Star Knightess Aura 0.24.0-prerelease-3 (Patreon)

Like every week, grab the latest prerelease at:

ITCH | MEGA | ITCH-DELUXE

There is no public patch today due to large deviations between the public and the prerelease development branches stemming from the UI rework.

Last prerelease before we hit the next release! 

The week went slower as expected (a new project using technologies I know practially nothing about was dumped on my lap on my day time job and is kinda exhausting me; I think I feel asleep for 3hrs after work today...), and I didn't manage to get the start on the Belphegor boss fight as plant.

So we will need to see if I can get everything planned for next week done, if not I will take care of the outstanding items in the 0.24.1 build, kinda like with the Festival of Greed back then. However, while I didn't get the early start for this done and we might face some time troubles next week, for this week the todo list is looking nice and tidy.

The three main additions are a new side quest to complete the Nephlune Underground Dungeonc content, stabilizing the new UI, and the integration of the Hermit 2 CG.

The new side quest "The Lord of Phantoms" technically already got added in the first prerelease week, now it has been filled with content. Dive into a new domain and fight the boss fight for the Phantom enemies. Currently probably a bit difficult since for now there are no torches inside and the enhancement spell that will allow you trigger the light sensitive ability is not yet in the game. However, dealing with this boss yields a rewarding drop which also enables a new interaction with James.

On the UI side, there now also exists also the implementation of the Map HUD. We had some troubles to finding a good balance between intrusivenesss and showing helpful information, with the mockup being not quite there when I gave the thing a test drive. Luckily Yoroi and Trihan jumped in and simplified the whle thing. Quite some information go reduced, but I believe this compromise is still quite useful especially down the line when Mana draining effects such Legs of Sloth come into play. If you find the HUD too big or maybe prefer to have none at all, you can change that setting in the options.

Besides that,  we have a bunch of bug fixes, especially for Android builds. There are also various minor improvements such as the Message Box now reacting to Q/E instead of <-/-> which caused various players to accidentally trigger a message box command. Aesthetically there are also various minor improvements to letter spacings, font inconsistencies, stylings, apparantly very complicated to implement gradients over the silhoutte shadow (lmao), etc. Thanks to Trihan for pulling through with so many fixes!

Speaking about options, we also have a very experimental option called External Save Location. Sadly I didn't quite get to the point to actually make it useful, but basically, what it does is perform saves not into your save/ folder in the game but in a user directory. In this future (whenever I have time to work on this again...) this option will become also enabled on Android builds and finally allow physically interacting with save files. But it turns out that this thing is more complicated than I expected, so for now it's only enabled on PC and there you also need to be careful... Your saves in your local directory will still be shown but you won't able to load them... I will most likely hide this option for the 0.24.0 release since it's fairly incomplete.

And then finally we ave the new Hermit 2 CG integrated into the game! I have also briefed Emubi about Hermit 3 as you have already seen in the sketch post. It's currently looking good that the CG will be finished before the end of the month and make it into 0.24.0

Other than that, mostly just mOrE bUGfiXEs, but check it out for yourself in the usual changelog below.

Changelog 0.24.0-prerelease-3 (21.10.2022)

• Integrated Hermit 2 CGs 
• Created HUD for map scene 
• Added option to toggle between local and external save data 
• Finished quest "The Lord of Phantoms" 
• Added boss Phantom Lord 
• Added item Humanitas Rune 
• Scripted option to give Humanitas Rune to James 
• Addded item Corrupted Humanitas Rune 
• Addd Central Lake and Destroyed Mountainreach maps 
• Increased max killed bosses to 68 

Balancing

• None

Bugfixes

• Fix typos 
• Fixed duplication of state icons 
• Fixed glitchy behavior due to arrowkey and message command window interactions 
• Fixed touch input for loading autosave 
• Fixed mobile title menu command placements 
• Fixed letter spacings 
• Fixed Olaf Duel having no Gold payout 
• Fixed missing Paul to Paulina portrait change at the end of What Lurks Within The Mountains quest 
• Fixed compendium list offset bug 
• Fixed incorrect setting of George and Rose meetup recollection crystal 
• Fixed input interruption on message skip