0.5.0-prerelease-2 (Patreon)

0.5.0-prerelease-2 is upon us! You can always grab the latest prerelease at:

https://aura-dev.itch.io/star-knightess-aura-prerelease/patreon-access

I took a week off of work and was able to get, review, and implement a lot of feedback! Thanks to everybody who provided me with feedback! As you can see in the changelog below, the resulting changes are quite a few. So let me try to sort them out! For the full changelog just scroll to the bottom of this post.

New Content: There really isn't that much new content. There are a couple of new interactions in the Happiness Room (check out the tank and the top-left generator) but none of them trigger a scene. They are mostly "setup" mental changes, but the reason why I implemented them a bit ahead of schedule was to provide players with just a couple more ways to spend Corruption.

Other than that, and as I announced in this weeks project plan, the main focus is the introduction of the Refugee Camp. There is not yet much to discover, except for the introduction scene and a couple of jumping points. The theme of the map will be an "investigative city dungeon". There will be quite some tunnels as you investigate the camp.
To unlock the Refugee Camp, try heading up the stairs in the Barracks to the newly added guard room! Guard Captain Julian will be giving you some quests!
And as of the Refugee Camp itself, there is currently 1 NPC implemented that, as I show cased last week, can teach you a Slime Summoning spell.

Also, if you are starting a new game, check out the small building to the left of the Adventurer Guild! A book store can now be found in there! You can buy some books to read for a day and to increase Aura's stats. For those who would like a smoother corruption curve, there is also a lewd book included so that you can start Aura's journey into lewdness with something less explicit than letting her be sexually harrassed!
If, on the other hand, you are just about to finish a playthrough: In addition to the Victory Score, there is also now a Defeat Score which is calculated via your total lewdness. Furthermore, you can now also find the option to start NG+ with additional gold! And since there is now a Defeat Score, maximum lewd players can also get a nice bonus!

Typing all that out, there is apparantly more new content than I actually thought. Huh.

Balancing: There are quite a few balancing improvements. Scorpios are no longer crazy tough and can easily be defeated with a certain skill! Also if you bother to fight or sneak your way through them, you will no longer be rewarded with just a boring Energy Potion but instead with Stasis Bombs which can be very helpful in fighting tough Martial heavy bosses such as Minotaur or Bandit Leader! Also the number of very fast enemies has been drastically reduced since it didn't give the player the chance to properly perform ambushes, which shouldn't be the case. 

The Workshop is also a bit more rewarding! In general from now on, any "time spending physical activity" will increase Aura's Max HP by 1.
Right now that's just the Workshop, but in the future this will cover a lot more activities.

I am quite positive that with the balancing improvements, new corruption spending options, and new ways to spend your day ends, people who have been previously struggling should be able to enjoy the game a lot more!

Bugfixes: Here, I would just refer to the changelog. Lots and lots and lots of thanks to all the people who bothered to report bugs!!!

Next week: So for next week the project plan just says "Main Story". Basically I plan to continue working on the main quests in the Refugee Camp and I want to at least write a couple more scenes to continue the corruption path.

Right now, in order to create new corruption interactions, I first have to write some more common event scenes that show Aura in ther completely uncorrupted form. I am pretty sure that I can get the necessary scenes done next week. So maybe I will get to already creating some corruption scenes, but I might also end up doing them the week after that.

The bigger next corruption goal is to reach the point where Alicia can implant Aura with a greater interest for fashionable shoes!

Thanks to all the patrons for joining in and helping me make the game better!

Changelog

• Added upper barracks room
• Added stub map for Refugee Camp
• Added "Forest of Danger" quest
• Added "Impostor Refugees" quest stub
• Added "Stolen Food" quest stub
• Added an "!" marker above the adventurer guild quests when there are new quests available
• Added Slime Summoner tent in Refugee Camp
• Added Defeat Score based on obtained Lewdness
• Changed best score to be maximum of Victory and Defeat score
• Added NG+ option for more gold
• Added Statis Bomb
• Added interaction for increasing Happiness Tank Capacity
• Added interaction for configuring Socialization Happiness Source
• Added bookstore location in Trademond

Balancing

• Drastically reduced HP and AGI of Scorpio. Also reduced ATK but increased DEF
• Reduced number of very fast enemies in Northern Mines
• Blessed Water now takes 1 day to arrive to prevent a day 1 softlock
• Working at the Workshop now gives 1 Max HP
• Improved a chest in Northern Mines to give Stasis Bombs

Bugfixes

• Fixed incorrect unlock messages in clear room
• Fixed tile passability issue at Jacob's farm
• Fixed missing Lewdness and Corruption increase after John lewd scene
• Fixed infinite harvestable Ether spots
• Fixed killing Corrupt Guard triggering ENHANCED state of Bandit Leader
• Fixed incorrect label of interests room control crystal
• Fixed incorrect triggering of cut-scene during intro
• Fixed Aura seeing bandits in Forest of Runes shed if they are already killed
• Fixed info book in adventurer guild not having a visual marking
• NUMB state now only lasts for 1 turn and only disables Martials as the description of Thunderbolt I states