Course of Temptation Dev Diary #36 (Patreon)

Hello friends! Dev diary time is upon us once again!

Following last Friday's dev diary, I spent a good chunk of the weekend working on some last minute things for the April update that came out on Sunday. I wanted to make sure each sport got at least a little bit of attention, and football and cheerleading were the ones left out, so I made a little event sequence for those. (It'd be a bit of a spoiler to even describe which event it is, but I hope people enjoy discovering it!)

This being the week after a content update, I spent some time doing bugfixes. Nothing truly critical has needed fixing, fortunately — the slippers that teleport you to Blodgett Gym when you put them on are bewildering but ultimately harmless, I swear!

And I've also been back to developing 0.5, the relationships update. My time here has been devoted to writing events for established relationships. For example, if you arrive at a FWB type of arrangement with somebody, you can expect interactions along those lines.

My philosophy here is basically that choosing certain types of relationships should change the character of your playthrough somewhat. If you collect FWBs, then your opportunities for casual sex should multiply, just as your more harrowing interactions will increase if you gather rivals.

I still need to do some events for romantic relationships (that's today's project), and then some focusing on D/s relationships. I'll probably be able to get that done sometime next week, and that'll be a first pass on events for all relationship types done. That'll be a good milestone, as it'll mean all planned relationships are implemented and have content.

After that, I'll want to get to work on some cheating content (already partially implemented on the NPC side). Getting caught cheating should, of course, not endear you to your partner. But, also, how exactly do we detect whether you've been caught? The logic for this isn't as straightforward as it might sound! It means I'll probably have to add some logic into any event where you arrange a hookup with somebody in public, as well as into the post-encounter passages. ("Isn't that Amanda's dorm? What were you doing in there?")

I also want to do some storyline changes and extensions. The Harasser and Admirer were both added on a bit of a whim just before the first public release, and while I did have a vague plan for them that I've mostly stuck to, I want to revise their storylines now that they're several events deep and, hopefully, make them more interesting as characters.

While revising character storylines, I also want to add a new way to change your relationship with the BFF. While seeing your best friend in a new light as a result of a certain quad party event is cute, it's one of the less straightforward and most frequently asked about storylines in the game. An alternate, more romantic path would probably be welcome, especially for people who play through multiple times.

But, as usual, I'm starting to get ahead of myself. I probably won't get that far before the next dev diary, so I'll discuss it in more detail later!

Unfortunately, this week hasn't all been smooth sailing. I spent a solid chunk of time trying to solve a problem that is probably not actually under our control at all and even rolled back an update as we tried to sort it out. (Thanks, monolithic operating system corporation!) This delayed some fixes that I'm eager to get out to you, but updates will resume shortly, probably by Monday.

I'll be back next week with another progress report. In the meantime, thanks as always for your support, it means a lot!