Course of Temptation Dev Diary #79

Hello friends! Happy Friday to all.

We're in the midst of early access (currently v0.6.5b — update using the link from the previous post if you're on an earlier version!), so no need for a progress report as such, but I do want to talk about one new thing coming with this month's update.

And that thing is what I've been calling opportunity events. These are events that will detect certain conditions — for instance, an employee at QuickieBurger cleaning a table while in a short skirt — and present you with the chance to interact.

These use the same event engine and differ mainly in their presentation. Rather than firing a single randomly selected event based on a specific trigger, like walking into a location, this system will gather a list of all opportunities available under current conditions. They're not subject to the base event chance roll that determines whether an event should fire at all, so generally they'll be presented every time they're available (though there will often be some rarity adjustment so things don't seem unrealistically prevalent). In the future, as the number of this type of event grows, you may see more than one opportunity available at a given location, and you can pick which you interact with.

By its nature, the random event picker engine that powers the game has the feel of things happening to you, because you generally can't control when a certain thing will happen or who it'll be with. Opportunities, conversely, will generally have the character of the PC being more assertive, and initiating an event that wouldn't otherwise happen. Often these will be the flip side of familiar events that can happen to the PC.

The problem of player initiative is one I've been working on intermittently since version 0.2, which added the phone (yup, the phone was not in the release version) and hangouts/dates that the player could initiate. The in-person dialogue system was another piece of this, giving players more control over which NPCs they interact with and ways to shift their attitudes in the wake of the relationships update. Opportunity events will, I hope, be another tool for letting the player have initiative — a select menu of context-sensitive events where they can take the time to engage or just let it pass by. I also want these events to frequently lead into the in-person dialogue menu, at least as one possibility, because currently that system doesn't do a great job of presenting itself as an option.

There aren't too many opportunity events right now, but I'll be adding a few more on the way to public release and it'll certainly be an area of future expansion.

The other thing I want to talk about is more of a scheduling thing. I'm going to be away from home for the second half of May, so I'll be spending the first half of the month on the June monthly update and making sure that has content ready to go — so, the monthly update will still happen on time, and at worst it'll be progress on Greek houses which suffers. Still, I'll do what I can!

Okay, that's all for now. Public release is on Wednesday, so you'll hear from me then with an updated changelog. In the meantime, thank you as always for your support, it really does mean a lot!