Course of Temptation Dev Diary #24 (Patreon)

Hello friends! The time has come once again.

It's a little hard to talk specifically about my progress because a lot of it has been storyline events that I'm sure most of you would prefer to discover while playing. But a couple teasers won't hurt.

Suffice to say that I accomplished the goals I had laid out for myself: the roommate's partner content has been extended with a new challenge, the roommate has begun to properly enter into this storyline, there's a new event with the BFF, a new venture involving the parasocial fan has been added, and you may now find yourself with some extra attention from certain townies.

You should get to push the button

Lately I’ve been realizing that some things aren’t drawing themselves to the player’s attention as much as I would like. If a player has a certain inclination or passes some other condition, then in several cases the passage text just changes automatically. Even some skillchecks are handled this way.

But in games like this, it's really easy to get into a habit of just clicking through things when it appears at a glance that you've seen it before. So a lot of these variations in passage text end up going unnoticed.

The fact is (and I suspect this is an uncomfortable fact for many game developers) if players are regularly missing something in my game, then it’s nobody's fault but my own. It indicates a flaw in the game’s design. These things are just failing to make themselves noticed.

Fortunately we have the tools to fix this — these things just have to become explicit options within the passage. When you achieve something, when you earn a new inclination or gain some new status, then just automatically changing text within a passage is not a sufficient reward. It should become a new option that the player gets to choose. You should get to push the button.

So this is something I’ll be keeping in mind as we move forward. Also, I’ll try to go back and touch up some older passages that have this problem. For example, I spent much of Monday revising and extending the dining hall socialization passages to give you a number of options when you sit down at the table. I've also touched up both major branches of the prologue bus tour to let you pick how your character reacts. Park socialization needs a similar pass as well, as do a lot of the recently-added sports events. It makes all of these passages more complicated, but this is a game about reactivity, and it's worth the effort.

The Android version

The contributors have been hard at work polishing up the APK version of the game and extending it into a proper fully-functioning app. Cadia, Keina, majou, and SunsetDreams have put a ton of work into making this happen and I'm very grateful for their efforts. It's really shaping up and I'm looking forward to getting this into the hands of our mobile players as soon as it's ready.

Next week

I've mostly gotten through the new storyline events I wanted to add. The Admirer, however, is still due a large event — but, without spoiling anything, there should be a couple of code extensions that go along with that. But since I intend to make that a prose scene, the new code isn't strictly necessary. Either way, I hope to get that event written next week.

Taking things mostly in order, it's probably also time to extend streaming a bit. I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but I added chess streaming for Niche.tv as a way to raise Intellectual, and it wouldn't be hard to add one or two more streaming types, like perhaps a cooking stream. With the streaming framework well established, adding new stream types isn't very difficult and only requires a bit of writing.

Of course, most people want adult streaming extended. I have one unique scene in mind, as well as the much-asked-for ability to have a partner on your streams. I'm not completely sure how much work adding a partner will be, as I'll have to write a range of new requests and accompanying events for them. None of them need to be very long, but writing them is still a task.

If I still have time after that, I want to start on some of the toy extensions that I mentioned in a previous dev diary. Extending the reputation system is also definitely on my list for this update, though at this point we're probably talking about the week after next.

Next Friday, we'll be about a week and a half from when this update is due out, so I'll probably be starting to have a pretty good idea of exactly how much will be in it. Thank you as always for your support, it means a lot, and I'll talk to you then!