Course of Temptation Dev Diary #30 (Patreon)

Hello friends! It's Friday, and Friday is dev diary day, so here we are with a dev diary. What's been happening?? Let's find out together!

First of all, more fixes! We're now up to v0.4.23, which, as always, you can get from the official website or itch.io.

Note that following the March update, I'll be changing how we do versioning. If the March update is 0.4.24, then fix/polish updates for it will be 0.4.24a, 0.4.24b, etc. 0.4.25 would then be the next content update... unless a major roadmap update happens first, which will be 0.5.0! The tldr version is... letter updates will be just fixes while incrementing numbers means new content, so you can see whether there's new stuff at a glance.

Speaking of the March update, that's what we've been gearing up for this week. The plan is to have it ready for supporters like yourself by the end of this month for a week of early access, after which it'll become the public version.

Here are some things I've been working on this week for it:

NPC gender customization

A common request has been the ability to customize the genders of storyline characters. I decided to see to that this week, starting with everyone's best friend... the best friend!

AltOfTime's player gender customization laid the groundwork for this, so it was relatively painless. Mostly I just had to change a few scenes that assumed a static gender to use the game's pronoun and conjugation system instead.

Further, we now have a new menu under worldgen options...

These are all pre-game options. Customizing genders mid-game will probably not ever be possible because of the potential to softlock storylines or otherwise produce unexpected results. But I hope these give you some options to tailor your next game!

Summit Market

Falc's Summit Market events are now in! While the pay isn't great, you're not supervised particularly well here, giving you plenty of opportunities to address low vital needs like Food and Rest. If your character isn't up to a full shift at QuickieBurger, Summit Market is now a great alternative.

Of course, suboptimal performance will eventually get you into trouble with the boss. Luckily, you'll have a few ways to get yourself out of it...

Accessibility

It's been asked for a few times, so I whipped this up, mostly as a proof-of-concept...

If you find some fonts easier to read than others, then I want to give you the option. Right now this is fairly unpolished (changing text size alters some UI elements in undesirable ways) but we're going to keep working on it.

We've also, at user request, been discussing the possibility of using icons or emojis to mark menu options in at least some passages. After some hours of playing, these text-only menus do get a little hard to parse!

If you have any font recommendations or preferences or other ideas about accessibility, please let me know, either here, in DM, or in the Discord!

Threesomes

I spent some hours debugging threesomes this week and managed to uncover several surprisingly minor bugs (typos and small logic errors) that could have a large impact on whether threesome encounters proceeded in a satisfactory way. I think I have eliminated the issue with the second partner sometimes staying on the sidelines for the full encounter and polished things up overall.

Another of my goals for the March update is to extend encounter AI so that another NPC, and not the PC, can be an NPC's focus, which will expand the types of threesomes possible.

Next week

As said above, next week we plan to put the March update into early access for supporters. Ahead of that, I want to add a couple more events for the Librarian (a character you may have noticed teased above) and finish the changes to the Dominance and Submission skills I talked about last week. We're also going to keep working on the accessibility stuff and get at least some of that ready and polished for the March update.

Next time you hear from me, I should come bearing release notes! Until then, thanks as always for your support and making this project possible!