Star Knightess Aura Internal Release 0.5.0 (Patreon)

Like every week, grab the latest prerelease at:

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

Note that this week's prerelease is the 0.5.0 release but 1 day earlier. The public 0.5.0 release will be coming out a couple hours later on saturday.

Rather than a larger theme, this week's work is kind of me just tying up a bunch of loose ends in order to move up the end of content. I hope I made it obvious enough to stumble upon it. For those who do: I apolize in advance! I'm sorry for the cliffhanger! Or rather roof-hanger! But with the kind of episodic release format I am afraid this will be happening more often! 

Aside from tying things together at the Refugee Camp there's a bit more side content sprinkled all across of Roya. Some new items, some new skills, a new quest you can do together with Charlotte, including a new interesting boss battle, and so on.

Also try approaching the Slime Summoner while your slime is in your party! I know some people don't enjoy tentacle contact, but I think an erotic fantasy story is just not an erotic fantasy story without some slime tentacle action! Therefore, you can now um... bond... with your slime! Lewd actions with your slime to give it a major power up! It's the first lewd action that has a minimum lewdness requirement and requires you to basically do all other lewd scenes in order to be unlocked! Though, having written it, it ended up being a bit more lewd than I thought. Naked Aura, her reaching a near delirious state, and being close to losing her virginity from a tentacle. In the future I will probably raise the lewdness requirement for this scene to 10 or so.

Also please don't die from shock when you see my badly drawn naked Aura sprite. Instead, just think of the nice future once we break through the 400€ artist goal, okay, please?

As I said, the rest is mostly an assortment of lots of minor fixes. I spent a good amount of time this week playtesting the game and basically just fixing a bunch of inconvienences and bugs. You will find icons being used in text boxes to better identify status effects, better default options when interacting with shop npcs, more consistency in my use of colored text highlights, and so on.

In terms of the corruption path, there is not much to report this week -- except for the overhaul of the Appearance Room! Thanks to your money support I was able to buy the tilesets I needed for doing some modern shopping areas! This will be highly important going forward in Aura's corruption journey, especially when I will continue working on Alicia's quest for creating the "Shoes" interest in Aura! But for now, I was able to use these resources to map out the Appearance room using appropriate metaphors for the planned brainwashing interactions!

If you are interested in the delta compared to last week, check out the changelog below. I will make another post on saturday, when the public 0.5.0 release is built, containing the consolidated changelog with respect to 0.4.2. It will leave out development details and contain all the changes of all 0.5.0-prerelease-x versions.

In the following week I will be working a bit more on the technical side. I will be working on some minor menu improvements such as hiding choice options with (???), filtering out skills that can never be used from the skill selection during combat, and so on. I also expect quite some bugreports and feedback for the public release and I hope to review and intergate some of that for next week.

0.5.0

• Added Liliana and Robert in Refugee Camp
• Added quest "Winged Pig Thief" at Adventurer Guild
• Added small forest area south of Jacob's house
• Implemented learning "Heat Up I" from Charlotte
• Detailed out "Appearance Room" and added introduction scene
• Finished quest "Stolen Food"
• Moved up end of content
• Added lewd scene "Bonding With Slime"
• Killing all goblins in "Forest of Runes" increases apple restock rate by 1
• Added skill "Offensive Stance I"
• Added new duel opponent in Refugee Camp
• Added droppable key for opening door to stolen food storage
• Improved icons and icon usage for status effects
• Added Marten stub NPC
• Added rescued refugee stub NPC
• Added [NOT IMPLEMENTED] messages where appropriate
• Changed "Shop" to be the default option at shop NPCs
• Improved spell descriptions at spell shop
• Added new harvestable item "Emerald Leaf"
• Improved markings for enterable areas on world map
• Added some minor new default dialogue effects to reduce reuse of existing effeects
• Improved consistency when color highlighting text

Balancing

• Finishing "Demonic Vaults" now restocks 3 "Blessed Water" on the next day
• Wind Mage Demon Worshipers now cast "Tailwind I" on battle start
• Reduced encounter number in Nothern Mines by 2
• Improved loot in Northern Mines Vault
• Decreased Lorentz ATK but increased DEF
• Increased required MP for learning "Summon Slime I" to 30

Bugfixes

• Fixed too small map size of classroom map
• Fixed Refugee Camp Caves being enabled at game start
• Minor editorial improvements and typo fixes
• Added some missing sound effects when picking up items
• Fixed incorrect quest ids being used in "Stolen Food" quest
• Fixed Aura sprite not disappearing sometimes when talking to Slime Summoner
• Fixed feeding slime setting exp to 5% of base price rather than increasing it
• Fixed some inconsistent default choices
• Fixed "Venom Scorpio" not disappearing after battle
• Fixed killing Whitefang sometimes not making wolves disappear