Course of Temptation Dev Diary #42 (Patreon)

Hello friends! Welcome to another dev diary, in the midst of early access to 0.5!

I am going to keep us in early access for a bit longer — but not more than another week — because new content is still being added and I want to be sure it, and the rest of the very extensive changes in this update, are as solid as they can be. Scary-looking syntax and runtime errors have pretty much all been caught by now, and most reports are to do with edge case oddness in relationship logic, which I've spent some time addressing.

I spent much of the week catching up on submitted content, and you can add this to the 0.5 changelog:

• Gloryholes now become accessible once you have done the gloryhole dare (other ways to discover them will be forthcoming) (contributed by Meat Glacier)

• Alternate way for male characters to become suspicious about the quad party milkshakes (contributed by sleepy)

• New sex toy site added that players can discover in various ways (contributed by Enigma)

• Added some variations to watching adult streams with different skills raised (based on contributions from Shiro)

In addition, I did some quick touch-ups to D/s relationships, expanding the conditions under which they're available and making sure that if an NPC qualifies to become a D/s type relation, that you have that conversation instead of defaulting to becoming a romantic partner.

One of my changes was to add a variation on the goodnight kiss passage that often follows a date, giving an opportunity for a big shift in the control attitude for dominant or submissive NPCs. This should make it much more reliable and less grindy to form these relationships with appropriately inclined NPCs. This is a bit of a placeholder — long-term I would like there to be various events that help to accomplish this attitude shift — but for now, it'll work for helping you to create this relationship type when you want to.

Onto the poll results! Aggregating from both platforms, the ability to approach NPCs at your current location is the big winner, which is not really a huge surprise. Also high up there is advancing the storyline with the roommate and their partner, and simply adding more relationship events.

Second tier priorities look to be the librarian storyline, D/s punishment events, and hangouts with multiple friends or poly partners.

All of the things in the poll will make it in sooner or later, but it's always instructive to see what you all think and make sure I'm not going astray from what really needs to be done. In this case, I fully agree with the poll about what the #1 priority should be — being able to interact with NPCs at your current location whenever you want will help fill in some gaps and leave less to chance when it comes to establishing the relationships you want with the people you want.

This will be my big project today and heading into next week. The first step is refactoring NPC schedules somewhat so that you actually know where to find them.

This is work that would've been necessary sooner or later anyway, as which NPCs hang out at which locations is a bit too random and isn't always consistent with their character. You want to find mostly video game nerds at the arcade, studious types at the library, sporty types at the gym, and so on. I'm accomplishing this with "pull" and "push" conditions. Pull conditions can be an inclination, a style, a skill, or something else that makes a matching NPC more likely to choose a place as their hangout, while push conditions do the opposite and make them less likely to choose that place. This will make who's hanging out where mostly predictable but not completely homogenous.

Once this is done, the next step will be to "bake" NPC schedules — to decide who is where when and then to store that as static data. Then you'll be able to learn an NPC's schedule as you get to know them, see that data displayed on their social card, and go to where they are when you want to interact with them.

After that, it'll be time to code the interaction itself. Luckily, if there's one thing Twine is suited for, it's making a branching dialogue system, so I'll leverage that as much as I can. But I'll talk more about that once I get into doing it.

In the meantime, the early access build has just been updated again with the new content listed above and new fixes. Here's the link again.

Next time you hear from me will probably be on public release day! My goal is to have the new schedule and interaction system in by then, and I think I can probably do it, but it's quite a large undertaking so we'll have to see.

For now, thanks for reading, and as always, thanks so much for your support that makes this project possible!