Course of Temptation Dev Diary #55

Hello friends! October is almost here, and with it will come the October update!

First off, let me show you something Drakon has been working on that's probably a long time coming!

The People dialog now displays a few graphical icons, indicating at a glance who your friends and lovers are, who's nearby and can be talked to, and so on.

What's the star icon, you might ask? Those are people you have favorited! It's not yet completely functional, but the basic idea is that favoriting somebody is no longer just a function of the phone but will also apply in other contexts, making it easier to keep track of characters you're especially interested in.

If you've a keen eye, you might have already noticed my other big focus for the last few days.

The game's month of Gourdtober combines aspects of October and November. At the end of the month during the fall break is Harvest Eve, where we honor the dead and make offerings to the creatures of the Otherworld in the hopes of achieving a good harvest and prosperity for the whole community.

Of course nowadays it's pretty much just an excuse to dress up and party.

To fit the theme, the October update will bring in costumes, with more and more NPCs getting into the spirit as the week goes on, culminating in a Harvest Eve party on Friday with new events.

You can purchase costumes both piecemeal and as whole outfits.

One key aspect of costumes also ties into a frequent request: the ability to anonymize yourself with a mask. This is actually pretty complicated and would involve altering a great many events, so, for now at least, the times where you can use masks is fairly limited. Obscuring your identity will pretty much only be acceptable during Harvest Eve week, and there are no classes during that week anyway so we don't have to worry about that. Hiding your identity in town also won't be accepted, so it's pretty much just an on campus thing.

Eventually it'd be fun to expand masks and anonymizing into more contexts — but for now, the main calculation here is just what I can get done by the end of the month!

NPCs may be partly or entirely anonymized by their costumes too, which, of course, is something that can play into some new events during this week.

I remember last year some people really wanted some Halloween-themed events. I did too, but the game was about three months old then, and I thought I should spend time on fundamentals instead. It's fun to finally be adding some seasonal content... and it also lays some groundwork for the seasons & holidays roadmap item. After all, roadmap items don't have to be one single giant update — some are probably better suited to being implemented over several smaller monthly updates like this one.

So that's what I've been working on this week! I hope to get the Harvest Eve party events done over the weekend, and by Monday I'll be rolling in contributions and completing as many smaller miscellaneous tasks as I can get through just ahead of early access. Once early access is out, you can expect some more new features to come in alongside whatever bugfixes end up being required, up until public release a week later. And then I'll be back to the big River Rat update.

That's all for now! Have a good weekend, and I'll be back next week with another progress report. And as always, I really appreciate your support! I couldn't do it without you!