Star Knightess Aura 0.17.0-prerelease-2 (Patreon)

Like every week, grab the latest prerelease at:

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

And it's already halfway into March. How can time keep passing on so fast?! Anyways, this leads us to the second prerelease of this month. There isn't too much new story content this week, as I was mostly working down on some backlog items. Nevertheless, I managed to get a bit faster than expected through my planned items and also started tackling some of the corruption content originally planned for next week. You corrupt the first Temperance Orb as of this release, and watch 2 new corruption scenes.

They basically kick off the lewd story line in the real world, but since it's just two events, we are still at the very beginning here.

Most of the changes however can be found in the Isekai. You can enter the new Congergation building in Nephlune and meet two characters who appeared in Arwin's domain. If you have progressed to the second chapter, they will have an economically, although morally questionable, suggestion to make some easy money. Speaking about investments, after way too much time, Edwin's workshop is now finally useable. If you invested money into him, you will be able to use some additional services that should make integrating base materials such as Ether or Pyromantium into Aura's armor more lucrative.

There is also just a little of main quest progress in the Eternal Day Of Sloth quest line. Again, it's not much and mostly just the content I had already planned for the last release. Enter Mountainreach, get greeted by two of its inhabitants, and have a first exerience with the local myserious phenomenom.

Finally, we have a couple of minor refinements. If you went to the Festival with Edwin, you can now still ask the Young Merchant to go out for dinner even after the Festival. He won't offer Aura the option to infiltrate the party with him, but the monetary reward remains. Likewise, you will no longer lock yourself out from doing Kissing John if you haven't done Groped Breasts By John before. 

Also there was some technical work to have some more alive NPC behavior. I don't like the vanilla RPGMaker way of having doing townspeople using static move routes because they tend to block the player. After some investigating, I have come to a bit of a better solution employing the RPGMaker pathfinding with some custom performance improvement perks. I'm not exactly happy with the result, but if you enter Trademond you will see some new NPCs with some more complex wandering schedule. I would actually like to eventually have them also enter taverns and stuff because I like having some more alive and non-static environemnts. I was able to nail down the technical requirements for progressing here, but I don't want to spend too much time on this fancy non-content stuff so I will make a cut for now. Though, this is still kind of a 1.0 feature for me since it affects my planning on how much space the maps need.

Alright, that's pretty much it! As usual, the complete changelog including the public patch and this week's prerelease content can be found below. 

Changelog 0.17.0-prerelease-2 (11.03.2022)

• Added mental change "Remove Temperance Orb 1"
• Added mental change "Insert Hedonism Orb 1"
• Added scene "Aura Having Lewd Thoughts 1"
• Added scene "Aura Having Lewd Thoughts 2"
• Added Congregation Branch in Nephlune
• Added slave trader with investment option in Nephlune Congregation
• Integrated Mountainreach and Mountainreach Church maps
• Scripted Mountainreach entrance event
• Created Elaine end of content npc in mountainreach church
• Eliminated dependency of needing to do Breast Groping By John before Kissing John 
• Enabled Dinner With Young Merchant 2 post-Festival
• Added Edwin workshop in Riverflow
• Added minor roaming deco NPCs to Trademond
• Added item "Etherplate"
• Added item "Pyroplate"
• Added item "Emeraldplate"
• Added item "Maleficumplate"
• Increased max mental changes to 62

Balancing

• Reduced minimum lewdness for Bunny costume in Nephlune Bar to 5
• Removed -10 corruption limit and replaced it with corruption gain on every day for Hard Mode

Bugfixes

• Fixed typos
• Fixed mapping issues
• Fixed incorrect recollection unlock check for Going To Salon 3
• Fixed Tactical Advantage remaining for an extra turn when gained from an auto-skill