Course of Temptation Dev Diary #56

Hello friends! How is everyone doing. Our current early access version is 0.5.4c, which, in addition to the changelog posted earlier this week, now includes an extension to the description system.

I thought adding a few new description options might be fairly quick... well, it wasn't! But that's okay, as this sort of thing should be slightly quicker in the future if another extension seems like a good idea. Let's get into it.

My first thought was to simply add a bunch of options for eye shape, lips, chin, etc., in much the same way as you already pick hair color, eye color, and so on. The contributors (hi Falc) argued in favor of having just one really distinguishing feature, particularly for NPCs.

I decided this was probably wise. Describe everything and at a certain point you're not really describing anything, because you end up with a gigantic paragraph where you've basically played Mad Libs to describe a person and your brain doesn't even want to be bothered to parse it. So, NPCs get exactly one distinguishing feature.

I experimented with exposing this in their anonymous name (the descriptive line you get when you don't know their name) and everyone seemed to immediately like the results:

Something like "the brown-haired girl with hooded eyes" immediately seems more memorable and easier to distinguish than yet another toned brown-haired girl. This will probably be tweaked more, and certainly expanded with more options in the future, but for now it seems like a good result. And if you want to change any NPC's distinguishing feature, you can do that if you have the NPC customization option turned on.

But the other purpose of new description options is for players to better customize their own characters, and when it comes to this, we don't want to limit them to just one. So, for your character, you can pick as many distinguishing features as you want — though, of course, just one per category, so you aren't describing your eyes two different ways. And if you feel there's nothing remarkable about, say, your eyebrows, then you don't have to pick anything for them.

All of that said, there are a couple new description choices and sliders also! These are focused around fulfilling common requests for more detail about certain bits...

If you pick "nondescript" then nothing really changes, but any of the other options will affect your nipple descriptor! And then there are size and color choices.

Captain Willy hasn't been left out either, and there are now separate sliders for length and girth. Hooray! Similar to the muscle-plumpness axes, both factors will combine into a single descriptor string that replaces the old one.

In order to access the new options in an ongoing game, I had to add the ability to re-customize your character. This option will be active if you have either NPC customization or cheats enabled.

All of this led to a bit of housekeeping. The player character customization process was basically replicated, just with different text, in both the Prologue and Quickstart sequences, and by adding re-customization, I was looking at having it in a third place too.

But here's the thing: if you find you're duplicating code in multiple places, it means there's almost certainly a better way to do whatever it is you're doing.

So I took the time and unified player character customization under a single widget that Prologue, Quickstart, and re-customization all redirect to. Now any code edits only have to happen in one place! Amazing.

Anyway, again, this new stuff is already in the early access version, so go ahead and make sure you're updated if you want to try it out!

I'll be spending the time until public release cramming in a few more things, and an updated complete changelog will come out along with it.

Next week I'll be back on the big River Rat expansion, focusing on the remaining major tasks for that update: the bartender and manager jobs. I'll be back next week with a progress report on that!

But that's all for now. As always, you all make this project possible with your generous support, and it really does mean a lot. Thank you!