Course of Temptation Dev Diary #6 (Patreon)

Hello friends!

I got underway with the streaming update this week, outlining everything down to individual events and basically making a giant todo list.

The first step was giving the phone a bit of a facelift. Just in terms of UI, what I'm adding to the game needs a place to live, for this update as well as updates down the road. I created a general framework that will make it very easy to put additional features into the phone as needed in the future.

Clicking your phone button, instead of bringing you straight to your contacts, will now show you this:

This is where apps will live, and it'll be a good place for game functions that don't need to be accessible with one click — no need to further crowd the sidebar menu! The calendar in particular will likely be a welcome addition, revealing reminders that were previously hiding in the Character dialog:

The other new app is, of course, Internet, and it's the heart of the next update.

Elkbook will be the campus social media site, basically a prototypical version of... well, you know what site it's supposed to be. This will introduce the player to concepts of how social media works in the game: take an action online, receive a reaction to it, see pics and rumors spread, and face punishments like a temporary ban if you break the site's ToS.

The true focus of the update of course is streaming, I wanted streaming to appear a bit distinct as a career. It's a weird job in that you have one constant, amorphous watcher: chat. Chat has to be a character unto itself, always with you, always reacting to you. My first thought was to just include a few lines from chat in the passage text, but that sort of loses the distinct character of it. So then I had another idea:

On the left is where event prose will go (for now it's just a test passage, I haven't written events yet) and on the right is, well, chat. Messages here will be reactive to you and what you're doing, and when appropriate you'll be able to react back. Chat will be your constant companion, sometimes supportive and sometimes trolling you, from when you start the stream to when you end the session.

So, this week was mostly UI work and making the framework that this next update will be built on. It's coming along! Next week it'll be time to start writing events and get some more of the underlying mechanics coded.

Until next time!