Star Knightess Aura 0.24.0-prerelease-1 (Patreon)

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Alright, busy day today. Let's get to the last post: The prerelease! Most stuff I have already published in the internal release, however, there are a bunch of things waiting in the new prerelease. 

Most importantly, after like 10 months :'D we finally have the first round of UI overhauls integrated into to the main development line. There is still at minimum the map HUD menu and the battle menu remaining but the majority has been reworked. Maybe I will also have another look at having other menus such as the Shop menu reworked or introduce custom menus to replace the evented menus such as Alchemist crafting. Though, we have already sunk quite some money into this... :'D

Anyways! It's here, the one thing I would like to point out is that there is a certain minor inconsistency between Charlottes default RPGM standing image artwork and the description in the story. Since I hate conflicting art styles, I plan to have these standing images replaced at some point anyways (although I actually like the official RPGM artwork for these characters.)

I have been test playing the new UI quite a bit this and last week and have been quite happy. Lots of previously difficult to view or even invisible information is now easily accessible, the save slot count went from 20 to 120, the hotkeys are remappable, there's a master volume, additional categories for items and skills to give us the ability to scale information load up into the end game, you can see the value of an item, mobile users finally have their message box skip button, you can save during cutscenes, there's a backlog if you accidentally skipped over something, and and and. And that's just talking functionality. You have probably all seen the mockups, of course everything also looks a lot better. In addition to the new UI itself, I have also generally improved some textual elements. For example you can now find various tags at the skills giving you some insight into the damage formula.

Please give the new UI a try and drop some feedback! I hope that it makes everyone's life easier, reduces confusing and generally vastly improves the user experience. In the Discord you can also reach the UI designer Yoroikami and the two coders Trihan and coffeechan if you want to give them feedback in person.

Moving on to new game content: In the mental world you can find a new mental change in the Instincts room that modifies Aura's behavior once she starts a new day at 0 willpower. If there is a lewd action that can make her cum and is in pink available to her, she will then take that over just masturbating. This mental change is probably not interesting for those who trigger all lewd scenes as soon as possible, but I believe it gives quite some merit for those trying to role play as it allows Alicia to bypass Aura trying to getting pinked into content by staying away from other people at low willpower. Also, even if you do lewd content early it does allow you to prevent the full day from being occupied by choosing a lewd action that doesn't end the day.

Other than that, we have a new quest stub in the Nephlune Adventurer guild, you currently cannot do anything with it though :'D This is just preparing for one of the future development weeks. 

Balance-wise, we have a fairly big update to the Hard mode:  I was not happy with the +1 Corruption every day rule. Back then I rebalanced the game to allow for Womb of Lust to be enabled on all difficulties and then as a replacement added this rule to the Hard Mode. However, I believe that it makes Soul Break to too much of a threat. The problem is that the time delays between events in Chapter 1 are balanced for the 0.5 Corruption per day. Since most mental changes also cost only 1 Corruption, you end up with gaining quite a bit even if you are triggering mental changes as often as you can. I have been looking for a replacement for the rule and I think I finally found something I am happy with: The 1 Corruption gain on every day rule for Hard mode has been removed and replaced with Curse effects x2. This means the effectiveness of the Cursed I/II/III states has been doubled, Womb of Lust drains Willpower at 10 WP per day, Eyes of Greed drains 6% of the price of an item as WP, and so on. I have done some test playing and believe that rather than threatening Soul Break, this new configuration is better for making it difficult to keep Aura pure due to the massive curse effects while reducing the risk of running into a Soul Break ending despite not even abusing the Remove Collar action.

And finally, we have a little goodie for the Deluxe Build. I was not sure if I should include it, but I have come to the decision that for the cheating console, the rule should be "if you can easily cheat it, there should be no argument against adding it to the cheat console". And since it's fairly straight forward to cheat a full H-CG unlock using a save editor, I decided to add a convenient way for doing this unlock also to the cheat console.

Aaaand that's it. Next week is corruption week, so as announced in the project plan post, I will be creating a couple of corruption scenes and a new lewd scene. The complete changelog including the changes of this prerelease and today's patch release as usual below.

Changelog 0.24.0-prerelease-1 (07.10.2022)

• Integrate first round of UI overhaul 
• Add mental change "Masturbation Is Not Enough."
• Increased max mental changes to 93
• Created quest stub for "The Lord Of Phantoms"
• Added H-CG unlock option for Deluxe Build
• Added skill "Recall"
• Addded costume tag to Hermann Election Event
• Changed Patentia Rune to give MATK boost instead of teleport

Balancing

• Replaced Corruption increase every day with Doubled Curse effects for Hard Mode
• Increased MATK curve of Thunder Slime
• Set Addicted I/II/III cooldowns to 12/10/8

Bugfixes

• Fixed passability bugs in northern Trademond
• Fixed Blessed Water corpse missing in Draknor Fortress 5 Alt
• Fixed Sathanas defeat not giving stats
• Fixed incorrect reading speed calc for Mana book
• Fixed curse resist remaining after defeating sathanas
• Fixed missing trust check for going to celebration when asking Anna for a second time
• Fixed broken Dungeon_B tileset
• Fixed issues crashes from high damage autoskills
• Fixed rope-vine tile mixup in Northern Forest of Runes, Lower Cave
• Fixed Darkness In The Woods highlight still being on intermediate request book
• Fixed incorrect icons for Furorem skills
• Fixed missing location locks on burned villages