Course of Temptation Dev Diary #70

Hello friends, and happy Friday to all, even those for whom it is already Saturday.

The latest update as of this post is v0.6.2h. I spent the first bit of this week addressing some lingering issues with encounters, mostly regarding birth control and the surprisingly complex logic surrounding negotiating its usage. Birth control implants have been implemented too, not really in a fully realistic manner, but in a way that I think suits game balance. I think all of that is sorted out for now. Pregnancy itself will still be coming in a future update.

SunsetDreams spent some time improving performance regarding the meters (the ones you see for your needs, NPC attitudes, and so on). This involved refactoring a bunch of things, and while the performance improvements seem to be successful, some of it ended up not working as before — notably, the option to always see meter percentages hasn't been working. That too should be fixed in today's update.

All in all, we're probably done with bugfix updates until the next monthly content update. Which also needs to be worked on pretty soon! Between the extra effort involved in the February update and February just being a short month, the window for working on the roadmap update is pretty small.

But it is underway! So let's talk about that.

So, last week when I said I had a feeling I knew which option would win, I was actually thinking of strip clubs. But, CoT community, you have shocked the nation. It turns out the next roadmap item checked off will be... Greek houses! (And a big thanks to everyone who took the time to pick their favorite option.)

Greek houses are kind of the college movie trope, and it's important to get them feeling right. As always, the first part of brainstorming an entirely new system like this is to ask yourself which stories you want to tell. What experiences should the player be able to have?

The classic story is a popular successful house vs. an underdog house. The player should be able to experience that, not just as an underdog protagonist but also, if they like, as a member of the more successful house — this may especially benefit players pursuing a dominant path. Players should be able to affect a house's reputation, for better or worse, and have an effect on determining exactly what benefits it provides. There should be conflicts and pranking but also alliances between houses. Fraternity-sorority interactions are definitely a thing. There's rush week: pledging, trying to prove yourself to the members, hazing. There are parties and other activities hosted by the houses.

One of the first items to settle was exactly how many houses to have and what they should be like. As you probably know, while CoT has a lot of NPCs, it doesn't have the population of a real campus — that would be asking a lot of a Twine game, and it'd be a lot for the player to manage too. So, having too many houses would spread NPCs too thin, and we wouldn't be able to fill them.

My thought has been to group the game's current archetypes into a few broader cliques. Again, if we're leaning on college tropes, the classic dynamic here is "jocks vs. nerds." We also have archetypes that don't fit under either umbrella who should be accommodated too. I considered three coed houses, or six or more fraternities and sororities, but coed houses aren't common in the real world and six houses seemed like too many for our population.

After a bunch of brainstorming with the contributors, I've landed on this: four houses covering a popular-underdog and fraternity-sorority matrix. We'll have a classic jock fraternity, a popular girl sorority, a nerd fraternity, and a sort of counterculture sorority. Any archetype of any gender has a home in at least one of them. Nonbinary students will be welcome at any of them.

Another key decision was to make the fraternity/sorority thing optional. While that will be the default experience, there will also be a worldgen option to turn all houses coed. This will also happen automatically if you've made gender distribution very one-sided to the point where it has trouble filling a house. It'll mean some extra work to accommodate this option, but I think it's worth doing.

So, I've spent the majority of this week working these things out as well as making the game's Greek house database and writing algorithms to fill them with students. As always, there's some underlying code to write to make this system work, but it shouldn't be nearly as complicated as something like the River Rat. I'm also working on defining them as locations so the player can move around in them. Just basic stuff! But soon it'll be time to work on events, and that's where the bulk of the effort will go for this update.

I want these four houses to have some individual character in their appearance, the NPCs you find there, the activities they host, and so on. For pledge week, I'm thinking the house will have a list of challenges that the player can choose from, the nature of which will also reflect the character of the house. While some house activities may be exclusive, I also want them to have an impact for players who don't join — I think they should host some activities open to all students, and offer some more stuff to do around campus.

Anyway, that's about all I have for now! These early planning stages don't provide much fodder for screenshots and teasers (sorry about that) but pretty soon I'll have some events and things written. For now, I'll post this and get back to it. Thanks for reading, and thank you for your support, I really appreciate it!