Post by collectorofmyst in Course of Temptation comments

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So I hope it's okay to just ask a couple of quick questions?

1. Does the Friday night party happen every Friday? This is just for clarification, I wanted to figure those out.

2. How many of the persistent characters have events/can you progress your relationship with? I'm trying to figure out if I'm just doing it wrong when trying to date the Best Friend, plus I've only managed to trigger the Roommate's Partner events once (when they hide in the showers), plus certain characters just don't seem to show up again at all (Classroom Harasser). Obviously, the game's still a work in progress but I'm just trying to figure out if it's like, a settings thing.

3. Do the clinic, frat houses, and suites not really have anything to do yet, or is the former for when your 'health' gets low (or birth control/morning after stuff), and the latter just related to hooking up with specific students?

anarchothaumaturgist292 days ago(+4)

Of course!

1. Starting the second week of school, yeah, they'll start reliably every Friday at 6pm.

2. The BFF events rely on two things: the "talk about sex" option in their dorm room, and figuring out the quad party mystery, which you will if you just keep attending. The roommate's partner events have a specific trigger where you have to overhear them having sex first. The classroom harasser should show up now and then during class events mostly (I've increased the frequency of their stuff for the next update) but make sure you have Bad Situations turned on for them.

In general when I design storylines, I try to get them to kick off in a fairly natural or interesting way and then have events occur at a reasonable frequency... but this is pretty easy to get wrong, it turns out, so I often end up retuning them based on feedback.

3. The clinic has a little content if you pass out (due to hunger or exhaustion) and yeah, it'll be the home for birth control type stuff when that's in. The other two don't have any content yet, but there will be a major update related to frat houses and upperclassmen stuff sooner or later.

collectorofmyst292 days ago(+2)

Thank you for the reply! Glad to know I was going along the right lines of thinking re: 1 and 3, and it's good to know regarding 2 that it's mostly me just not trying everything out + stubbornly trying to ask my best friend on a date. I do think a couple more events triggering might make the campus feel more alive, but I can see you're already doing plenty of work there (saw the changes to the park and the cafeterias) so I'm eager to see where things go either way.

One last question and a suggestion, then, if that's alright;

- Question: You don't need to share (unless you want to, ofc) because giving it away might take away some of the fun of it, but do all Persistent NPCs have (or will in future) have events to pursue/unlock? The QuickieBurger boss and the mail desk employee and so on? (tbh, with them and the classroom admirer and the ones I've already mentioned, I can't think of any others, but you might have more planned, I don't know).

- Suggestion: This is a bit of a take-it-or-leave-it because it's probably a lot more work and I don't want you to make things too hard for yourself. But something along the lines of the Things To Do tab (which kind of serve the same purpose already) or that shows up by enabling cheats, because walkthroughs are a little bit cheaty, to give hints/suggestions towards the different character storylines, maybe even in the character profiles, i.e., with the Roommate, you could have a 'Wait and see...' hint or something like that.

anarchothaumaturgist292 days ago(+3)

Yup, once the BFF is down to try dating, you'll know, it's a whole thing. ;)

More "everyday" type events, reactivity, and socializing is something I'll keep working on. I try to keep a balance between big new content additions and just going back to shore up the foundations, so to speak. Both are important.

I don't think every special NPC will have their own big storyline... some just sort of fill particular niches, or I wanted the player to be able to see at a glance who they are, and that's why they have a listed role in the story. At some point I might have to make some distinction in the UI between NPCs that you can pursue a full storyline with and ones that are more just minor side characters.

Your suggestion would be a bit of work but is possibly something I could build into the existing data structure for events. "Things to do" is meant to be sort of a placeholder until content is more generally findable or tutorialized/introduced in a more immersive way. Moving toward storyline hints would be better for sure, and better address the questions players tend to have.

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