Course of Temptation Dev Diary #15 (Patreon)

Hello friends! This was a busy week of more small bugfix type updates plus getting into the meat of 0.4.

Current version

We're now on 0.3.18. Over the weekend I did some quality of life type changes, most notably adding fast travel so that you can get around on the campus and town maps with just a couple of clicks, plus implementing a couple other suggestions from players.

I also fixed some edge cases that arose with the change to gender sliders from a couple weeks ago, where a world might fail to generate with certain extreme slider values and seeds.

0.4 progress

This week my main goal was to finish the coding and other prep work that would allow the player to enroll in sports and attend practice. Practices act a lot like classes and use a lot of the same underlying code, just getting their information from a slightly different place. Each sport's practice sessions occur at different locations and fill in that Friday afternoon slot.

Sports open up during your second week of school, informing the player via an email alert that they can sign up. In new games, you're very likely to see this on your second Monday, while in ongoing games, it'll likely occur almost immediately as you move around campus. Either way, your sport is not chosen during character generation but instead after the school year has started, which is both realistic and means I don't have to do anything special to integrate the new system with existing saves. Hooray!

My other big consideration this week was... uniforms! Half the fun of being a cheerleader is getting to dress as one, and even esports teams have jerseys. Not all teams need to practice in uniform (cheerleaders generally don't, and esports players, definitely not) but they will need to be in uniform for games.

So, my considerations there were 1) make it simple to get everything you need to be in uniform without a lot of fiddliness 2) make sure NPCs are in uniform when they should be 3) write code that checks if the player is in uniform and enforces it where needed.

My solution was to add each uniform to the list of NPC outfits (which already sometimes apply to the player; for instance, the starting outfit lives there) and then enable stores to sell entire uniforms in one click.

This is smart enough to sell you only items that you don't already have, and it even adds it to your list of outfits, so you can go to your closet and change right into it. And if you're gaping at that price tag, I've already changed it so that the school will pay for your first uniform. $219 is a lot on week two!

Besides that, I also made a start on the basic practice events. Practices are three hours long and each "step" is one hour, so you'll see three practice events per week. I'm starting with the sort of bread-and-butter events, ones that stand alone pretty well, and once I have a pool of basic events for each practice, I can build out more storyline-driven stuff from there.

Next week

I'll be continuing the first pass on practice events. I'll then probably immediately do a second pass, writing special events that introduce you to each sport and the characters on your team, and events that contribute to the small storyline each sport has.

Which is generally how I tend to do things. I start relatively simple, then extend and layer on more new things. I tend to look for natural breakpoints that I can achieve relatively quickly, places where the new addition is functional and playable even if it doesn't have everything planned, even if I have no intention of publicly releasing it at that point anyway.

Adding new stuff always tends to "break" a game for a period of time, but I like to bring it back towards playability asap even if I'm not done adding things yet. It ensures I can have a backup plan in case things ever take way longer than I planned. Everything is iteration. It's a lot easier to make a complicated thing that works out of a simple thing that works than it is to make it out of a complicated thing that doesn't work. But anyway, before I get too philosophical...

After practice events are done, I can go one of two ways, and that'll be to either start adding games and closing in on completing the sports addition for now, or shift gears to the other part of 0.4 and start adding office hours and other interactions with professors. I probably won't get to the point of having to make that decision within the next week, so I'll wait and see what feels right at the time.

Until next week!