Course of Temptation Dev Diary #37 (Patreon)

Hello friends! Welcome to another dev diary!

First of all, the issue we were having last week with false positives has cleared itself up, so I reapplied the last update with some additional fixes on top, taking us to v0.4.26h. Be sure to grab that update if you haven't already!

It's been a productive week, with the remainder of relationship types getting some events just for them. This gives all relationships some unique content, and with relationship mechanics now fully established, this will be a natural area for expansion in the future as well.

Getting some baseline D/s content in was a bit of a puzzle, but then I had an idea that I think might be fun: rules! A dom can set rules for their sub, affecting their behavior until either the rules change or the relationship ends.

Currently the rules mostly revolve around setting a dress code, but with the system established, it'll be relatively easy to add new ones. This also gives something for more D/s content to build off of. For example, in certain D/s relationships, rules are made to be broken because both parties enjoy the act of punishment... so, sooner or later, I want to make sure the player can achieve this dynamic as well.

Rules go both ways. As a dom, you can set rules for your NPC subs, and if you're an NPC's sub, they'll certainly enjoy setting rules for you too.

The next target is cheating mechanics, and I plan to finish out the week making progress on these. Last week a patron had an interesting idea (hello erieee) about inclinations to reduce suspicion in regards to cheating. It caught my attention because I had been thinking of getting caught cheating as a singular catastrophic event. Perhaps sometimes it should be, but it would make for more interesting mechanics if a partner instead could become gradually suspicious over time, giving you various ways to deflect or decrease their suspicion.

This all led to the creation of two new behind-the-scenes attitudes that can be tracked for each NPC: anger and suspicion. Whether you're failing to follow a dom's rules or sneaking around behind a partner's back, we can use these new attitudes as a buffer of sorts to allow you to try to manage the situation before whatever you did has a huge impact on your relationship.

Cheating mechanics are pretty much the last high priority coding task on the list, with the remaining tasks having to do with revising the characters that already had romance storylines of sorts: the BFF, the Admirer, and the Harasser. What this means is that my optimistic guess that I could finish this in April, or at least have it ready for testing, was pretty close!

We'll keep to the monthly update schedule, so I'll still have to split my time somewhat in the final week of the month, but my goal is to have 0.5 in playtesting by the end of the month with a release to follow in May. As always, that's not a guarantee, but it's looking pretty good.

It feels like for every major update, I've begun with the thought "well, at least this won't be quite as much work as the last one," and then it's always much more! The relationships update has its tendrils deep in basically every area of the game, so it has not been straightforward or easy. But that's why I wanted to get it in now, before its addition would involve revising even more established systems. Once it's in, it'll be a deeper system for how the player relates to NPCs with a lot more player choice involved, and a good framework to keep building more content off of.

But for the next major roadmap update, I really want to try to pick a task that's actually less work than this! Probably something focusing on a really specific location or area of the game. But we'll see!

That's all for this week! I'll check in again next Friday with another progress report. Thanks as always for your support, it really does mean a lot!