Hello friends! It is dev diary time!
We are now on v0.7.5g with a new update out today. This one just contains a bunch of minor bugfixes. Unless there's some major "accidentally created a new bug while fixing an old bug" situation, this is likely the last update until early access to the February content update.
This is one of those weeks where I've been basically entirely buried in code and haven't done any event writing, so I don't really have many screenshots to share... unless you want screenshots of code. Do you? Is that what you want??
Yes, I really do like my curly braces to look like that, why do you ask?
Anyway, interestingly, this isn't actually a new method. It's existed ever since I added the birth control options a few monthly updates ago. Its purpose is to check a number of factors and return a value between 0 and 1 representing the probability that the NPC (or the PC) is fertile that day. At the time, I wrote it just to tie together everything I'd done with birth control while it was fresh in my mind, and there it remained, never actually used.
Well, now it is used! This week I'm working on extending the work I began earlier so that, you know, becoming pregnant is actually a possibility. This fertility probability needs to be resolved into a final roll and then potentially become an actual pregnancy, which then has to advance over time and reach a conclusion. Under the hood, I've got this done except for the very end. But, again, this is just code — the events and other narrative stuff are a whole other task.
Along with this comes a bunch of other stuff, like an app to keep track of fertility level (probably not the final look), pregnancy tests, and so on. It's a fair bit of work, but it'll also check off a big roadmap item that a lot of people have been asking for, so there's that.
Besides that... and I'm going out of chronological order for some reason... I also finished student year advancement earlier in the week.
Over summer, fourth year students will graduate, either converting to townies or, if they're of no apparent interest to the PC, being removed from the game entirely. A minimum of 25% of graduating students, randomly chosen, will become townies regardless. I may even increase this to 50%.
First, second, and third year students then all advance by a year, transitioning into the more advanced versions of their courses. Then an all-new set of students is generated to become the new incoming first years. This new cohort isn't the size of the year the PC is in, but rather, like the upper classes, is a sort of smaller representative sample. They'll be less likely to be highlighted in events than students in your own year, but they will be around and interactable, and will give opportunities for new relationships if you keep playing past a year.
Students graduating will no doubt leave the sports teams a little tattered, and potentially without captains as well. Incoming freshmen will fill out their ranks again, and an upper year member will be promoted to captain. As I mentioned last week, at some point we want the PC to be able to vie for the captain spot, but that will require some specific attention that probably isn't in scope for 0.8.
Another thing I want to do with 0.8 is expand the year with an extra month. Little-known fact: originally the game had only four months! I imagined the player would play through 12 or 16 months (depending on whether summer was actually playable), graduate from college, and that would be about long enough for a full experience. However, in early playtesting, everything just went by way too fast, so I gave each non-summer season an extra month.
Why didn't summer get an extra month at this time? I have no idea! It'd sure be easier for me now if I'd done it then.
It's not quite as easy as just shoving an extra month into the list, although that is step one. All other references to months will need to be checked out too, and anything that stores a time (hangouts, scheduled shoots, games, etc etc) will also need to be updated in save data. It'll be tricky, but it's doable!
I'm mainly thinking about this now because the total length of the game year figures into how long the duration of a game pregnancy should be. With an eight month year, the game will default to a proportionate six month pregnancy, but you can set it to a realistic nine months or all the way down to one month if you want to do some kind of human-rabbit hybrid roleplay. I don't judge.
I'll keep working on 0.8 for a bit longer this month, but within the next week I'll need to be switching over to the February content update. The contributors already have some stuff in store for that, such as a new location and hangout type and a new holiday, and of course I have some plans of my own. But I'll talk more about that next Friday.
So, that's all for now! Thank you for reading, and as always, thank you so much for your support. Have a good weekend!