Course of Temptation Dev Diary #48

Hello friends! It's Friday and time for another progress report!

Progress on 0.6

As planned, I spent the bulk of my time this week on the server job coming up in 0.6, the River Rat update. I've gone back and forth a bit on how detailed to make this part. The QuickieBurger job, for example, is pretty much the least detailed method — you select the work action, get one random event, an hour passes, and you get your pay.

For this job, I'm experimenting with putting in a bit more detail. Part of the server experience is having the table that's really friendly and tips well, or the table from hell that puts in a difficult order and then tips nothing. So I wanted tables to be actually distinct, so that you know who's sitting there, and you might either look forward to or dread taking care of them.

So far, it's looking like this:

The general process is that you'll take a new table's order, then as you're waiting for it to be ready, you can engage with other tables, clear tables, or just pass time. Your performance, the table's mood, and other choices lead to a final calculation of the tip you've earned.

Mechanically, your shift passes by in a series of hour-long rounds. Each round, you'll want to settle your tables, get them their orders or get them cleared, then get your pay and tips for that hour. Next round, the tables that had been served now need clearing, and the tables that had been cleared now have new occupants waiting for their order to be taken. Then when you're done working, you can clock out and leave just as you do at QuickieBurger.

There are two goals with this. The first is, as said above, to give tables some individual personality. Taking their order introduces you to what the mood is at that table, then you have some idea what to expect when you later bring them their order, which is where I plan to put the most consequential events. The second goal is to involve a bit of time management skill, so that how you prioritize tables and how long they've had to wait influences your tips. If you've made a table wait, how will you make them happy again? Your natural charisma? A little flirtiness? ...Your cleavage?

Now, here's a game design aside: The ideal of any game is, naturally, for all its mechanics to be addictively fun and engaging. For example, take a shooter game! You want it to be fun for the player to run through levels shooting fools. But what happens when their gun runs out of bullets? You have to reload! How easy is it to make the reloading process fun and something that the player looks forward to? Probably not very easy at all! So instead of trying to make it engaging, you make it simple, so that they only have to hit one button and the reloading takes care of itself quickly.

Make game mechanics engaging, and when you can't do that, make them quick and simple.

Some games run into... what's the opposite of a sweet spot? A sour spot? Where a mechanic is not that engaging, or becomes less engaging over time, yet still requires a lot of the player's attention. That middle road where a mechanic is neither engaging nor simple is to be avoided, to say the least.

All of that is to say that as I playtest, I'll be paying a lot of attention to how engaging it actually is to juggle a half dozen individual tables versus how much thinking is required to do so. If it's landing too close to that sour spot, then the solution will be to simplify it, either by involving fewer tables or by automating some of it and just picking one interesting thing that happens each round. I've designed this in a fairly modular way so that it'll be easy to simplify if I need to, and I have some ideas about that. For example, it may be better to simply pick one table per round where you can do something to improve your tips, either boosting an already happy table or making it up to an unhappy table, while the others automatically resolve themselves.

We'll see how it goes as I playtest! For now, the under-the-hood systems are mostly in place for this and I'm at the stage of writing events for it. I'll be able to use these events regardless of how the mechanics of serving turn out.

The August Update

We're getting close to the end of the month, and that means it's time to focus on the monthly update. Once again I've also spent some weekend overtime on this.

I've tweaked open relationships a bit — currently, they're romantically exclusive but allow you to sleep with other people without consequence. This didn't fit everyone's definition and led to people occasionally accidentally blocking themselves off from other romantic content, especially if they took the BFF's open relationship offer.

So, until the mechanics are in place for individual relationships to have their own specific characteristics, we'll keep it simple, and only the exclusive romantic partnership will have any exclusivity rules. In addition, the BFF events have been tweaked so that they'll also offer a poly relationship as an option.

The Findr app now has tags for open and poly relationships, making it easier to find NPCs to add to your collection!

I've also added a UI to group hangouts that allows you to invite exactly who you want. People aren't 100% guaranteed to show up, especially if they don't actually like you that much, but that aside, you can now pick who will be there.

I've also added some contributed clothes, and expanded the new addition of pets with some contributions there as well. I'm also addressing some common requests like faster undressing during encounters, bullies being reluctant to even attempt giving you trouble when your Physicality is very high, and the ability to throw matches during arcade side bets and tournaments.

Next week

My focus will be the August update for the next week and putting more stuff into that. I have a bunch of stuff on my shortlist to add — clothing pins and mods, books, new toys, misc sexy events — and I'll get to as much as I can. Several new clothing contributions have been submitted in the past week and I definitely want to get those in. I also want to add a couple more events to the library basement set before it's introduced

In any case, the end of the month is next week, which means the next thing you'll see from me is the changelog for the early access August update!

But for now, I'm off to once again bury my nose in game code. Thanks as always for your support, it means a lot to me, and I hope you have a good weekend!