Liora's Price of Dignity 0.1.0-prerelease-1

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It's the first end fo the first development month for Liora! If I did everything correctly, I should have just finished updating all the deployment files so the 5€ tier now also has access to the whitebox prototype developed this month.

With most core mechanics functional since last week, I mostly focused on stubbing out some content. Emphasis here on "stub" where the focus is more on placing placeholder events and objects in order as a prepration for figuring out the details. In particular, yesterday I stubbed out the intro. So um should you decide to go through it don't be surprised to be met with this

around every corner. :'D There are also a couple of text blocks I already wrote out a bit but that's mostly so won't forget some lines I wanted to bring in and so I have some idea where I want to do exposition, rules explanation, etc.

I have also started to work out some principles of the level designs I want to apply to the areas - those with a good idea might immediately see the "hidden" path in this screenshot. The Castle area is still very rudimentary but the Forest one now has some proper encounters with the usual puzzles for figuring out back attacks, finding hidden caves, etc, so it's now kind of possible to try out the gameplay loop at least. Although the Area Guardian is still a bit cracked... :'D

The maps however are still using RTP as I have not yet committed to which assets I want to use as the base for the game. Aura was using FSM as a base, but in the past 4 years other artist have created interesting packs which I need to evaluate. For example Winlu Fantasy seems promising. Figuring out some of these aesthetic questions will be on my to-do list for the next Liora dev month.

For enemy progression I have implemented Skill Progression, which unlocks new enemy skills as the enemy areas level up. You will be able to see in the Compendium at which levels a new skill will be learned, although you won't know which until the area reaches said level.

Speaking of the Compendium, our assistant developer Trihan has done another round of behind-the-scenes refactorings to improve the technical basis. Those who saw the Compendium last week maybe saw it glitching out in various cases. The new refactoring makes it easier to extend and less quirky.

Thanks to the refactoring, I was also able to clean up the Contract Compendium a bit by sorting day-restricted clauses in sub categories. It makes it a lot easier to see which clauses will be affecting Liora / Edgar on a certain day.

Finally, we also have some minor additional expansions on the core gameplay mechanics. If you talk to the Inn Keeper or destroy a boss, you will see the variable "Town Prosperity" pop up. This corresponds roughly to the act of selling Star Metals in Star Knightess Aura. It's raised by defeating Area Bosses and then unlocks stuff like new items at the Alchemist, increasing the number of Ration restocks (oh right, the new apples! You can buy them at the Inn Keeper, although functionally more like Lumerian Bread) and also skill availability from teachers.

And on the Contract side I think I only expanded it with an additional negotiation category "Mining" where you can put a contract on Edgar forcing him to help out with mining Ether or Pyromantium - he really hates that kind of work so he will want something high-value in return. :)

Next week, we will be back on the Star Knightess Aura development, although I will be stealing a significant chunk of time to start the artist search for Liora. I will probably only do some light technical work on SKA alongside the artist search for Liora. And then in the week after that we will be back on the Maid Bad Ending content production, but more on the next month's plans in the next Project Plan post.

The next Liora development month will then be in June. My next goal would be to go from the current whitebox prototype to minimum viable product and make that the version 0.1.0 release. I want to try timing its release with putting up the game's public itch.io page and also the steam page. I currently would say that we need more 2 development months to make this step and basically have all the stubs that I added over the course of this month be filled out.

Also there will be a minor SKA bugfix patch release right after this, but other than that I would say, see you on Monday for the SKA Project Plan post for May!

EDIT: Fixed itch links.