Course of Temptation Dev Diary #104

Hello friends! It is dev diary time once again!

This week I've been getting things done in two main areas.

First, the advice stuff I talked a bit about last week. I'd completed the part of it that queues a simulation event up as "pending advice" rather than executing it immediately, but I still had to figure out the part where the player character gives their advice and the NPC then chooses to act on it, or not.

Naturally this is a bit more edifying for you if you actually know the other person, but sometimes we just have to take what we're given. Even here, NPCs still have a will of their own — if she likes this guy, your advice may not sway her against going on the date with him. In the back of my mind, there's a question about whether it might just be annoying to be asked for advice which then isn't taken, but for now at least we're going the more realistic route.

The other major hurdle was how to handle things when the NPC accepts the advice to not pursue a simulation event. Behind the scenes, what led up to this was your friend and this other NPC flirting and getting to know each other, and the prerequisites for this go-on-a-date event are still true, meaning there's nothing inherently stopping the event from just queueing up again next week. So it needs a blocker.

This involved a bit more iteration on the simulation event system. So far, events have just queued themselves automatically, but this called for a manual event: one that represented advice given against pursuing the date and set a flag for this particular NPC pairing. The date event then just has to not fire if this particular flag exists. I imagine that, as the system develops, there will be other cases where manually inserting events into the simulation makes sense.

I've also now done advice events for other situations: whether to become friends with a person, whether to pursue friends with benefits, whether to go all the way with a partner, and so on. What sorts of things you're asked for advice on depends on your relationship with them and what sort of inclinations they have. For instance, a less confident friend tends to ask for advice on more things, and is more likely to accept your advice when it's given.

I still haven't tackled advice regarding inclinations, though I'm looking forward to getting a start on this. These will be a bit more involved with some full prose scenes. Getting an NPC to pick up an exhibitionist inclination needs to be more than "Hey, yes or no, should I become an exhibitionist?" More of a realization about themselves that you steer them into through actions rather than words.

The second area of progress has been year advancement. Had year advancement actually won the poll, I would be working on different types of class projects and other stuff to spice up college work. But as it is, I should be able to get the basics of year advancement working without taking too much time, and I'll save the other planned content for another time.

The first step was to come up with more advanced courses for each major for each year... so, twelve new courses per major, for a total of 108 courses. Fun times! Hee Ho and Rfpnj helped me with this.

Second step was to find professors for all of these new courses. I thought this might require generating new professors, but it turns out the current professor schedule is pretty light, so they have plenty of time to cover all of the new additional courses. I think this will be fine, but if it turns out it makes the faculty feel unusually small, we can always generate more professors later.

Next was to allow the player to update their course selection as they change years, which you can see above. You can decide on a different major as you enter your sophomore year if you want, but that will be your final chance to change your mind. However, each year you can pick any electives you want from any major (these are your block C and D classes), so there's some more variety for you there if you want it.

The next step is to have the seniors graduate, either converting them into townies (a likely outcome if they're important to the player character) or quietly removing them from the game. New freshmen will then have to be generated, which will give you some new people to meet each year. I may not get this finished this week, but it'll get done before 0.8 is up for release.

So, that's about where we are. Next week I'll be shifting focus over to getting a January content update ready, which will probably largely involve continuing to expand sports content (the winner of the last development focus poll) but also probably some other stuff. I'll let you know my progress next week.

Until then, thanks for reading, and I hope you have a good weekend! As ever, thank you so much for your support and for making this project possible.