Course of Temptation Dev Diary #119 (Patreon)

Hello friends! It's dev diary time!

This will be a short one, as we're in that awkward time between early access and the public release where the things I was working on two days ago are in your hands already. Also, I'm working on getting through as much of my todo list as I can and I'm eager to get back to it!

As you know, early access arrived on Tuesday, and then I spent the next couple of days working on fixes and general improvements. I added a much-needed trash/delete function to your art inventory, and got the Inkmorrow platform working for customers and not just artists — you can now order prints for your room to add to your decor.

These things are present in 0.7.8a, which you can update to right now if you haven't already.

I've now started on commissions, which will be a moneymaker for artist type characters on the platform. This has turned into kind of a whole minigame, so it might be about as far as I get this month, leaving photography for a future update... but we're getting there!

The basic idea of commissions is that you, as an artist, will receive a request for a specific type of art. For example, your client might want an illustration in the fantasy genre... featuring a tall redheaded woman... depicted as an elf sorcerer. To do this specific piece, it helps to have a reference — do you know any tall redheaded women you can sketch? A real life reference will improve the quality of the final piece!

Failing that, you can just look for references online, but that will take some time as well. The closer you can get with a real life reference, the better the final result will be. Naturally, this is all a bit simplified, but I hope to capture some of what it's actually like to be an artist.

Getting clients for photography is also required before I count the art stuff as finished, as is implementing other types of art subjects like still life and abstract. Again, I'm not sure I'll have time before the public release deadline, but I'll do my best. In any case, once those things are done it'll round out the core functionality for the art and photography skills that I had outlined.

Which will be good, because throughout development so far, I've tried very hard to avoid adding new secondary skills while the ones we started with still lacked content (I think Troublemaking is the only new one, and it started with content thanks to the Greek update and giving it some existing actions). Having underutilized secondary skills in the game is like owing a debt, one that should be paid before taking on something new. But once all the skills have some core mechanics, all new secondary skills become a possible area of expansion.

I'll also try to mix it up a bit more for the next monthly update — though I planned to include some erotic prose events in this update, just coding the mechanics behind the art stuff ended up taking up a lot of my time, so I'll really want to focus on events and general sexy stuff for the next one. The life sim vs. adult game balance is tricky sometimes.

So, that's where I'll leave it for now as I dive back into code. Thank you for reading, and as always, thank you for your generous support! You'll hear from me again on Tuesday with the public release and the final changelog. Until then, have a good weekend!