Course of Temptation Dev Diary #14 (Patreon)

Hello friends, dev diary time has come.

The current version is 0.3.13 after a few bugfixing updates, which I've been doing approximately once per day. As always, you can get the latest version through direct download or play it on itch.io.

I want to write a few thoughts about bugfixing, but it's really game dev process type stuff. If you just want to hear about progress, you can skip the next section!

Fixin' bugs

So, here's a funny bug that got reported just yesterday. A player was using the new laundry mechanic that just got introduced in the last proper update, which throws everything you're not currently wearing into the wash.

Then, wearing just underwear, they proceeded to the shower room, stripped off, and took their shower.

Then they got the random event that results in somebody stealing your underwear.

And then... since they didn't have the Exhibitionism level required to be naked in the shower room, they were stuck in the shower. Forever.

Most times, a bug is just a typo. A parenthesis is in the wrong place, a variable or method was misspelled, or when juggling a bunch of variables you end up using one when you meant that other one. This bug, however, didn't really come about because of an error in any code. It was an unfortunate, rare confluence of mechanics all working as intended that, in this one circumstance, resulted in being unable to proceed.

In hindsight, it's easy to see exactly how this happened. And the fix I chose was simple: the underwear-stealing event simply won't fire if the player has their clothes in the laundry. But this combination of highly specific circumstances did not occur to me when I was making the laundry system, and I could've played the game for a month straight and never encountered this issue myself.

The inescapable law of development is that adding new things to your project is also, inevitably, adding new bugs. Of course this doesn't mean you just throw your hands up and accept bugs. It's important to playtest, to try to break things, to review new code, and to have a build test checklist designed to find problems.

But I could playtest for a month straight, and still 1) not think of every possible combination of circumstances that could lead to bugs, or 2) experience anywhere near as much of the game as all the players out there are doing collectively. It's hard, at least for me, not to regard bugs as some sort of personal failing. But you've also gotta get past that, because bugs are inevitable.

Do your best to playtest thoroughly, but accept that you're not going to anticipate everything or find every possible issue. Give players a way to report bugs, address them methodically, and put out fixed releases as appropriate. That's all you can do.

Progress on 0.4

Well, that bit was more longwinded than I anticipated, so let's get to the progress report.

First of all, I outlined everything, a few things down to the level of individual events and some things are still more broad strokes. Trying to balance between a variety of experiences and what I could reasonably put into a single update, I focused on three possible sports activities... then rethought things a bit and expanded it to four.

So, the four activities you can expect in the next update are football, cheerleading, swimming, and esports. I have characters and small storylines in mind for each, and I think they offer a decent variety of things for different types of characters. Like most things I do, I'm building this out of a flexible framework so that more activities can be added in the future with relative ease.

The football and cheerleading events will be somewhat intertwined, seeing similar events from opposite sides. The cheerleading team is there to support the football team, after all, and that can mean a lot of different things.

Several people in the Discord have also been asking for content where they can be the bully, and this was on my mind as I was brainstorming... so, if you want to pump iron, become a football star, and shove weaklings into lockers, football might be your jam. Of course, if you can't cut it, you might find yourself as the hapless waterboy/girl instead. But generally, becoming a big deal on the football team can lead to a more dominant path than a lot of the other storylines currently provide.

Swimming and esports don't have the benefit of so many sexy tropes to lean on (though swimming at least has the benefit of everybody being nearly naked) so I have to get a bit more creative there. The sexy parts of these are going to be a bit more character-driven.

The other big part of this update is interactions with professors. I have two main branches in mind for this. In one, you're doing well at school, and you can help the professor between classes or with special research projects. And of course the other possibility is you're doing poorly, in which case you can ask for help, "persuade" them to give you better grades, and so on. Naturally, these two will have X-rated events attached.

Next week, I'll be getting these ideas down in more detail and start writing individual events and putting them into the game. As you can imagine, the outline is already really long and there will be a lot of events to write!

More people!

One thing about sports teams is there are a lot of people on them. The PC's student cohort is around 160 people, and of those, around maybe 10 of them usually end up getting generated as sporty types. That doesn't exactly fill out multiple sports teams!

Something I've been thinking about for a while is adding more students. Not necessarily adding to the PC's immediate cohort (which some already find to be an overwhelming number of NPCs) but just people who can be around and used in certain events when needed. These are mostly upperclassmen, and along with the new special characters being added, they increase the student body by around 50%.

These new students will not be in your classes, but you may run into them around campus, and they will also be filling out the sports teams.

These new students are flagged as not being in the PC's cohort, so if in playtesting it feels like there are just too many people around to the degree that you can't get to know anybody in particular, the event people picker can be tuned to deprioritize them or even exclude them entirely from most random events. But I'll see how it feels before I do anything drastic.

Also, you might have noticed that each professor generated teaches two classes. To give more room for different professor personality types, I gave each professor just one class, meaning their count will be doubled.

In addition to this, some of the special characters I came up with seemed to demand styles not currently in the game.

NPCs can now lean more deliberately into hipster or scene type styles, and in addition I'm adding more granularity into styles the PC can be recognized as having. This means some new clothes, too!

Next week

Special characters have been made and sports teams have been filled. Next week I'll be coding the enrollment process (both for new characters and saves in progress) and then start writing events. I'll start with practices first, since those will be the most regularly occurring events and sort of the bread and butter, but games/meets will be a thing too.

Professor stuff is also outlined. I will probably not get to those events within the next week, but I'll likely do some of them right after the first pass on practice events.

Thanks for reading. As always, I'll check in again next Friday!