Course of Temptation Dev Diary #123 (Patreon)

Happy Friday! It's time for another dev diary. With the releases falling on a Thursday the last couple weeks, I haven't really wanted to double up on posts. But in fact I've been back to working on 0.8 since last week, so let's get caught up!

As you may or may not recall, the remaining vital items on the 0.8 todo list were... finishing up pregnancy, and ways to encourage NPCs to take certain inclinations as part of the new NPC simulation. These have both mostly involved a lot of event writing, so that's most of what I've been doing.

These new pregnancy-related events generally aren't doing anything based in mechanics, but instead are there to make your life feel qualitatively different while pregnant. The game doesn't feel very reactive if everything remains basically the same through what should be major life changes, so it's important to give reminders, if you will, that your character is going through something. I've put these in some of the most common event sets: walking around, being in class, hanging out with your partner, and things like that. Certainly there will need to be some more work in this area, and I'm sure I'll add some more in playtesting and in followup monthly updates. But for now, I can check it off the list.

Besides flavor events, I did also add some mechanical effects to pregnancy. We're simplifying things here a bit, but broadly, it goes like this: The first trimester mostly has you feeling a bit more tired, but otherwise, it's not too much of a strain on your body yet. In the second trimester, you actually have a bit more energy, but you're starting to need to really feed that pregnancy with extra calories. The third trimester is the most uncomfortable and puts the most strain on your body, but, of course, you're in the home stretch! The game reflects all this through need decay modifiers and random events that further alter needs.

It's not all negatives, though. When you're relaxing, feeling your baby moving around can be a mood boost!

Next, we move on to events that will encourage your sexual or romantic partners to add certain inclinations. As you may have read in a previous dev diary, in the new simulation system, NPCs you're close with will often ask for advice about whether to go on a date with somebody, whether to break up over an argument, whether they should be friends with this other person, and stuff like that. Encouraging them to gain inclinations uses that same system, except it's less explicit advice and more giving them a nudge at the right moment.

Again, this is a bunch of event-writing, and I'll certainly have to expand the variety of events where you can give NPCs this kind of nudge. My goal is for it to seem fairly natural, in a way that, "Hey, do you think I should become an exhibitionist?" definitely would not. My goal of the moment is to knock out a few more of these events, enough to get us started with.

And that will conclude the remaining critical items on the 0.8 todo list. My goal after that will be to get into some heavy playtesting, which will mean just starting a new character and playing the game like anyone else would... with the difference that I'll be stopping every two minutes to fix or adjust something. I'll likely be doing this till the end of the month, along with seeing if I can fit in any other additions I wanted to make before it'll be time to put this into early access.

What comes after 0.8 is something I've been thinking about as we get closer. My usual habit is to have one full monthly update before I pick another big roadmap item — expand and consolidate what the last update added, put in additional content, and that sort of thing. However, this is a big one, where I'll be more or less checking off three roadmap items in one go. In addition, there are a lot of areas of the game as it exists already that could use more polish and content. All of this is to say I'll probably do at least two or three months of just monthly updates before I embark on another roadmap item.

As you've probably read numerous times, I normally split my time — half of the month working on the next major update, and half of the month working on stuff that will go out at the end of the month. With 0.8 being so complex and fairly major existing systems in the game also needing work, this has left me stretched a bit thin at times. Putting aside roadmap updates for a couple months will let me dedicate entire months to improving existing systems in the game, iterating on things that don't feel quite right, adding content to areas where it's sparse, fixing up things that currently don't work very consistently like group encounters, doing UI updates, and that sort of thing.

This won't change the update schedule from your perspective. Monthly updates will still come out on time, they'll just be a bit bigger than you're used to since I'll have twice as much time to work on them. Once I feel like I've kicked some of the game's more apparent problem areas into shape, I'll reevaluate.

But anyway, that's all for the future! That'll do it for this week. Next week, I'll be able to tell you how playtesting is going. So, until then, please have a good week, and as always, thank you for your support! It really means a lot!