Course of Temptation Dev Diary #114 (Patreon)

Hello friends! Happy Friday to all.

First of all, my cat is doing much better. Thanks for all the kind words and well-wishes! The week started off a bit shakily on that front, but he seems fully recovered now and I've gotten back on track in regards to work too. I still feel a little bit behind, but I'm doing my best!

In any case, early access for the March update will be upon us tomorrow with the full changelog so far, so I'll run down what got done this week without going into tremendous detail. This update has gotten about a week of work so far, so I'll continue to actively work on it up until public release to make sure it's as full as it should be.

First of all, Hee Ho's Springril Splash event has been delivered, and I spent Monday integrating it. It's a big one, with a number of unique activities taking place on the University Mall throughout the day.

There's a swimsuit contest, grilling competition, water balloons, and a number of unique events and foods. I'm pretty sure Hee Ho wants to do even more with this over time, too, which is of course sheer madness.

Next, I tackled something I've been meaning to do for a while and which has been suggested many times, and added a search and filtering options to the People dialog.

That is... a lot of stuff! And it'll probably get reworked a bit at some point (I think it's been well-established that UI design is not really my strong point, but I try!). The icons do have tooltips, so you can figure out what they are. The search bar will filter by name, or if their name isn't known, by their anonymous description instead.

This is an example showing nearby people filtered down to very attractive femme type people, so a search like this can help if you're looking for somebody to chat up! Or you can do things like filter your sexual partners by the Exhibitionist personality trait to see who might be willing to put on a show with you.

Given the game's central design pillar is based around persistent NPCs with unique personality traits, I hope this will be a useful tool in navigating and organizing them. If there's anything else you'd like to be able to filter by, let me know!

I've also been working on the phone texting interface. "Better texting" was the next priority from the last poll, and a number of people confirmed in the comments of last week's dev diary that they would like to see that. I'm starting with revamping the appearance a bit...

...and adding some scrolling when there are many options available, since we'll tend to only add more over time. I also want to reduce the instances of having many options presented at once by putting some under submenus that you can click into, and have text conversations persist fully until you move to a new passage, all of which requires me to adjust how the system works. Getting that done will be my project for the rest of the day.

Once that's in place, the phone should be a bit more usable, and I'll work more on content: coming up with ways to make conversations flow more naturally, interspersed with selfies and such. I'm not quite sure how far I'll get this month, but ultimately I won't be satisfied until we can fully simulate sexting for some reason.

I'd also like to see if I can at least get a start on implementing art and photography skills over the next week. They've waited a very long time to get some content! And adding photography would tie into improving how the phone functions.

In any case, to sum up: early access tomorrow, then further work on this update, then public release next week. That's all I have for now! Please have a good Friday, and as always, thank you so much for your support, I really do appreciate it!