0.12.0-prerelease-3 (Patreon)

Like every week, grab the latest prerelease at:

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

Another week, another prerelease. I am currently building up the foundations for the next chapter and that mostly means introducing new skills and NPCs that will see useful stuff.
Some of these will be accessible before the Festival, and give you new options for dealing with the Arwin and Mammon fight, while others will become available later.

(You won't be able to get the skill early, this screenshot was just from a test run). One skill "Shadowcloak" will give you the option to make ambushes easier and deadlier. The second spell "Bless Item" will allow you to strenghten items. Especially, you will be able to turn Bombs into Blessed Bombs which deal a decent amount of LIGHT damage. This should provide some more tactical options for demon fights.

I would like to try and avoid introducing these kind of complexity increasing skills and options in chapter 1, but since the skills are taught by the priestesses in the church, I felt like the White Priestess should also have the option to bless items for you before you can learn the skill post-Festival. Her prices are a bit absurd though. There's also as a third spell "Light II" that you can now learn post-Festival, but it doesn't have as game changing effects as the other two spells. The only issue is that if you killed all enemies befor engaing in the Festial, there won't be much to use these skills on for this update.

We also have a new side quest "Save The Crops" that you can start by talking to the farmer girl in Riverflow. It will unlock the Formula Peddler who will be able to sell new formulas to upgrade the Alchemist. The Formula Peddler himself is not implemented yet, but his interactions for the quest are. The quest was written by our new writing assistant freelancer midnightREN. You will need to get an expensive formula from him, and we know the drill, is given the option to bypass the price in exchange of a lewd favore. In this case a lewd dance. The scene also features some very slight Luciela possession content.

I am still establishing my workflows with him. And editing his work and adding it to the game, I ended up editing way more than I initially expected. I did a review of his script and gave him a lot of points to work out, but it seems I overlooked quite a few things that I then had to deal with in-development. He's also just getting to know the game and the character voices. Though, I think post-editing, it should not be too distinguisable from my own writing. I also ended up adding a couple of variations to his scenes depending on the status of Aura's opinion on books (the Formula Peddler loves them), and when you hand in the quest and have the Vice stat unlocked, you will be given the option to be not so good-hearted to those poor farmers. 

Overall I would say that having someone prepare the first script version with 4k words was a huge time saver though. I expect that under normal circumstances I would have taken the whole week to design + write + script the quest.
As a small note, it's possible that you might not be able to complete the quest due to the requirement of procuring a material that is as of now finite and you may have already used it. This will most likely change next month.

Moving on to the next topic: Talking about lewd scenes, you will find one final additional final lewd scene in the Money Domain! Talk to the maid in the west to start it. This should make the whole ordeal quite a bit easier for corrupt runs while maintaining difficulty for purity playthroughs. Also, having in total a +2 on the lewd number count is nice.

We also just hit the funding goal for a dedicated 100€ budget for the freelance writer. Up till now, Mapper and Writer had to share a common 200€ budget. Now I no longer need to turn the mapping budget to 0 to finance the writer. :D
This will be important next month, where I want to keep going with the writer commission while adding some new major maps. Including the eastern map of the forest of runes.

For next week, I will be continuing this week's activities of side content creation, but focused a bit more on the refugee camp and the rescued refugees. I hope next week I can also integrate the CGs for the handjob scene and get to setup (probably won't get to write it) another lewd scene in Riverflow, involving an artist who will be very eager to draw Aura. (Preferable naked of of course.)

Man, I usually just want to quickly summarize the developments of the week, but these posts always tend to turn out longer than I expect and I bet I ended up forgetting something. 

The list of all changes this week (patch+prerelease) can be found below.

Changelog 0.12.0-prerelease-3 (15.10.2021)

• Added lewd scene "Feeding Slave Owner Mouth To Mouth"
• Added lewd scene "Lewd Dance For Formula Peddler"
• Added quest "Save The Crops"
• Added quest stub "Eternal Day Of Sloth"
• Added skill "Shadowcloak I"
• Added skill "Bless Item I" 
• Added skill "Light II" 
• Added item "Anti-Magic Coating"
• Integrated maps for "Formula Peddler"
• Added option to learn Shadowcloak I from Black Priestess
• Added options to learn Light II and Bless Item I from White Priestess
• Added option Bless Item at White Priestess
• Increased Max Lewdness to 28
• Added migration rule to unlock seen real world events in recollection room for old saves

Balancing

• No changes.

Bugfixes

• Fixed typos and editorial improvements 
• Fixed "Evening With Rose 3" triggering before "Evening With Rose 2"
• Fixed passabilities issues in Northern Mines and Northern Forest Of Runes
• Fixed being able to pay Slime Summoner with any Ether number > 0
• Fixed various incorrect scene setups in RL recollection room