Course of Temptation Dev Diary #65

Hello friends! Happy Friday, and here is today's dev diary.

So, 0.6 is out! Pushing out a major update is always a nerve-wracking time — What if everybody hates this stuff I've been working on for months?? — but I do the best I can to make something I'd like to play and eventually, it just has to come out!

Thanks to everyone who's taken the time to communicate their thoughts about the update. Fortunately, feedback has mostly been positive. But regarding negative feedback, there are two specific issues I've been able to identify.

The first is that many feel that progress through the career is too slow. Part of that is the way I develop — I'd rather start a system out being underpowered and tune it up than start out overpowered and have to nerf it. And the other part is that I, personally, just prefer games like this to be a slow burn, so that ends up being the type of game I make.

But not everybody likes slow burns, or has the time for them for that matter, which is where things like the difficulty settings come in! To help address this, I've made a new options screen for specific storyline options, of which the River Rat is the first and, so far, only entry.

"Vibes" are progress along the Flirtiness/Professionalism axis, while Performance affects how quickly you'll be promoted. If you feel that progress is too slow for you, you can make these numbers change up to four times faster.

These sliders are present starting in v0.6.0g, which is out today.

Another issue affecting progress was a bug where a "days since promotion" counter was erroneously reset when your job title changed rather than when you were actually promoted. So, if you liked to swap jobs, you were unknowingly delaying your promotion. This was already fixed earlier this week, but I'm certain it contributed to the feeling of slow progress.

The second major issue is that bartender events don't feel as varied as server events, or seem to lack the same level of interaction. This tells me I need to brainstorm and write another round of bartender events! Which I will certainly do, probably as part of the February monthly update that, for you, will come at the end of January. Though if I have any great ideas that I can fit in sooner, I will.

In the meantime, as I mentioned last week, in lieu of a January update we'll have a second update this month. It'll be an update that fits the season, and it will add a highly requested feature.

Thanks for the plush human, weirdo.

So yes, gifts are in, making your character's birthday relevant. In addition, you can give gifts to NPCs as well, boosting their positive attitudes about you. This goes through a "gift appeal" algorithm that judges how much an NPC likes an item based on their hobbies and inclinations, your relationship with them, and other factors including, of course, the expense.

Converting myriad types of objects and things into potential gifts is a non-trivial task and it's taken a couple days of coding. Gifts can be both given to and received from NPCs, and in terms of coding these two tasks have less overlap than you might think. But it's coming along, and I'm currently in the process of adding gift-related events for birthdays or just because.

Given what month it is, you can probably guess why gift-giving is being added now and what else is planned! So there will also be some special events and other little changes I'll be adding in, which will be my focus for next week.

I aim to deliver this update by the end of next week, and the week after that will be my holiday. After my week off, I'll start on a lots-of-little-things type update to be delivered at the end of January, and then we'll be on the usual schedule.

Okay, that's all for this week! I'll be getting back to writing events. Thanks for reading, and thanks, as always, for your generous support, without which I couldn't do this. Until next time!