Star Knightess Aura 0.27.0-prerelease-3 (Patreon)

ITCH | MEGA | ITCH-DELUXE | MEGA-DELUXE

Lots of things going on today, let's move on to the usual last item for today: The weekly prerelease! This week, I mostly spent pretty much all my time working on "The Disbanded Crew" quest. Since I had to also make the maps, I decided to scope down a little bit here and there, which in the end happened to give me quite more time than I expected. 

I managed to implement main part of the quest this week instead of just the stub as intended and even had some free time left to try out a technical I idea I had to tackle one of our most long-standing issues. But more about that later! First lets talk gambling, sailors, issues in getting it up and other problems our sailors in Nephlune are facing!

Talk to the Captain in the east of Nephlune to start the new quest and get overwhelmed by all the money that's asked of you. Of course, as usual there are ways to decrease the needed amount of money! Although, I haven't added any direct lewd scenes for this quest, as I am still not 100% sure which parts should be cheatable using lewds, the quest connects into many other parts of the Nephlune storyline, giving some more incentives to do take some of the existing lewd options.

Help the First Mate deal with his potency issues by bringing him some drugs or by giving his wife some lewd tips. For another sailor connected to the demon worshippers, the High-Ranking Magistrate who's into bunny suits can help you... if you have done his rituals of course ;)

The main attraction and thingy that occupied me this week is the chinchirorin/4-5-6 minigame in the Crying Seagull. It sadly didn't turn out as well as I thought in my head and feels a bit slow with all the clicking. Also the evented code is a complete clusterfuck :'D

You can either just pay off the gambling debt one of the sailors has accumulated, try to beat the game - although there is a cheater hiding among the players who might mess you up... On the other hand, if you accuse the right player at the right time, you can immediately clear the minigame without losing any money.

If you cannot pay up or lose too big, you will be given the option/are forced to strip. What is missing is a lewd option that once you have done the stripping allows you to pay off the rest of the debt with a lewd scene (possibly a sequence). But I am not yet sure how big I want to make this. For now the quest is self-contained and I might potentially even move this option post 1.0.

Then we have this very innocent looking screenshot. I finally had an idea on how to implement a generic way to crawl the rooms for available mental changes. It's a bit hacky and I haven't 100% tested everything but from my testing today it's working quite well. If you have a mental change available, the control crystal will show a yellowish color. If there are no mental changes available, it will show a green color. 

In the past I have avoided doing this, because all my implementations I came up with involved either lots of copy&paste of conditions, which means that if I forgot to change one condition it would be incorrect in the other place, potentially confusing everyone. The other one being state-based by tracking available mental changes using variables, but that would require doing save game migrations whenever I would make a major change. Both cases were not appealing to me as long as the game was in the 1.0 state where lots of things can change or get added all the tiem.

I believe the technique I used can also be expanded to placing some marker, like a sparkle effect, on events with available mental changes when you are in a room. I still need to think about this a bit though and would like to see that my approach to control the room crystals is working well enough or if there are more corner cases to  consider.

On the freelancer side, as you have seen, Absurdity finished the first version of the Roland events. I have given a first round of feedback, if you have anything you want to give Absurdity on the way before the next update of the events, your opportunity is now. 

I have also posted some more advertisements for the BGM Composer position and received a lot of applications that I am currently checking out. Fingers crossed that we finally get someone and they don't jump off :'D

With Terekov having jumped off as a mapper, I have also continued searching for a new mapper and found a candidate. Nothing is settled yet, they are currently on the way on creating one map as a test commission so we can find out if working together works out.

Lastly, Trihan has done a bunch of further minor improvements to the battle HUD based on the reported feedback.

Aaaaaand that's it for this week. One last dev week to go! The lack of a mapper is now creating some issues for me as we have neither the Magic Academy maps nor the Nephlune underwater dungeon map. I hope that the mapper candidate can at least supply the latter so I can work on it next week. 

I'm currently not sure how I will proceed next week. Either I will create some of the lacking maps myself, which is a bit sad as I am a very slow and time-inefficicent mapper. Or maybe I will just work on some more corruption scenes which would be more time-effcieint. The problem is that the corruption content has been pulling ahead quite a bit and we kind of need to progress in Roya instead.

Anyways, I will figure something out. Now, that's it for this week. For the complete changelog including the public patch, as usual, see below.

Changelog 0.27.0-prerelease-3 (20.01.2023)

• Added quest stub "The Disbanded Crew" 
• Added map Sailor Quarters 
• Added map First Mate's House 
• Implemented chinchirorin minigame
• Made back button for enemy/item/skill windows in battle more responsive when hovered
• Improved performance when having many items 
• Updated battle HUD visuals for better visibility
• Implemented visual marker for rooms with mental changes
• Increased max mental changes to 112

Balancing

• None

Bugfixes

• Fixed typos
• Fixed hex buttons for touch input/Android
• Fixed broken state display in menu 
• Fixed remaining Hermann 25% discount mention in text
• Reverted changes to state/buff turn duration
• Fixed Gossip About George recollection crystal not unlocking
• Fixed #fuckreading not increasing required reading progress
• Fix incorrect timing of activating homewrecking lewd flag
• Fix incorrect auto spell tutorial message check

EDIT: There is a save corrupting bug if you find out the cheater in the chinchirorin minigame where the objective will not be properly completed! I have deployed an update where this no longer happens.