Course of Temptation Dev Diary #34 (Patreon)

Hello friends! Welcome to another dev diary!

The April update is nearly upon us, with some new minor content and polish from me and the contributor team. Barring anything unforeseen, you’ll get early access to the update on Sunday, the last day of the month, and a public release will follow a week later.

My efforts this week have all gone toward the April update, starting with some work on encounters. The major change you’ll immediately notice is that you can now suggest things to do, and unless the NPC is a jerk (as we all know, some are), they’ll generally do as you wish.

Mechanically, this new option exposes “encounter ideas” — these have existed since I refactored encounters some weeks ago, and are things that NPCs pick to decide what type of scene they want depending on their inclinations and so on. They give the scene a specific thrust... so to speak... and ensure the NPC isn't just picking things completely randomly. Ideas lead to specific acts, and acts lead to specific positions.

But now you can make this decision! Pick a general course of the scene’s direction and the NPC will pick appropriate positions and acts. I applied this in a slightly different way to make it work for threesomes as well. This part still needs some work, but it should already make it significantly easier to get what you want out of these scenes.

I also started on expanding encounters to target NPCs rather than only ever targeting the PC. For reasons you can probably imagine, encounters were designed to focus around the PC, and a lot of the system is built around that core assumption. Every NPC picks acts and positions in relation to the PC. But if, for instance, you want to be one M in a MFM, then that assumption no longer works — both you and another male NPC should be focused on the female NPC. This looked like it was going to take a large chunk of time, so I set it aside for the moment. It’s not an insurmountable problem and I have made some progress on it, but there were a lot of other things I wanted to do this week!

I also tackled a frequent request and added some new starting outfits. You can pick a favorite style during character generation and start with different clothes than the ones you’re used to. As a bonus, I added in some basic starting swimwear. It’s nothing fancy, but if you want to swim early on, there isn’t an upfront expense anymore.

I’ve also worked on events. The gym now has a yoga exercise alongside the others, there are some more events related to having a high reputation (of various types), and more opportunities for rumors to spread around campus and in town. Both streaming sites now offer merch, and wearing that around might get you some comments too. I also worked on sports, adding a few more decision points to esports and some distractions during swim meets, and there's more I want to do here too.

There are other things too, but release notes will be out on Sunday, so I'll save it for then!

New code inevitably means new bugs, so next week I'll be tackling any of those that come up. I think I’ll also spend some of that time finishing up some other things I’d hoped to get to this month. Trying to find the right balance of time spent on the monthly update versus the major update is tricky — I like being able to deliver chunky monthly updates, but I also don’t want the roadmap updates to take forever! 0.5 shouldn’t be too much longer in any case, and I’ll be back on it in early April.

Again, you should hear from me on Sunday with release notes and early access for this April update! Until then, thanks as always for your generous support!