Project Plan May

We are back with another Star Knightess Aura month! The main goal: Finish the pre-Festival content of the Full-Time Maid Job events. Before I go into the weekly details, there are two minor meta updates:

• I have updated the budget post taking the new artist position for Liora into consideration. While we are right now in a post-release freefall and I'm not sure if we can make it back there, but in the case we do, I updated the 8.5k€ goal to either try again with a composer for BGMs or maybe try to work with a sound effect focused freelancer.

• The intransparency from the extra votes of the higher tiers has caused quite some issues in the past, so I'm replacing this with a simple special Discord role (that has no other benefits besides being a different color but ok... :'D) There's also the issue of the second voting page needing an extra post, kind of leading to occupying a lot of space in the patreon post list. I expect the number of future polls to increase again due to Liora' development and this change is in preparation for that.

Then, with that out of the way, let's take a look at the usual weekly breakdown.

Week 1: A bit of leeching from SKA dev time to Liora dev time for the the artist search for Liora. Over the weekend, I have created a recruitment post and posted it on the usual places, including deviantart. If you have an artist in mind who you think could be interested in the position, be sure to let him know.

Overall, the number of artist applications that meet the same quality standards as SKA has been surprisingly low (significantly lower than when I made the call for SKA all the way back then.) But there are still a lot of applications coming in, so we will see. Should the artist search take longer than expected, I might make next month an SKA month and delay Liora development to give it more time.

Besides the artist search, I plan to do some light technical development on SKA. Stuff like expanding the build process to calculate the translation progress for each language and showing it in the Options menu so it's less confusing for players that when they change a language apparantly nothing happens because the translation progress for the language is still low.

Week 2: Then it's time for some more content development and return once more to Arwin's mansion. I will be creating the next Maid Job event as well as the new actions Aura can do in the follow-up time slot.

Week 3: In Reactivity Week, I will probably focus once again on some NPC work. I haven't yet quite decided on the work items here, but do expect that Doll Aura from the Formula Peddler will become a Wandering NPC and go around Trademond after the completion of her events, with some NPCs gaining reactions to this.

Week 4: We will close out the Full-Time Maid Job events in this week. For the Maid Bad Ending we then only need to update the Festival of Greed and have it trigger a Betrayal H-scene for Aura if she fails a Willpower check when Arwin calls her to his side, and then I can work on the ending itself. But that's a story for the next SKA update.

Week 5: It's a five-week dev cycle, so I'm taking a week off (It's been a while :D :D :D :D :D :D). Should our artist finish a H-CG for one of the Maid Job events, I will integrate it and there will be a prerelease, otherwise if there isn't anything to integrate from our freelancers, the week will be a skip.

From our Freelancer side, we have the following pieces of work:

RPGM Developer.

Our Assistant Developer Trihan will be focusing on more refactorings in order to allow bringing features (Costume system, books) over to Liora. Other than that, we have some more ongoing work on improving the technical backend for the translation support and also the integration of the Time Transition Screen. We are still waiting for another iteration of the UI artist before can proceed there, though.

Artist.

Emubi will be working on increasing the variety of the Richard H-CGs by creating a new H-CG for the last stage of the late night sex storyline. After that he will be focusing on creating the assets from the new Full-Time Maid Job events.

Aaaaand that's the plan for the month!