Adding Limited Time Events

It's that wonderful time between the patron bug testing release and the public release, which means lots of bug hunting and some general polish on the state of the game. This week I had also planned to do some forward planning and experimentation with a new feature, but a couple particularly productive nights turned that into a full fledged feature that will be coming out with v0.23.1 in a couple of days!

The public version of v0.23 will include "limited time events", which are normal random events except for two key differences:

1) They trigger during your turn when you interact with someone or enter the same location as someone, instead of between turns.

2) They only exist for a limited time before expiring.

This new functionality will let me write new random events that logically should be triggered by you moving around. Examples where this could come up include walking in on someone masturbating or catching a member of your staff slacking off when you walk into the room. Support had already existed for events triggered when you walked in to a room or talked to a person - both were used in Gabrielle's storyline - but those events had to be hand placed and there wasn't a way for those events to expire if they went too long without triggering.

You might wonder why it's important that these events expire. If they didn't expire over the course of a long game every girl would eventually have one or more events generated for them. Girls you talked to often would have these events cleared out, but you might hire someone for marketing and forget about her for a couple weeks in game. When you get around to corrupting her you would end up with an event triggering every single time you entered the room or interacted with her until you cleared out the list. If the events expire over time I can have a higher rate of random events so that you encounter them more frequently on girls you interact with without them piling up on other people.

There was already one previously existing special case that I have converted over to the new system, because special cases are the bane of code maintenance. The random event where a girl asks to either give you a new title or be given a new title use to require special variables stored for each person and updated each turn, but is now completely replicated by this new system. I'm also working on some new events that should be included in v0.23.1 if my writing stays on pace. If you have any ideas drop me a comment or a message, it may inspire me!