Course of Temptation Dev Diary #88

What a week! I find myself wishing, often, that game development was actually just about developing a game and not dealing with things like a mass-delisting of all adult content by one of the biggest online games distributors. I will keep this diary about actual game dev talk, but if you want to see my statement on recent developments at itch.io and find out how you can help push back against corporate censorship, please visit the Discord. Thank you!

This week, I've been working mainly on pledge tasks again, as discussed last week. I've implemented some new mechanics and written some new unique events to let the player fulfill some of the tasks that I didn't get to earlier.

For example, the task where you elect to be "free use" during a house party:

Another task I didn't get to before was "have sex in a locked building after hours." How do you do this, you might ask? Well... there wasn't really a way! An actual Lockpicking skill doesn't fit the vibe or genre of the game and would be of very limited use, but there isn't any other skill that implies getting past locked doors either.

What I came up with was the first new secondary skill since the game's release: Troublemaking. In general, I've been very reluctant to introduce any new skills until the current ones all have content, but we've gotten pretty far on that at this point. Also, given that a lot of Greek life tropes involve pranks and so on, I think we can quickly build up a good set of uses for Troublemaking in this very update. And picking locks plausibly fits under this category.

Also, there were some events (like knocking a nerd's books out of their hands) that were gated behind Dominance when that didn't really make a great deal of sense and undermined how that skill is treated elsewhere in the game. Events like this will now be gated behind the Troublemaking skill instead.

So, with this skill, you can potentially make your way into buildings after hours and fulfill the aforementioned pledge task. Or just wander the empty halls (I wrote some spooky alternate descriptions), or even have the gym and swimming pool to yourself for the night. This doesn't really have any negative consequences yet, but as you can imagine, this sort of thing will be explored much more in the future Crime and Punishment roadmap item.

We've also begun internal playtesting, so we're catching bugs ahead of early access next week. I'll be spending the days remaining on that, plus working on fleshing out some of the party activities. I'll continue to iterate on these things through early access until public release, and the September update will almost certainly be largely a further fleshing out of Greek content.

Anyway, the next time you hear from me will be about early access for 0.7. Until then, have a good weekend, and as always, thank you so much for your support — it absolutely does not go unnoticed, especially in times like these, and believe me when I say I truly could not do this without you. Until next time!