here's one where you run into an established rival that you have... complicated feelings for:

Another thing I worked on was a more general implementation of the Control attitude. "What's that?" I hear you ask. Well, you're familiar with Friendship, Lust, and Romance, but NPCs can track other attitudes that are less visible, like a professor's Favor or... Control.

Basically, Control is how in control that NPC feels in their interactions with you. I originally implemented Control to help handle the logic for some specific characters and storylines, notably The Classroom Harasser. But, with this update, it's become useful to track this for everybody. After all, someone who doesn't like you but also doesn't feel in control around you won't just hate you, they'll also be afraid of you. This can turn them from a Rival into a Victim, if you're inclined to be a bully.

I also probably don't have to explain the implications of the Control attitude for establishing D/s type relationships! I haven't done much in this area yet, but they did score highly in the poll I did for 0.5, so I'll be giving them some specific attention before this update is released.

Speaking of... when will that be? I'm optimistic I'll be able to get it into some sort of final shape over the next month (but don't hold me to that, nothing is ever certain). Now that we can enter and exit all relationships, I need to write the "ongoing" event types for the rest of them. Then I need to handle cheating mechanics and all the fallout that can come from that. Finally, I want to add to some specific storylines — for example, perhaps an alternate path to establishing a romance with the BFF that doesn't require going through the quad party storyline. So, there's a lot still to do, but the end is in sight!

Next week

The rest of the month will be all about cramming stuff into the April update. Poll results are similar across both platforms — people really want the encounter system extended some more and more reputation events, with more sports events not far behind.

The encounter system will benefit greatly from the player being able to express what they want to do. As some experienced players have figured out, selecting certain positions or certain actions will tend to nudge most NPCs into doing specific things, but this is not very reliable and definitely not very obvious. I also want to work on encounter AI some and extend it into accepting NPCs and not just the PC as a partner. This will improve threesomes and may lead to some events down the road where the player is a voyeur.

As for reputation events... well, the reputation system got a fairly solid implementation in a previous update so there isn't much I need to refactor. Mostly I just need to do some brainstorming and writing and work on adding events, with the eventual goal of having certain reputations feel like it really changes the game for you.

I also agree that we need more sports events and I have some ideas for these. I'm not sure I'll have time for all three of these things, which are all pretty big tasks, but I'll do my best.

The latter part of the poll had tasks I think will be smaller than the others, so I'll pick a couple winners amongst these small tasks and try to get those done too. The winners here, again on both platforms, are starting outfit selection and yoga at the gym, with a workout stream type not far behind.

I'll do as much of this as I can, and the April update won't be too far away! In the meantime, thanks so much for your support, it really means a lot!