Course of Temptation Dev Diary #64

Greetings! It is Friday and time for another progress report.

I've just deployed v0.6.0d, so if you're on an earlier version of the early access, it's a good time to update! The most common bugs have been addressed, a bit of polishing and rebalancing has happened, and a bit of new content has been added.

As you might imagine, the first few days after a big update like this are mostly filled with bughunting. The playtesters did a great job, but releasing into early access puts it into the hands of many, many more people, all with different types of characters and different ways of playing that access different variations of events and so on. I appreciate everyone who brought issues to my attention this week and helped us get to the point we're at now.

In terms of new stuff, I spent some time helping the professionalism path along, giving it a bit faster progression and some events unique to this path. The game being what it is, the flirty path is certainly easier to conceptualize and build out, but both deserve some attention.

Some things still need to be worked on I think, the timing in particular. Originally, the concept I had in mind is that you'd work in hour long blocks like at QuickieBurger, with the difference being that you'd have several tasks to perform before you progressed to the next hour.

As I've been rebalancing things, this hour-by-hour structure has become increasingly difficult to discern and it probably makes sense to restructure it into something else. Luckily, the individual events are flexible and can be plugged in in different ways. I just need to consider exactly how I'm going to do it.

Another area I've begun to address is upgrades. While the ultimate goal of this career is to gain control over how the bar is kitted out, I think it's somewhat unsatisfying to not get to play with things like dancing on tables while you're still just a server. So, in a manner similar to uniform changes, I've added some events that give you the option to change specific upgrades as you're working your way up.

There's also an event in here about just interacting with the owner, which is something I plan to build on. And I still have it in mind to add some more upgrades as well, and some more options for uniforms. There's a lot to do!

This month will be a bit unusual schedule-wise. In addition to the River Rat update, I want to do a specific seasonal update for this month — it'll be relatively quick, hopefully, and I'm not sure yet if I'll roll it into 0.6.0 or count it as a quick 0.6.1, but either way, it's basically two updates for this month. I want this seasonal update to happen before the 25th, which means there won't be anything on the last day of the month like there usually would be.

In fact, I plan to take that holiday week off, so there probably won't be a dev diary on the 27th. Being a little bit of a workaholic... this will just be the second full week I've taken off this year.

In January, though, we'll be back on the usual schedule. I plan to spend January on a lots-of-little-things type update, addressing the remaining priorities from the last poll, some general polish and extensions, and hopefully some surprises. That update will be in early access by the end of January as usual, and by then we'll be talking about what the next major update (0.7) will be.

Anyway, that's all in the future. We'll take it one week at a time, and the next week will be about preparing 0.6 for public release as well as working on the seasonal update! And I'll see you again next Friday for another progress report. As always, thank you for your incredible support, it really does mean a lot!