Star Knightess Aura Release 0.47.0

ITCH | MEGA | ITCH-DELUXE | MEGA-DELUXE

We continue our march forward towards the 1.0 release! Not much remains and after this update, we managed to reduce the remaining workload by another big chunk. As usual, a reminder, that this is the summary post for the major update where I will summarize the new additions to 0.47.0 but only go into more detail on what's new from the week. For more detailed devlogs, checkout the prerelease devlog posts.

And also as usual, let's start off with the summary in numbers! We have two new H-CGs, 4 new dungeon areas, 1 new quest (not finished yet), 3 new skills, 2 new boss fights, and a ton of other minor stuff.  

In the past months we had largely pursued the completion of the Corruption ending, neglecting the dungeon crawling content for reaching the good end, and while we started picking up on that last month with the Slay the Demon quest, we have fully restarted the dungeon work this month!

The Clockwork Forest has been further expanded with two new areas (although the area as a whole is still largely under development), and also got its first boss fights, new loot to uncover, and generally bunch of whole new encounters. I did some reviewing of the development our asssiatnt developer Trihan has done at the beginning of this dev week, but have still to try the new stuff from this week and how the iteration has improved the content. Still might be a bit rought about now.

Buuuutttt!!! That's not all in the dungeon department, actually far from all!! Next up, we have a completely new dungeon that you can enter through the new Expert Rank Quest Judgement of Pride, in order to challenge the last and final Demon General. The first 5 of 7 floors of his dungeon are complete, well although I say floor, each floor is pretty short as it only contains 1 encounter and 1 choice, but still, we got to 5 / 7, so only two more to go next month until we can move to the final Demon General battle.

Then, we also have dungeon progress in the Final Dungeon - challenge Belphegor's level, filled with a couple of unique mechanics that will try to throw you out of the loop.

What's new week are among other things the gameplay-wise probably quite impactful new spells at Main Cathedral. Originally, I wanted to Gabriel's story to be over after his event at the Cathedral, but apparantly he does have one last boon to give to Aura in the form of teaching you th Light III spell - for free.

Wait... Aura-dev... For free......? There has to be some sort of trick to his...! Okay, you got me, Light III itself isn't that much mor epowerful than Light II in exchange for being free, although it does get a useful utility effect. What does further pump up the damage is also the new Radiance II skill (+2 POWER to Light) - which however costs 12000 Gold to learn. Yep. So that's where the gold cost went. The main advantage here is that this stays consistent with the characterization of Gabriel, while still requiring a serious gold investment to really go all in on the Light path. Light III is learnable pre-reverse summoning ritual and Radiance II afterwards. Splitting it up on trainers also had the benefit of spreading the new skills out a bit / not gatekeeping them for too long.

Besides these two spells, we also have Divine Guard II, but I don't think that is going to be too impactful as the skill is mostly designed as a niche skill. It increases the duration of Divine Guard by a whole 5 turns though, which could proof useful in some battles. Although, I haven't really experimented with this myself yet.

Then we also have a new minor addition to the Entertainment Den. I wanted to fill the place up a bit more this week, but my efforts for this general improvement work ended up being spread over the entirety of the game. :'D Anyways, for the Entertainment Den, we now have two additional Soul-Contracts that you can choose as alternative to the Prostiution Contract. In order to have them enabled, you need to have Hermann make you the offer to support him in his election or to marry him, but refuse him. You can then bet accepting his offer (and paying 50% of the reward to the Entertainment Mage). Note that this is also possible without Vice, meaning provided you have reached this point of the game without unlocking Vice but would like to progress through the Hermann route, you can use this event to do so.

As mentioned before, besides the Entertainment Den, there are a couple of minor just general items I have expanded upon, mostly just cosmetic to make the cities more lively. New NPCs, especially wandering ones in Nephlune should make the city a bit less static looking. I spent probably too much time on the quite complex NPC routine of a wandering NPC townswoman. :'''D But I also need to have some fun with this stuff from time to time, so it has to be. :'D

Moving on from the minor polish items, I have also started this week to work on one of our last bigger technical items: When you open the Options menu you will now find a new option called "World Fog". It's supposed to cover the yet-unlocked world in fog and make in inaccessible, however, in the day I spent on this I couldn't get the fog nicely looking so.... Instead I decided to render the mask for it. :'D It's a very boring black, but until I revisit this item to make the actual effect look nicer, it will be staying an option in the menu.

In the future, it will be turned on by default though. I'm also scared of having made a mistake in linking the unlock of an area to an incorrect condition, so deploying it like this seems safer to me. I hope that in the long-term it can reduce the confusion of the early game by getting lost trying to check out areas that haven't been unlocked yet.

Finally, to close things out, we also have a couple of improvements on the UI/UX side, the most helpful one probably being the Next Skill information for companions, now showing you at which level they will gain a new skill. Other changes include a separate background for choices locked by Curse of Greed to provide a visual indicator as to why the choice is locked and then we have a new marker in the Formation menu to show which characters won't be used in battle. When having a party of size > 4, this should make it easy to see which member is the last one that is actively deployed in battle.

Aaaaaand that's it! There's a lot of gameplay stuff, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are some breaking bugs that need a hotfix. x_X Let's cross our fingerss and hope that's not the case and I hope otherwise everyone has fun with the update!

Changelog 0.47.0 (27.09.2024)

• Added Lady Charlotte 2 H-CGs

• Added Lady Charlotte 3 H-CGs

• Added Geroge and Veronica 4 H-CGs

• Added George and Veronica 8 Part 1 H-CGs

• Added map Richard Domain Level 3

• Implemented quest stub "Jugement of Pride"

• Judgement of Pride: Implemented investigate murder victim house objective

• Judgement of Pride: Implemented discover entry to Lucifer Domain objective

• Judgement of Pride: Implemented First Judgement

• Judgement of Pride: Added enemy Vainglory

• Judgement of Pride: Added enemy Arrogance

• Judgement of Pride: Added enemy Vindictiveness

• Judgement of Pride: Implement Second Judgement

• Judgement of Pride: Implement Third Judgement

• Judgement of Pride: Implement Fourth Judgement

• Judgement of Pride: Implement Fifth Judgement

• Removed Charlotte from Roya events while caught on the trolley tracks

• Clockwork Forest: Added map Hidden Cave

• Clockwork Forest: Added additional enemies

• Clockwork Forest: Implemented western forest

• Clockwork Forest: Implemented selectable protocol dialogue for clockwork forest enemies

• Clockwork Forest: Implemented option to re-challenge Shirleen for her skill after losing

• Clockwork Forest: Implemented enemy detection range bonus

• Clockwork Forest: Gave Scout Scanner Trait and implement Scanner Trait

• Clockwork Forest: Implemented Eastern Clockwork Forest bridge

• Clockwork Forest: Implemented rope points in eastern Clockwork Forest

• Added skill Light III

• Added skill Radiance II

• Added skill Divine Guard II

• Added artifact Mana Shield

• Added boss Unicorn

• Added boss Ether Golem

• Implemented Entertainment Den Contract: Hermann Favors

• Moved base materials to rope merchant and give Nephlune merchant other materials for restock

• Added explanation aura for giving info about ground color and crystal color in recollection rooms

• Added marker for Northern Mines Vitality Potion in Hidden Room

• Added Vice option to steal Pyromantium from crates in Northern Mines

• Added Rainbow Scale as possible item for passing maid in Arwin's Mansion

• Created first implmentation of world fog plugin

• Iterated main menu plugin

• Added flags to select skill plugin for showing skill costs and allowing cancel

• Added visual indicators for Curse of Greed in choice lists

• Added next skill display to status menu

• Expanded Nephlune with wandering NPCs

• Added side doors asset into Winterfall Inn

• Added parameter into save menu plugin for increased number of saves in playtest mode

• Improved error analytics to send game state information in addition to stacktrace

• Expanded New Game Plus Carry Over event with Difficulty meta info

• Created meta plugin to track deploy target in analytics

• Increase max killed bosses to 119

Balancing

• Iterated Unicorn encounter

• Improved Web Bombs to Paralyze target for 1 turn if target is Flying to deny enemy turn if outsped

• Reduced gold cost factor of blessing an item from the White Priestess from x5 to x4

• Increased HP harvesting cost for base materials except rope to 10

• Streamlined enemy logic in Northern Mines Low Demon Domain by making all battles escapable and giving Low-Demon a Detector tag

Bugfixes

• Fixed typos

• Reworked Shadow battle

• Fixed Shadow battle crashing if tmp switch is on when it starts

• Fixed error reporting in analytics not triggering

• Fixed crash at Rosemond mansion

• Fixed being able to enter Murder Victim House before starting judgement of Pride

• Fixed Charlotte disappearing from Adventurer Guild pre-Judgement of Pride first Judgement

• Fixed Unicorn Horn description not listing Light III

• Fixed Fast Items Stance consuming multiple coatings

• Fixed presenting Marie Ledger stopping trial from progressing

• Fixed off by one in Hermann check for Charlotte Marriage

• Fixed being able to learn Rampage III after already knowing it

• Fixed broken removal of rank 1 spell version when receiving reward from Slay the Demon

• Fixed off-by-one modulo counting in Trademond restock

• Fixed menu crashing if Aura is present in a non-leader index

• Fixed cancel button on skill select window being underneath help window

• Fixed difficulty option not playing confirm or buzzer sounds

• Fixed Arwin proxy battle not progressing if beating him when he picked his monster first

• Fixed lingering standing image after Bandit Blowjob if Adult Content OFF

• Fixed undefined menu images when party leader is Aura

• Fixed lingering Aura standing image after ruined lab dialogue

• Fixed bush tile in hidden cave causing passability issues

• Fixed incorrect facing directions on hidden cave jump points

• Fixed passability issue with hidden cave clockwork pillar

• Fixed western forest well rope not already being present in hidden cave

• Fixed incorrect rewards in hidden cave

• Fixed hidden cave encounter pathing allowing for trivial avoidance

• Fixed Hedgehog not using Defensive Stance on first turn

• Fixed Quills having skill type Special instead of Martial

Stats

• Estimated play time: 36-51h

• Word Count: 837k

• Lewd Scenes: 131

• Real World Scenes: 325

• Epilogue Scenes: 16

• CGs: 50 (+1 Bonus CG)