Course of Temptation Dev Diary #53

Hello friends! Happy Friday... the thirteenth!

As of today we're on version 0.5.3e, with a couple of bugfix patches out this week. Be sure to thank Drakon for many of the fixes you've seen! And, of course, we also have to thank the players who diligently report the issues they find. None of the issues have been major and reports have slowed down, so this version may be the one until the next content update.

It's been a couple of weeks since a proper dev diary. I always hesitate to post two days in a row because I don't want to feel like I'm spamming y'all. Would you prefer dev diaries on release weeks even if it means posting two days in a row, or if they're short? This month they're far enough apart from release day that I'll have them anyway.

Anyway, let's talk about... encounters!

I did a lot of work with encounters in the September update, basically adding some context to them and making them aware of available space and furniture, and adding some new positions to take advantage of that.

As I mentioned in the release notes, I want to extend this to sex furniture and gloryholes and better implement bondage scenarios — currently, these things are all a bit of a hack, but they can be done more elegantly within the new system. This would allow for things like... well, I'm not sure how much sex furniture we can logically fit into the dorm, but maybe the player can get free access to the library basement or something. Basically, a better implementation will give the player access to these things outside of the very specific events they're currently found in.

All of this goes to show that there are a lot of places the encounter system can still go. There are also a lot of places where it's still missing pieces or needs polish — group scenes, scenes where the focus is anybody but the PC, exactly what happens when what the NPC wants to do collides with what the player wants to do. These are areas I'll continue to work on, at least some of it in the next update.

The encounter system is by far the single most complex system in the game. If there's something that seems weird and undesirable happening with it, you can help me out by making sure I know about it!

The best way to report bugs is in the Discord, but you can also DM me here. Note however that, given the complexity of the system, it's often super hard to reproduce a specific encounter bug given the sheer amount of variables involved — so if you can export a save to disk at the moment a problem occurs and get it to me, then I can immediately identify and start debugging the issue, which is an enormous help.

River Rat Expansion Progress

Aside from addressing some bug reports, this week has been all event writing all the time. I've planned and outlined the remaining events I definitely want to be part of the River Rat server job, and now I'm going down the list and writing them all.

Many of these are branching events — one I wrote on Wednesday has twelve different possible passages — so they're a lot of work! But we're getting through it. They're really the meat of the River Rat server "adventure" so getting them done is pretty gratifying. I can probably pretty much wrap up the server stuff this month. I have even more events in mind, but they aren't strictly necessary and will probably wait for the polish phase.

I had one idea for expressing the PC's dominant side in server events. When you're asked to do something to improve your tip that you don't really want to do yourself, maybe you can sub in (get it?) another server to handle it for you. Your success would depend on how the other server feels about you, their submissiveness, and your dominance. It'd also contribute to making your coworkers feel more present, which is always good.

After the server job will be the bartender and manager phases of the job. The manager portion will probably use the bartender events as its backbone, just with added options and responsibility and more interaction with the owner. As a bartender, there's a vibe of having more authority than you had as a server... which, in my mind, just means opportunities to play with power dynamics! But we'll talk about that later.

All of this is to say we're seeing good progress this week. The end is in sight for server events, and that checks off a huge portion of what I scoped out for this update.

Besides that, please accept this preview of an event I wrote this week that fires if the River Rat becomes a topless bar while you're still a server:

That's about all I have to talk about for this week. It's just a lot of writing! I'll probably put in some weekend hours too, because I really want to finish up these server events and be ready to work on bartending events before I shift focus to the October content update.

I will be back next week with another progress report! I hope you enjoy your weekend and, as always, I'm incredibly grateful for your support!