Course of Temptation Dev Diary #9 (Patreon)

Hello friends! This week I finished another major chunk of the 0.3 update and the end begins to be in sight.

Camsite streaming

This week I completed the basic set of camsite streaming events. X-rated streaming shares quite a lot in common with PG streaming, so it only took a day or two of coding to add in what I needed as opposed to the week or so of coding that preceded writing PG stream events. The rest of the week was spent on writing events.

As I explained last week, these streams are a little different in concept. With only a little finagling, I cajoled the event picker (the thing in the game that decides which event passage to show you) to pick content for links instead of content for passages. It ends up looking like this:

From a gameplay standpoint, this means you choose which event happens next, except you don't know exactly which things your viewers will be wanting you to do and what your choices will be. Requests stack, so if four different people want you to take your top off, you're getting a good payout when you finally do it. Or if you don't like any of the current offers, you can play for time, which doesn't directly earn you any tokens but can generate more offers if you know how to work your room.

It needs some balancing still, but it's complete and working pretty well.

What's left for 0.3?

With both PG and X-rated streaming working, that's the bulk of 0.3, but there's a bit left to do. For one thing, I still want to do the campus social media site, which will have some fun events attached to it and be a basis for certain things as time goes on.

Also, when I said this was the basic set of camsite events, I did mean basic. These events are you in your dorm room, stripping and playing at the request of people in your chat, and that's fine and fun. But there are other types of activities, more involved scenes, that can be done with this concept too, and I'd like to try to include one or two of those in the initial 0.3 release.

So, basically, I have my work lined up for me for the next week. It's been almost exactly a month since the complete 0,2 update and I would really like to try to release a major update roughly every month. This one just has a lot of pieces and a lot of unique code, verging on a game within the game. I'll see where I'm at next week. But I think we're close!

Weekend project

Weekends are where I set aside major update stuff and give other areas of the game my attention. Refactoring encounter AI last weekend really did take all weekend but at the end of it, the encounter system was working mostly as it was before — but with a more flexible method that's under 200 lines instead of the original thousand line one.

So now that the new method can hold its own with the original one, it's time to actually make it better. As I said in the Discord the other day, I remember reading once about a company that made shooter games, talking about their AI. Everybody complained about the poor AI... until they added voice lines to make the AI call out what it was doing, whether hunkering behind cover or coming out to try to flank. And suddenly everybody thought the AI was great, even though it was really doing the same stuff as before. Because now they knew why it was doing what it was doing.

Encounter AI is similar, I think. It has specific ideas about what it's trying to achieve, especially in the new version, but since you have no idea what those are, it often looks inscrutable or seems to behave strangely. By having the AI call out what it's doing — basically, adding dirty talk — the player can know exactly what the AI has in mind and have a much better idea about why it's doing what it's doing. Also, it'll be hot.

The other thing is toys. This is where the weekend project overlaps with 0.3, because toys seem like a big, obvious thing currently missing from camsite play. I would really like to get toys implemented and then have some really fun events centered around that.

So that's about it for now. If everything goes right, I think next week I'll be able to talk about wrapping up 0.3 and release plans. Until then!