Course of Temptation Dev Diary #60

Hello friends! I hope everyone had a good spooky season.

Early access is now on version 0.5.5a, fixing the bugs reported so far (all pretty minor), and... adding a rock tumbler, contributed by Meat Glacier!

Speaking of, I have to issue a correction of the patch notes. This update's new conspiracy bulletin board notice was in fact a collaboration between RyDog and Meat Glacier. This will be reflected in the final patch notes on public release day.

This will be a fairly short entry, since the patch notes make it pretty clear already what I've been up to. Prior to early access release day yesterday, I spent most of the week on updating dating and relationships.

As I've mentioned before, completely blocking the player from contacting professors by phone or dating them was a temporary measure, until I could add some mechanics and narrative text that reflect these specific circumstances. It's against university policy for professors to fraternize with students, and a professor NPC should actually weigh this and be reluctant to establish contact outside of class.

But, although the system still hasn't taken its final form, this block is now gone. Once you've fully crossed the line with a professor, you have the option to begin an illicit relationship of sorts where you can see each other in private outside of class, or take the risk of being together in public with the new relationship stealth system.

The only thing really missing is consequences! Currently, having your relationship with a professor exposed only makes them reluctant to see you in public anymore, until the heat dies down again. Sooner or later, of course, we'll want there to be a lot more to this — having a relationship with a professor exposed should really blow things up. I think it'll overlap somewhat with the crime and punishment roadmap item, in that it'll involve interactions with the administration.

You can also sneak around with somebody you're cheating with, and in this case the consequences are pretty straightforward: having the relationship exposed will confirm to your exclusive partner that you're cheating.

To enable sneaking, and just because it's fun, this update also saw the addition of the Riverside Motel. NPCs may choose to meet with you here instead of at their home, particularly for things like booty calls.

The Riverside Motel is also the first proper home base for the player other than their dorm room. While it's pretty expensive to maintain full time, it does have certain advantages, particularly if you have a streaming career and need some privacy.

This wasn't actually very difficult to add, but did necessitate some code changes to generalize certain things away from specifically the dorm room location to a broader "home base" system. But now that it's done, similar locations will be easy to add in the future.

In general, this update added a lot of framework-type stuff that will be fodder for further expansion in the future. I'm particularly looking at the aftercare system in the short term. Now that you have a chance to play with it, is it hitting the right notes for you? Is there something in particular you'd like to see in it? Let me know!

I'm also going to be polishing and expanding the starting inclination system a little bit ahead of public release, so if you want to see anything there, please let me know that too.

Starting next week, I'm going to be shifting my focus back to the big roadmap update. I have almost the whole month ahead of me and there's a lot I want to get done. But I'll update you on that progress next week.

So, that's all for now! Thanks as always for your support, you really do make this project possible. Have a good weekend and see you next week!