courseoftemptation
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Course of Temptation Dev Diary #41
🕑 Added 2024-05-17 18:59:41 +0000 UTC
Hello friends! Dev diary time is upon us.
I've released version v0.4.27h today with another round of bugfixes. I don't think there's anything very critical in there, but if anything has been annoying you, download this one and see if it fixes it! If it doesn't, remember that you can always drop a message in the bug-reports channel in the Discord, or just DM me here.
I've been very busy since the last progress report! Over the weekend I finished the planned new events for the Admirer revision. When I was done, out of curiosity I did a word count and it was about 9,000, which is way more than I expected! Apparently it's very easy to underestimate how much writing goes into events.
Anyway, it was a very fun series of events to write and I hope you enjoy them!
Much of the week has been general playtesting, polishing, and fixing. Relationship logic is complicated and some issues can only be uncovered through playing a normal game.
For example, in order to not spam you with relationship events, they tend to get spaced out for you behind the scenes. This would be fine, except at a certain point in the game, you tend to start getting lots of people qualifying to be friends — and then you end up with other types of relationship events clogged up behind all these potential new friends! Obvious in retrospect, because a casual friendship is a relatively low bar, but it did need fixing, and this is accomplished by making new friendships less frequent as your number of friends grows. This gives room for other relationships to move forward.
Other than that, my focus has mainly been on beefing up the dating and romance aspect of this update, as there are certainly a lot of people looking for more of that. When planning this update early on, several dev diaries ago, I mentioned the idea of making romance less about grinding that Romance attitude and more about distinct events and thresholds.
I decided to lean into that idea and, well, basically build some dating sim mechanics into the game. But wait, hear me out! Instead of going on bunches of dates until you grind the Romance attitude to 60%, what if particular milestones represented progress toward a relationship? First date, third date, first kiss, and some dirtier milestones... these all move you along the path to snaring that person that's caught your interest.
And if you don't like the idea of keeping track of what you've done with whom, there's also an option to turn off the dating sim type mechanics. But I think most people will find them more engaging than the alternative.
One milestone I decided on was taking a person on their favorite type of date. What type of date is their favorite? That will depend on their interests and inclinations, and it's up to you to discover it!
Of course, to facilitate this, we need a few more date types than we have right now. For example, studious types may enjoy a one-on-one study session...
...though it's important to be on the same page about what exactly that entails!
We're also introducing the arcade date.
Of course, you can also do these things as platonic hangouts. I have a gym date in mind too that I want to get to, but as these event sets take some time to write, I decided to make sure the coding tasks were done before I came back to writing.
I'll be getting back to this milestone-driving dating system right after this dev diary, and I'll likely dip into weekend time too to make sure I can get everything done that I want to. I have in mind some sort of "dating card" to show what you know of an NPC's preferences and how many milestones you've gotten to — I haven't quite gotten to UI yet or I'd be showing it off here. :)
I'm quite close to being where I want to be and there is a very good chance that the next time you hear from me will be regarding early access. Do note that this will be a very "hot" early access, meaning far away from a code freeze — I'll continue adding in more things based on feedback and my own sense of what the update could still use. For this reason, it's entirely possible this early access will extend beyond the usual week. But nothing is set in stone!
That's all I've got to say for now, but you'll hear from me again soon! As always, thanks so much for your support. I couldn't do this without you!
Comments
Anarchothaumaturgist
It's outside the scope of this update I'm afraid, but relationships are definitely part of laying the groundwork for it — being in a relationship will affect how likely an NPC is to be willing to not use protection and things like that.
Rico P.
Thanks for the update! I was wondering will pregnancy be part of the 0.5 update?
Ludociel
❤️
