aura-dev

Star Knightess Aura Release 0.48.0

Added 2024-10-25 18:21:10 +0000 UTC

The train of progress marches on! On our path to 1.0 and only a couple months left, I have been steadily progressing towards closing out the remaining milestones; this month the main ones were

Finishing the final Demon General
Handling the aftermath of killing Roland
Closing out lewd skills / lewd books / the remaining interaction point in the mental world.

As usual, for more details, I recommend reading the weekly devlog posts. In this post, I will summarize the important advancements and go into detail regarding the new additions from this week. To start off, let's look at the usual summary in numbers! We have: 1 new H-CG, 2 new boss fights, one new final dungeon area, 2 new lewd skills (inlcuding all 3 ranks), 1 new Vice option, and lots of "small stuff".

As we have kind of entered the polish phase, it's getting more and more complicated to put things into just a couple of numbers, as progress is mostly done on various small fronts. Besides the "bigger" additions we have lots of minor improvements and additions such as two new pixel art chars from our pixel artist to better distinguish some minibosses in the overworld, various new NPCs with complex and reactive routines wandering Nephlune & Verdeaux, and lots of minor technical advancements.

Let's work out way through the changes!

As mentioned above, the main addition this update is the completion of the quest "Judgement of Pride". Deal with the last Judgement and challenge the final Demon General to battle! The big deal with this battle: You have a second chance to kill Roland. And this time around it doesn't require you to go through all the Popularity reducing effects (just reducing his popularity a bit more than increasing it is sufficient). Although it still make the battle a lot easier. In particular this meant updating all the Roland quests so that they could deal with the possibility of his death, which was also 99% possible. There is just one part in Poisoned Elixirs where a main option to progress the quests disappears, although the backup is luckily in-tact.

Moving on! New Lewd books to learn new lewd skills! Two of them in the Verdeaux Erotic Bookstore and the other two can be found at the Maid Academy (Also providing more Maid Score!) One of the new lewd skills will also be learned by Paulina as her corruption progresses. The addition of the new lewd skills also means more Rank III lewd skills, giving more leeway in Chapter 3 who needed to get rid of some Corruption through skill sealing. Should the Maid Academy be already sealed off because you completed Mansion of Lust by killing Asmodeus, you can still learn this skill through the new mental change in the Chapter 3 Control Room, the Lewd Skill Shrine. You still need to pass the Lewd Knowledge / Exhibitionism checks for that one though!

Then, also on the corrupt side, the Entertainment Den has also been completed through the last set of NPC additions, most importantly one offering a new opportunity to invest into slavery, but at a much higher efficiency than the Congregation branch in Nephlune - and higher Vice of course.

This week, I progressed further on the final dungeon, working my way through Richard's Domain. With the fourth level in, we are now half-way through! The Final Battle is closing in! As you can see from the screenshot, we will be revisiting the concept of an Underwater dungeon in this domain, but this time combined with the traits of a demonic domain. You won't have to learn Air Bubble for the dungeon, but not doing so will definitely put you up to some challenges.

Yesterday I mostly spent on iterating Clockwork Forest's Eastern area, and I believe minus some more balancing passes that one should be in a nicely playable state now. When you kill Ether Golem, you now also (among other materials) obtain the new material "Power Core" which gives a huge buff to MP OR has the secondary ability to recharge runes. An effect didn't have yet and for which I am curious what kind of applications players will come up with. Trihan has also made some more progress on the Western area, although as usual kind of last-minute so I haven't had the opportunity to check them out in more detail yet. :'D

And then, as mentioned, we have mostly a lot of minor changes. I finally replaced the stub credits and implemented an automated way to parse our CREDITS.json, expanded the NPCs in the cities, and focusing more on this week, also performed quite a few performance improvements. Since there isn't really one big major bottleneck to optimize, it's quite a grind, but I believe tackling the largest outliers from my performance analysis is likely to be worth it for older laptops and mobile phones. Overall eliminated the about ~10% contribution to CPU usage, not a lot but perhaps what some on the lower hardware spectrum needed.

I also improved my automatic build processes which have been mostly chugging along the past years, but recently the stability had deteriorated, leading to various instances of them deploying garbage (which some users then saw as 22 Byte sized downloads). The builds should be more stable now, I think the out of date mega dependencies were at fault. In case the deploy produces garbage, I have also improved the process to instead fail the build and not upload it (instead sending me a mail that the build pipeline failed so I can react faster).

Finally, we have some minor visual improvements as also mentioned at the begining of the post. The Ogre King and Mature Spider Queen now have dedicated overworld assets so they don't look like their early Chapter 1 counterparts on there.

Oh, right! And then, to close out the post, a final word to the balancing improvements. Slay the Demon has become a bit easier through 2 extra free starting perks and a reduced Class Point cost for acquiring skills. Also the skills Bomb Proficiency I/II had their power doubled to improve the capability of item focused builds. For the other balancing touches, I refer to the previous devlog posts for my reasoning behind them.

Aaaaaand I think that covers most of it?! Like mentioned, a lot of progress on different fronts, closing out our remaining items so we can make the final step to version 1.0. The goal of next month: Finish the Demon General levels of Richard's Domain!

Changelog 0.48.0 (25.10.2024)

Added Veronica and George 8 Part 2 H-CGs
Addded map Richard Domain 4 Envy
Iterated Clockwork Forest Eastern Area
Iterated Clockwork Forest west
Judgement of Pride: Implemented Sixth Judgement
Added boss Lucifer
Added boss Thunder Golem
Added skill Seductive Dance I
Added skill Seductive Dance II
Added skill Seductive Dance III
Added skill Seductive Command I
Added skill Seductive Command II
Added skill Seductive Command III
Added lewd book "Skillbook: Seductive Command I"
Added lewd book "Skillbook: Seductive Command II"
Added Slash III to John at level 14
Added option to learn Seductive Dance I at Maid Academy
Added option to learn Seductive Dance II at Maid Academy
Gave Paulina Seductive Dance I at Maid Score 70 and Seductive Dance II at Maid Score 90, moving Seductive Stance II to 80
Added material Power Core
Gave Ether Golem Security Chip, Power Core and Etherplating drops
Added emerald tea reward to Money Domain refugee if player paid debts of the other two competitors
Nothing but the truth: Updated quest in case Roland dies before the quest becomes or is active
Judgement of Pride: Implemented objective quest hand-in
Poisoned Elixirs: Updated quest in case Roland dies before the quest becomes or is active
Rampaging Golem: Updated quest in case Roland dies before the quest becomes or is active
Luck is also a Skill: Updated Quest with variations for Roland death
Gave one of the fishers in Nephlune an npc routine
Expanded Order of the Knights Prison
Added Order of the Knights Vice Chest
Implemented credits plugin
Added Goblin Shaman Compendium Unlock by Albrecht
Added compendium partial info unlock for Mutated Hydrangea and Mature Spiders
Added nobleman wandering NPC to Verdeaux
Implemented mental changes for Chapter 3 Lewd Skill Shrine
Implemented Entertainment Den Slavery section
Added wandering NPCs with complex routines to Verdeaux
Added post-reverse summoning ritual variation for Verdeaux nobleman
Added custom pixel art for Dark Star Knightess TV/SV/TVD
Added custom pixel art chars for Ogre King and Mature Spider Queen
Added improved key unlocking pixel art for doors needing keys and remove no longer necessary door keys
Added improved key unlocking visual for chests
Refactored enemy Shadowcloak to be gained on combat start like the player instead of Turn 0
Refactored hard-coded Rune usage logic to generic tag-based logic
Improved performance of Event Shift plugin
Improved performance of artifact plugin
Improved performance Turn Count Lables
Improved performance by CAE_MapEvents plugin by adding flags to deactivate unused features
Increased max killed bosses to 121

Balancing

Updated Seductive Stance III to affect both enemies and allies
Added Heartbreak state giving CHARM resist and being gained upon CHARM removal until end of battle
Reduced learning requirements Overcharge I to 30 ATK, 120 MP, Overcharge II to 50 ATK 200 MP, Thunderbolt II 60 MATK, 125 MP, Thunderbolt III 80 MATK, 250 MP
Reduced HP cost progression on Assassinate II and III
Slay the Demon: Raised number of free starter perks in Slay the Demon from 1 to 3
Slay the Demon: Decreased Class Point cost per Skill from 5 to 4
Increased Bomb damage increase from Bomb Proficiency I/II to 50%/100% #6688

Bugfixes

Fixed typos
Fixed remains of soldiers after Roland battle in Goddess Domain blocking path
Fixed Luck Rate affecting probability of 100% State Application Effects on Normal Attacks
Rampaging Golem: Fixed Tell Truth option looping
Rampaging Golem: Fix mixups in state variables for end choices
Fixed phantom Fleura and repeated choice after she wins corruption mission duel
Fixed Fire Mage in Pasciel causing crash
Fixed weather fog not resetting on load
Fixed incorrect Magic Academy book variable post-reverse summoning ritual
Fixed graphical glitch on mental day end in identity room unlock
Fixed secret door in Laval mansion overlapping fireplace
Fixed Reading Proficiency not affecting Tales of the Artificer
Fixed A Child Needed not always giving Shadow support
Fixed softlock case in Twin Adventurers corruption mission
Fixed merchant not appearing in underground city when teleporting into it
Fixed Demon-cracy flow issues when adult content is set to OFF
Fixed Elizabeth boyfriend H-scene showing with adult content set to OFF
Fixed apple merchant only restocking 1 apple a day on story difficulty
Fixed Desmond incorrectly saying player defeated forest bandit leader even when they did not
Fixed nonexistent objective trying to close in Something Is Fishy if Roland is dead
Fixed Eyes of Greed not applying to pure recruitment option on Demon-cracy merchant
Fixed vice choice in Poison Swamp still being offered before vice is unlocked
Fixed missing system messages when enhancing Unicorn Horn
Fixed Shadow investment option not increasing vice or corruption
Fixed shadow mismatch on rock in Winterfall
Fixed patrol desync in Clockwork Forest hidden cave