Course of Temptation Dev Diary #28 (Patreon)

Hello friends! Time for our first dev diary with 0.5 officially underway.

First of all, v0.4.20 is out just now! (Download here) This contains a number of fixes and tweaks, notably fixing an issue that was delaying the firing of post-sports practice events and therefore delaying progress in several sports. Also, we've heard you loud and clear: you hate muttonchops! NPC beards are now customizable.

We're just coming off of the public release of the monthly update, which was more sizable than most of the monthly minor content updates are likely to be, so I've had to split my time somewhat between bugfixing and new development. But the bug reports are going to wind down as things get polished, so I'll be devoting more and more time to new stuff.

Progress on 0.5

In the meantime, I've gotten a pretty good start on 0.5, the next major update. This one, as you might be aware, is all about relationships! Like most mechanics in the life sim genre, this mostly involves very carefully quantifying things that are in reality completely subjective.

I've been starting with the foundation: what are relationships? How exactly do we tend to feel about a person when we want to say they're our bf/gf, best friend, or enemy? What are the expectations once we've labeled our relationship? And how do we know when that label stops applying?

Up to now, a lot of social mechanics have relied on the "desired relationship" algorithm. This is where an NPC weighs their attitudes towards you, their inclinations, level of attraction, and some other things, and ends up deciding what type of relationship they want to have with you, whether that's friendship, dating, casual sex, a rivalry, hate sex, or just indifference. This informs a lot of their reactions — someone who wants to be your friend will naturally mostly react positively to you, whereas somebody who wants to be a rival will go out of their way to bother you.

As you might notice, this is all about what the NPC wants. At no point does the player directly decide what kind of relationship they want with the NPC. This is the bit we're looking to change in this update.

This "desired relationship" will still be important. For one thing, you can't unilaterally decide you're dating somebody... they kinda have to feel the same way! In general, you have to be at a certain point with an NPC, in terms of their attitudes, before certain types of relationships are valid choices.

Which brings us to qualifying conditions and disqualifying conditions. If an NPC has a certain level of romantic feeling towards you, then you reach an inflection point — qualifying to fire an event that allows you (and the NPC) to decide whether you're officially dating. Each type of relationship has its own qualifying conditions.

But, unfortunately, we fall out of love too! If romance drops too far, if attraction is lost, then you might meet a disqualifying condition. You break up. You're no longer dating.

Disqualifying conditions aren't always bad. A rivalry is also a type of relationship, and if you reach a disqualifying condition for that, then maybe you're on your way to becoming friends!

From a design standpoint, it's important to be careful with these boundary conditions. You don't want the disqualifying conditions to simply be "doesn't meet the qualifying conditions." For example, if you need 500 romance to date, you might start dating at 505 romance, drop down to 498 the next day, return to 502 the day after, and so on... and you don't want that relationship changing every single day. Instead, we don't meet the disqualifying condition until we've dropped down to, say, 100 romance — then we know things have seriously gone downhill, and we won't just be bouncing around one boundary from day to day.

I've also been working on the concept of exclusivity. Up to now, there have been no real mechanics for NPCs dating each other, and so nothing was dissuading them from going after you if they wanted you. Now we have to account for the possibility that NPC is in an exclusive relationship, which will probably at the very least make them much more hesitant to pursue you. New inclinations like Loyal and Cheater will help to algorithmically weight this decision.

Sorry if that's all a bit dry and esoteric! That's just what adding a big new mechanic like this is like early on, especially if you're aiming for emergent behavior from a simulation. Have to create the foundation first before it can turn into fun new stuff. Speaking of...

Next week

With the conditions and characteristics of relationships set up, and with some appropriate changes to NPC AI done, it's about time to start writing some events!

Qualifying and disqualifying relationship conditions will lead to "inflection point" events — some unilateral decisions, like breaking up, and some not, like agreeing to date. This is where we start building up from that foundation and creating new gameplay.

It'll be the events that make this system start to come alive. All this underlying work has basically been really complicated event prerequisites!

After that, it'll be time to think about milestone events too — where, for example, on the first date, you can seriously think about how well you connected with a person and possibly achieve some big jumps in attitude. I would like the player to be able to proceed into a relationship in a natural-feeling way instead of just grinding out a bunch of dates in order to reach the required romance level.

But I'll talk more about that once I get to that point. Thanks for reading, and thanks as always for your generous support! It really means a lot! Another progress report next week!