Course of Temptation Dev Diary #66

Happy new year! 

The holidays are behind us and it's time to get back to normal, starting with the usual Friday dev diary!

First of all, the update schedule. In December I released both 0.6.0 and 0.6.1, the latter of which would ordinarily have been the January update, but it contained seasonal content so it was essentially released early. This means that my current plan is to have the next update enter early access on January 31st, then public release on February 7th — back to the usual schedule.

I prefer a regular monthly schedule and I think most of you do too, so that will probably be the only time I intentionally disrupt it. I just really wanted the Renewal Festival stuff out in December!

As for the next update, I plan to do a lot of general polishing and some extensions here and there. As I've expounded before, I think a pitfall that projects like this can face is the temptation to just always be adding all new content, and forgetting to address existing content that could stand some polish or doesn't meet current standards. Especially following a major update, I like to take some time to revisit what's already here and see where there's room for improvement. I view every part of this project as iterative, something I may have set aside for the moment but can always be revisited.

In this first post-holiday week, I've been easing back into things by going down my sizable list of small polish tasks, most of which have originated from player feedback.

For example, a common suggestion since in-person dialogue was introduced is the option to be mean!

This won't make you any friends, but then that's sort of the point — once your Charisma skill gets high, sometimes a really annoying NPC can't help but like you when you'd actually rather build up a rivalry. Annoying them regularly will, needless to say, solve this problem.

And speaking of common suggestions, a list of inclinations that the player can unlock will now exist within the game. I hesitated to do this in early releases because many inclinations didn't yet have ways to unlock them, and I didn't want to steer players toward something they couldn't attain yet. But almost all inclinations can be unlocked now, so there it is.

I've also reworked a bunch of existing events with what I'm calling the "uncharacteristic action" mechanic.

Basically, inclinations are meant to be what defines who your character is — so, if you pass up an opportunity to behave as your character would, you're hit with a bit of a Composure penalty.

The strength of this Composure penalty will be adjustable in the difficulty options, including turning it down to zero if you don't like it, which will make this mechanic disappear.

The purpose of this is to provide a bit of a push to get deeper into lewd content. The basic design pillar of this game has always been "temptation, not corruption" — hence the name — but a purely player-directed approach can sometimes lack a certain pressure. For example, it can be hard to reconcile why a more innocent character would take the lewd choice when the non-lewd choice has no downsides. So, this mechanic will tend to steer your character toward more lewd options, especially when coupled with the relatively new starting inclination mechanic.

Another thing you might have noticed lately is that I've begun having fallback skillgates in some events. For example, if your character can't or won't take a choice gated by Disinhibition, then an NPC may instead try to appeal to your submissive nature. If you have Submission skill or the Accommodating starting inclination, then you can get deeper into the scene even if your character is still fairly inhibited. This gives you more choice in how you progress your character and often less dissonance between your character and their chosen actions, and when combined with this new mechanic, helps steer more innocent characters into acting lewd.

Anyway, that's the intention behind it. I'll have to see how it feels in normal play, and it's always subject to further changes.

As for larger extensions I hope to get to this month, there are three main ones. First, the bartending job at the River Rat still needs some more love and some more events added to its set. Second and third are options that did well in the last poll that I haven't addressed yet, which are both basically extensions to encounters — condoms/birth control and NPC preferences regarding sex.

I'll talk more about those later. For now, my plan is to finish out this week by going through items that have lingered on my todo list and seeing what I can knock out relatively quickly.

If you have any suggestions for quality of life changes, small changes you'd like to see, little things that bother you or could be easier to manage... this is definitely the time to hit me with them!

In any case, I have definitely rambled enough for one week. Thanks for reading, and thank you, as ever, for your support! I hope you all have a great year!