Course of Temptation Dev Diary #86

Hello friends! It is dev diary time once again!

This past week saw the release of the July update, which more or less completes the background weather simulation and adds an X-rated video site your character can build a minicareer with. After some bugfixes, the current version is 0.6.7g, out just now, so be sure to update! The link is in the previous post.

But now we're in the push to get the Greek house update ready for early access by the end of the month. I've been working on the final (for now) Greek party activity, and it's a classic: beer pong!

Beer pong seems like a pretty simple game... until you're actually trying to quantify it, and then it turns out the logic is surprisingly complex. Aiming for a closer cup will of course be easier... but there's also an advantage to aiming for the central mass of the cups. But as cups are lost, the remaining ones become isolated, which is a harder shot. NPCs need a little bit of AI for deciding which shots to take... because it can't simply be taking the easiest. If one person is good at making their shots, then they'll want to take the more difficult shots and not force their partner to do so, because they want to win as a team. And so on.

If strip rules are in effect, each team loses one item of clothing per cup they lost that round, and if your team lost only one cup, there can be a little back and forth about which of you actually has to strip.

Anyway, beer pong is basically done, in that it's playable! That's the end of the party activities I had scoped for this update, which means it's time to move on.

I'll be prioritizing things in basically this order:

• Make sure all of the systems (introduction to Greek houses, picking one to pledge to, pledge tasks, being accepted into the house, party stuff) are all connected, and that a player can play through the new stuff from the beginning to the current end of content.

• Iterate on pledge tasks — some of them were waiting on party stuff being done, so those can be finished now.

• Iterate on party activities — several of them should be fleshed out with alternate stakes and different possible events that can occur during them, plus we can always use more general party events.

• Iterate again on pledge tasks — do the big heist pledge, brainstorm more stuff for more variety.

• Work on house upgrades — supporting your house should improve things at the house itself and provide some benefits to your character.

Some of this may well end up pushed past the start of early access, especially the upgrades and any all-new pledge tasks, but if that happens, I'll be working on followup updates immediately to get it to where I want it to be.

That's all for now! The plan is underway and I'm on track to get this update into your hands this month. As always, I'll be back next week with another progress report for you. Thank you for reading, and thank you, as always, for your support! I really appreciate it!