Course of Temptation Dev Diary #102

Hello friends! It's time, once again, for one of those slightly awkward dev diaries taking place in the early access period, where everything I've been doing is pretty much in your hands already! In other words, this will just be a fairly quick summary of what I've done this week.

We're up to v0.7.4b as of now, which has a number of fixes and some new content beyond the initial early access release last Sunday. I've been working on sports, the winning item in the recent development focus poll.

First of all, playing through a cheerleader routine has been broken up into its individual segments, which gives space for certain roles to fire more specific events. Currently, the specific events added for competitions focus on exhibitionism if you're not wearing the standard uniform.

After that, I turned to football. Using the same framework as cheerleader routines, I constructed plays out of phases with individual sports skills. As with cheerleading, there are some premade plays to start with, but down the line I would like to add the ability for the player to influence these plays or make their own.

The football team is scripted to focus on practicing one play per week. However, plays are of course ultimately constructed out of similar phases and subskills, so as the team rotates through plays, you'll tend to get better at them all. Once a play has been practiced a little, it's available to be executed during a game, where it'll play out phase by phase. Under the hood, the results for football plays and cheerleader routines are calculated in the same way, but you'll find they play out differently. Cheerleader routines are scored, while football plays rely on sequential success — you might recover from one mistake, but a critical failure or too many mistakes in a row means the play fails, and that's a serious setback for the team. However, pulling off a play will dramatically increase the team's chances of winning. It's a bit of risk vs. reward.

My other project this week was separating the player character's progress in sports subskills from the team's. The player may not even attend every practice, so it just makes sense. Also, it enables the player character to practice on their own time, increasing their skills beyond what they'd get just from attending the scheduled practices at the cost of some exhaustion. You may also see your teammates practicing on their own time sometimes, and if they allow you to join them, you can practice together.

What all this means is that once your player character is involved in football games (that is, they've demonstrated their skills at practice and no longer just occupy the bench every game), or if they're involved in cheerleader competitions, you have a bit more direct control over the outcome than you did before. Taking time to practice on your own means you're much more likely to pass any skillchecks rolled for you during games and competitions, which, of course, helps your team win.

I'll probably leave sports content there for this update, but I'll do more with it in subsequent updates. Esports can easily use the plays system, and I should be able to adapt the system for subskills to the other sports as well. Also, there's storylines; the sports storylines were always intended to go a little further or have some alternate branches, and I would also like to address that.

There's just a short time left until public release, but I'd like to spend that time dipping into the #2 priority a little, which was the amateur porn career. Which, now that I think about it, will probably quickly become about transitioning into a less amateur porn career. There are a couple storyline events that will lead to that, though, so my plan is to start writing those and see how far I can get for this month.

Next week, I'll be shifting focus back to 0.8 for a couple weeks, the next roadmap update, and work on NPC simulation type stuff.

That's all for now! Public release with the final changelog will come in another couple of days. Thank you for reading, and as always, thank you for your support, it really does mean a lot!