Course of Temptation Dev Diary #25 (Patreon)

Hello friends! One of these times I'm going to forget to increment what number dev diary it is... or maybe I already have! I'm afraid to look.

Anyway, progress on the January update continues. This is one of those weeks where I can just say, "Yeah, the stuff I laid out to do in last week's dev diary is basically exactly what I ended up doing." Which seems a little boring! So have a teaser.

Chat on the cam streaming site might have a new challenge for you:

I also added the ability to invite a partner on stream with you. They need to already be an established sexual partner and you need to know them to be exhibitionist (this will show up as a personality trait when you view them). Know anybody like that? Then you can interact with them on stream.

There isn't a whole lot to this yet, but as with anything, now that it's in it becomes relatively simple to expand on it.

MCMic, one of the contributors, has been at work improving the UI when you buy stuff in shops:

This is probably not the final look. But it's coming along!

This week has also seen the addition of beards and body hair coming in (contributed by SunsetDreams and Z respectively — body hair can be turned off in Difficulty Options if you prefer), the ability to plan more than one hangout/date, and several more events and other stuff.

The dev cycle

Lately we've been getting a lot of questions about the dev cycle. No surprise it's confusing, because since launching this game almost six months ago, I've tried a few different things to try to see what works best.

Currently, I'm planning on doing basically three types of releases:

• Bugfix: These contain medium- to high-priority fixes, anything that can potentially block somebody's progress or that really harms the game's presentation. They come out around twice a week but only as needed, so you'll tend to see them a lot following a content update (new code always means some new bugs) and then they'll taper off. These are just fixes and will rarely contain any new content.
• Monthly updates: One or two weeks out of the month, I'll spend time doing the sort of things I've been doing this month: additions to existing event sets, extensions to existing systems, and other relatively small tasks. These updates will also pull in whatever contributors have been working on. As the name says, my goal is to release one of these every month with whatever we've had time to do.
• Roadmap updates: I'll spend the remainder of each month working on knocking out a major roadmap item. These updates are a big accomplishment and it's when, for instance, you'll see us go from 0.4 to 0.5. They tend to be a lot of work and will often take 2-3 months to be finished, and they'll just come out when they're ready.

In this way, I hope to balance major new additions that take a lot of time with relatively small additions and expansions of existing content that can come out more frequently. It's always subject to change, but I think it's doable, especially with the help of the contributor team. But I'll only know for sure once I'm really trying it, which will start next month!

Did you know we have a roadmap? It's here! This is not in any particular order. For each major update, I will narrow it down based on player suggestions and what I think would be good to prioritize, then the final selection will be made in a poll of patrons. Which we're due for within a couple weeks!

Next week

The things I didn't get to this week were (as I suspected might happen) extensions to toys and the reputation system.

Toys are a little underutilized, especially the remote control ones, and I was surprised when they didn't rate a little higher on the poll given how frequently I see suggestions related to them. In any case, I'm going to make them a priority and add some more fun things to do with them. I plan to start that after I post this, so technically some of it will happen "this" week.

The reputation and rumor system is a big pillar of what I want to do with this game, so it's time to see it expanded upon. There's already some of it in: for example, when that mean person in the dining hall says you've been fucking your way through college, that's based on reputation. But there needs to be more, and it needs to be more visible, with some unique events based around it, and rumors need to be more of a thing as well. I think this will end up being next week's really major task.

By next weekend, I'll freeze the adding of any big new features and focus on playtesting for a few days, so this update can come out by the end of January. The time to think about what exactly 0.5 will be is coming up too.

See you next week for another progress report! And thank you as always for your generous support that allows me to do this!