Course of Temptation Dev Diary #8 (Patreon)

Hello friends, it is progress report time once again.

Current version

I've put out a new build just now, v0.2.26. If you've updated this week, this one mostly just contains a few fixes. If you haven't updated in two or three weeks, then you'll find a couple UI additions (like the Memories tab, to see exactly what you've done with a person), some new events extending plotlines for a few of the characters, and new mechanics like cooking in your dorm and using a bike to get around campus faster.

As always, you can direct download the latest public version on my website, or play it on itch.io.

This is, of course, not all I've been doing, it's just the smaller weekend projects I take on while weekdays are dedicated to working on 0.3, the streamer update.

0.3 progress

PG streaming is complete! Events written and all. I could come up with more, and probably will when it's time to polish the update, but it's a pretty good variety, around the size of the QuickieBurger file.

When I say "PG" streaming, I just mean those are the rules of the platform in the world of CoT. This is an adult game and many events here, depending on your choices, are decidedly not PG.

Longer scenes are present too. Here's the beginning of one in particular that I think may be my new favorite:

If you go on stream in clothes prone to wardrobe malfunctions, you'd best plan for "accidents." When dozens of eyes are on you for hours, they can be hard to avoid! And of course you can also take more deliberate and obvious actions.

This is the risk vs. reward of it: these things are easy ways to generate lots of interest and boost your popularity, but they'll earn you strikes and eventually temporary bans. Your newfound popularity will be waiting for you next time you stream, but you might lose that income source for a week in the meantime.

But that's all building toward something. Once you're popular enough, or you've had enough "accidents" to gain a certain reputation, you'll be contacted by an adult cam site and you can get a head start on a whole new platform.

The cam site

With PG streaming done, I've moved on to CampusCams, the adult version. I've only written the introductory events here so far, but I've outlined the set I plan to start with. The underlying code that I made for the PG version will handle this too with only a few adjustments, so I can pretty much jump straight into writing new events and chat messages.

But I do want to experiment with giving it a bit of a different structure. The PG side follows the standard structure for jobs in life sim games: you click the action and a random event is chosen and displayed to you, often with choices for how you react. But when streaming as a cam model, there's a tension between your audience always wanting to see more and you wanting to milk them for tips. What you do, when you give in and do it, and how much it costs your viewers is ultimately up to you.

So it'll be structured like this: each round, the event will be somewhat predictable, because it's whatever you chose to do. The reactions will be less predictable, and it's the selection of choices you get that'll be random, because they'll depend on how people are tipping you and what they want. I'm not sure I've described it well, but I think it'll be pretty cool in action. We'll find out!

The weekend project

But carrying on with my new routine, over the weekend I'll take a break from the big update and tackle another area of the game. This weekend I'm giving myself the task of refactoring the encounter AI.

What the hell does that mean, you might ask? Well, encounter AI is how NPCs choose their actions during encounters. It depends on their inclinations, how they feel about you, the nature of the scene, and so on. Currently it's a thousand line monster of a method, and if you know anything about programming, you know that's not great!

"Refactoring" is rewriting a section of code so it appears to work basically exactly the same as before to the end user, but has been made more efficient or easier to extend and debug on the backend. This is exactly what's needed here. This huge method needs to be broken up into smaller methods and restructured so that it's easier to work with.

Once this is done, it'll be much easier for me to extend the encounter system. In the near future I want to add toys, dirty talk, multiple partners, plus just fix some fiddly things like NPCs (even ones that should be following your lead) insisting on certain positions or overriding your actions, and refactoring is a key first step for all of those.

I'm not sure how long this will take me so we may or may not have the small Monday content release we've had lately, hence the release today. But, in any event, 0.3 is getting pretty close!

Until next time!