Course of Temptation Dev Diary #50

Hello friends! Friday has come once again, and with it is dev diary number fifty!

The current version is v0.5.2d, with a bugfix release fresh from the oven. There haven't been any really serious issues, but you know what's always really time-consuming to deal with? CSS! But I think the undesirable scrollbars that arise from tooltips near the edge of their div are finally fully conquered. Maybe.

I also fixed an issue that was causing submissive NPCs not to follow their dress code rules and, incidentally, was also breaking exhibitionist NPC behavior.

Personality traits have been fixed up a little bit (they were refactored as part of adding tooltips) and I added traits to represent NPCs' interests/hobbies. Since these are now plain to see, your PC will also be a little smarter about picking conversation topics that NPC actually enjoys (if your PC is into it too).

I spent the first part of this week putting more stuff into the August update, the greatest part of which was... books! "Why books," I imagine somebody somewhere has asked, "when this is a sex game?" Perhaps similar questions have been asked about pets and similar additions.

Well, there are two reasons things like this go into the game, one philosophical and one more practical!

As a design principle, I've never seen this game as just a sex game. Certainly that's its main purpose, and ultimately what its systems and interactions should lead to... but I also don't want it to be simply a dispenser of erotic scenes, one after another.

To me, erotic things are more erotic when in a larger context. Casual exhibitionism feels more exciting when you're also worried about your classes, your wellbeing... your reputation. The erotic elements should come from something and lead to something. They are something that affect your overall character.

That's why I designed CoT to be, among other things, a relatively grounded life sim. That contrast of the kinky and the mundane enhances the flavor of the kinky, in my opinion. Part of achieving that is just having really solid and complete life sim mechanics. CoT exists in large part because I just wanted to make a game that strikes this balance, the sort of game I really wanted to play but found hard to come by.

The more practical reason is... the game needs stuff. In order for money to be a motivator throughout the game, you need things to spend money on, so everything that's available to buy is a balancing factor. If there are things you want, then you need money, and if you need money, then you engage with the game's jobs.... which all, of course, lead to sexy events and storylines.

Also I'm gradually building up a variety of well, things so that you have an array of options for gifts, whether giving or receiving. Gifts are a fairly frequent request, especially since the dating and romance mechanics were expanded, and in order to build that system I want a good selection of actual tangible things in the game. So, gifts will happen, and anything you can buy/acquire are part of the groundwork for them!

Anyway, following the release of the monthly update, I was keeping an eye on bug reports and working on some small tasks in the meantime. One of those small tasks was toys for impact play! Paddles, whips, floggers... I've been wanting to bring in some of this stuff for a while now. There are more things I want to add here, but this'll be September update stuff, so I'll come back to it later in the month.

Any suggestions for new toys? Let me know!

Today, I'm back to working on 0.6, the River Rat expansion. If you remember, I left off with a prototype implementation of the server job where I was trying to gauge how many tables it'd be actually be fun to manage.

Someone in the comments here (hi Vayes) had a good idea about starting small, with one or two tables, then increasing your table count as your performance improves, which leads to more opportunities for tips. This will lend the job more of a progression, and if you couple that with the ability to decline more tables or dial it back again, then the player gets to decide how much they want to deal with, and I think that's probably a good implementation.

So, for the next two weeks, I'll be working solidly on River Rat stuff. The underlying code for the server job is basically done, but there's a whole lot of event writing to do. It should be fun, though! I expect to be able to make a good bit of progress.

That's all for this week! By next week I hope to have a fairly playable River Rat server job! I'll check in again then. Until then... have a good weekend and thank you, as always, for your generous support! I couldn't do it without you!