Course of Temptation Dev Diary #107

Hello friends! Hope you're having a good Friday, or whatever day it is in your time zone of choice.

As of just now, we're on v0.7.5f. A bunch of bugs reported since Wednesday have been fixed in this one, and in addition, I may have finally licked the rare wardrobe bug some users were afflicted with once and for all. Let me know if you're still getting it or something similar, but I completely replaced the method that was raising errors, so we should at the very least be much closer to a solution.

Rfpnj is running a contest on the Discord, and has this to say: "Many players write books as part of their gameplay, We want to see your best titles and synopses. They will be voted on by the community and the winner will be coded and added to the bookstore. The genre for this contest is romance. You can submit as many times as you want, and the community will decide the winner. Entries are to be added to the contest thread on the Discord for ease of voting and record keeping." If you want to participate, the contest now has a dedicated thread in the Suggestions channel.

I don't have too much to say today since we're just one full work day between the January public release changelog and this dev diary, but I'm back to work on 0.8, so I'll give you a little update on where that stands.

I left off working on year advancement, and I made a good bit of progress on that yesterday. Graduating students is actually pretty complicated! A student who is graduating is either becoming a townie or leaving the game entirely, and they might also be on a sports team, might be a team captain, might be your resident advisor or a student advisor or some other storyline role.

Currently, just as an example, who your RA is is tracked by who's in The Resident Advisor storyline role. Behind the scenes, a role has always been used interchangeably with an NPC's name to identify a specific NPC, so just slotting a new NPC into this storyline role can cause problems — it'll think the new NPC is the same person as before. So, for instance, if a storyline is about building a relationship, suddenly you're midway into that story with a completely different NPC. So what we need to do is just remove The Resident Advisor niche when that NPC graduates, and track who the Chicory Hall RA is in some other way. The storyline role, then, is used only to refer to a specific NPC in a specific storyline rather than implicitly holding additional mechanical information such as who Chicory Hall's RA is.

If that sounded confusing... well yeah, it is! This all has to be handled very carefully.

As another example, The Star Quarterback storyline role now also goes away when that specific NPC graduates. This means that in football practice, we wouldn't know who the team captain is anymore, so we now need to separately store that information and keep it updated. "The Star Quarterback" will always refer to one individual NPC who might leave the story, but the team must still have a specific captain, and that's where a new NPC slots in.

So, that's what I've been mired in. The system of graduating students and either removing them from the game or converting them to townies is basically complete. I now have to go through the game and look for references to these storyline roles, check each event I find, and see if it's part of a storyline (and should go away when the storyline niche does) or if it's referring more generically to a certain function that NPC was performing (and should be updated to find the new NPC filling that role).

After seeing that example, I know some will be wondering: what about the PC becoming the team captain? That's absolutely something that will happen, but that's more of a sports storyline update, and probably outside the scope of 0.8. It's definitely fodder for a monthly update after 0.8 is out, though.

Generally speaking, NPCs with storyline roles start at year 3 at the oldest, so that gives the player at least two years to engage with and complete these storylines, which I think is fine. Maybe some storylines could reset instead of going away completely, but we'll have to see. That would all have to be handled on a case by case basis.

And if you're concerned about your favorite NPC vanishing, don't be! The game takes a look at who you've been interacting with, who you have a relationship with, and chooses to convert those NPCs to townies instead of removing them. Even just adding an NPC to your favorites is enough to save them.

Anyway, despite how complicated I made all this sound, I should be able to get done with it sometime next week. After that, I'll want to spend some time getting some baseline mechanics done for pregnancy: discovering the pregnancy, you and NPCs reacting to that, events related to its progression, and the final event. This will probably be handled through more generic events common to all NPCs at first, and later we can see about better tying it in to specific storylines.

After that, there's still a bit more to do with NPC simulation itself. I think the biggest missing piece there is cheating mechanics. In any case, once we're at that point, we'll be close to thinking about when early access will be. But for now, we're a little ways off still, so we'll take it week by week.

Every time I start one of these by saying I don't have much to say, it seems to herald me going on to write a thousand words. Here we are again. However, that is all for this week! I'll be back next week with another progress report on 0.8.

Until then, I hope you have a good weekend, and as always, I want to thank you for your generous support. This project wouldn't be possible without your help.