Course of Temptation Dev Diary #29 (Patreon)

Hello friends! It's time for another dev diary, with the 0.5 relationships update under way, as well as gearing up for the March content update!

Our current version is 0.4.22. No real new content since last week, but a bunch of bugs squashed and things tweaked.

Let's get into this week's topics!

Domination & Submission

This is a topic that came up in the last week or so, and it's going to result in a couple changes, so I thought I'd write about it some.

Dominance and submission are both basically stub skills at the moment. There are a couple things on the roadmap that will lead to more content in this area (the River Rat job, for example) but what exists currently is less actual D/s content and more just ways to boost those skills to level ~3 in preparation for D/s content existing at some point.

Basically, in the same way that being randomly checked out early game will build your exhibitionism skill before you've done anything actually exhibitionist, early dominance and submission skill can be built by doing things that aren't actually D/s.

The logic here is that while being a bully and being dominant are very different things, they are both assertive roles — so any way in which you're assertive may, early on, lead you toward building that skill up. Unfortunately, in the absence of any proper D/s content past level 3 or so, this has the side effect of giving the appearance that we have no idea what D/s actually is.

We brainstormed a couple of possible ways to address this. One is renaming the skills — Assertiveness and Compliance better fit this early dynamic. We had the idea that the skills can start out with these names, then become Dominance and Submission once again as the character's own understanding matures.

A second solution is to make this issue diegetic — to have a character in the game spell out that the people who forcefully and sometimes clumsily push the PC's boundaries aren't actually doing dominance correctly, and to share their version of how it's done right with interested player characters.

The upshot of all this is... you may find these skills (temporarily) renamed to better match the early dynamics, and we'll soon introduce a new character that can start to bring in some actual D/s content. And that's all good stuff!

0.5 Progress

The relationships update is trucking along. In the last week, I further refined relationships and their prerequisites and began adding events that would lead to changes in your relationships with others.

Here's the first little such event I wrote, just realizing while in class that you've made a new friend:

I don't want to just generalize these events or have a generic prompt for whether you wish to accept a (non-unilateral) change in relationship. Instead, I want to have events tailored to the circumstances, that fit the context of what's going on, so it seems to happen naturally. This will be more writing, but it'll be worth it!

I've also been thinking about crushes as a concept. Currently "crush" is in as a relationship that can happen once you've gained a little romance with somebody, sort of as a prelude to dating them... but that's not really how crushes work! They hit you seemingly randomly, and you can find yourself really crushing on the wrong person.

That could be a fun thing to bring in, but the question is, how should the game decide who you're crushing on? I'm thinking that maybe, like NPCs do, we can allow the PC to pick some turnons and turnoffs. Then when an NPC matches your choices, the game points them out to you by making them your crush! Crushes would be temporary if not acted upon and fade after a while.

I also need to refactor dates and hangouts somewhat. They need new events and space to consider changing relationships, and discuss it openly with the other person. Starting on this will probably be my post-dev diary project today.

The March Update

In the meantime, the March update is due out in a couple weeks! This is the update formerly known as the February update — it's not delayed, supporters will still get it by the end of this month barring major issues, but I figure it makes more sense to name it after the month it becomes public.

Drakon is a relatively new contributor and has begun to find a niche updating some UI stuff around the game. This is definitely very needed... I like coding big systems, but the UIs for them are not always my strong point! Drakon takes particular care as well in adapting these various screens for mobile users.

Here's some work (not necessarily final) on the shop UI. As you can see, this will let you figure out what's what with much less clicking around, and instead of going in and out of the various sub-stores, they're simply tabs on one screen.

We'll also be integrating AltOfTime's custom gender system, a long-asked-for feature that will let players customize their bits, pronouns, and so on beyond the six gender presets.

Falc's Summit Market expansion will also be coming in, giving this job its own niche. While its pay won't match QuickieBurger's, it will become a good place to work if you want to make some money while also looking after your needs.

Next week, I'll be shifting gears myself, putting the relationships update aside for a few days in order to polish up and add my own stuff to the monthly update. I have a few new events and things in there already, but I also hope to start on the D/s stuff discussed above, look at some of the rough edges that still exist in threesome encounters, and some other things depending on what I have time for.

In any case, I have definitely rambled enough for one week. Thanks for reading, and thank you as always for your support, it means a lot!