Course of Temptation Dev Diary #16 (Patreon)

Hello friends! This week has been all about 0.4, what I'm thinking of as the extracurricular update, and I've made a good bit of progress.

Practices

First of all, I decided to schedule a second practice each week, also filling in the Wednesday morning gap, which I was otherwise never quite sure what to do with when playing. Of course it'd be most realistic to have a practice basically every day, but I think that would quickly become tedious, and it would also eliminate all that free time for doing other things that was just created with the switch to the two-class-per-day schedule.

So I'll playtest with two practices per week and see how that feels. I may also play with the length of each practice.

I started with a goal of a baseline of 6-8 recurring practice events for each sport. Again, these will be the bread-and-butter of sports activities, the events you see at the scheduled times every week. These will of course be added to over time, but it's a starting point.

I did those and then immediately did a second pass on practice events. I added one-off introductory events to each sport that show you where practice takes place and introduces you to the coach and some of your teammates.

Want a preview? Here's part of the cheerleader introduction:

Events that introduce you to other characters, events that advance the storyline and lead to erotica scenes or encounters, unique and recurring... these have been my project for the last couple days, adding them in and around the more "mundane" practice events.

At this point I've gone as far as I can with the storyline stuff I had outlined without the further addition of what practices inevitably build up to... actual games and meets.

Games

Sports aren't just practices! At some point you put it all on the line and compete with somebody else, whether it's a showdown with your college's rival team or just another game.

Representing this within CoT will require some new mechanics and new code, but I don't anticipate it being too complicated. After all, I don't have to simulate the entire sport of football in text, I just have to have some interesting events happen that lead to a sensible final outcome.

Of course, sports aren't just for the players. Attending a game is an archetypal college experience, and that should be represented too.

Which, when I was thinking about this last week, led me to a big brainwave about exactly how to handle game events:

1) Write sets of game events that read equally well whether you're spectating, benched or cheerleading or on the sidelines, or involved in the game but not in the current play.

2) But if you are playing, merge in events that directly involve you and challenge you with skillchecks that can affect the outcome.

3) End up with a dynamic event set that can be deployed for both spectating and playing.

So if you're playing, you will of course get a lot of detail about what's going on in the game, particularly where it involves you... and if you're just watching in the stands, you can also see events that involve specific NPCs doing specific things, succeeding or failing, all leading to the game's final outcome.

I never know if I'm describing these ideas well, but I'm excited about it, and you'll see it when 0.4 is out!

Next week

As I wrote last week, my thought when I finished the second pass on practice events was to possibly pause on those and do some work on professor interactions, just for a change of pace. But I'm excited about adding in games, and some storylines I've already started need games working before they can go further, so right now I'm leaning toward moving right on to games while those ideas are all fresh in my head.

But I'm also excited about professor interactions and looking forward to writing them. If you're looking forward to those too... possibly even more than the sports stuff... I hear you! Rest assured that in a couple weeks I expect to be writing about my professor storyline ideas in as much detail as I've been writing about sports ideas.

In fact, the way I've been writing sports storylines and the coaches as very individual characters has helped to inform and refine my ideas about how the professor storylines should work, so I think doing it in this order will be a benefit.

So to sum up... unless I change my mind, I expect my project for next week will be getting games and meets working. Once that's done, and once storyline events are written in and around them, then the end will be in sight for the sports and activities additions planned for 0.4.

We'll have to see where I am with that next week. Until then!