Star Knightess Aura 0.28.0-prerelease-2 (Patreon)

ITCH | MEGA | ITCH-DELUXE | MEGA-DELUXE

tl;dr: RIP.

That's pretty much all you kind of need to know about the content of today's prerelease :'D. I worked on the remaining Underwater levels and managed to finish all of them. And since they are the main section of the alternate path to Winterfall and there should be a good reason to instead do the Disbanded Crew quest with all the money it requires. Sooo, prepare to die :'D

There are two new dungeon levels. Central Lake: Depths and Central Lake: Flooded Vault with 6 new boss encounters, one of them being a superboss fight like Whiteoak. While last week's dungeon Central Lake: Underwater was a dungeon with only the Underwater mechanic, the two new dungeons each merge it with another concept. Depths combines it with the MATK boost concept and Flooded Vault, well, with a vault map and the associated puzzle of getting the vault orbs. 

In the new dungeons you can also find a new formula for creating a new coating: Lightning Jam Coating :D Turn Jelly Jam (of which you can find a lot in the Underwater levels) into a coating that gives you a bunch of MATK and Thunder Resistance. That now finally gives an alternative to Rock Armor for eliminating the Thunder Weakness or to gain a resistance against Thunder when the two are combined.

Of course, as in all the other vault maps, there is also a new rune. This one can restore your Willpower by 100 every 21 days, giving you an alternative to Emerald Tea.

On the quality of life side, we have another menu overhaul, this time the shopping menu has received a major face lift. You can now see the restock conditions a lot easier and obtain all the useful meta information such as category and tags directly in the shop. This menu remake is also the last menu remake in the overhaul plan, if there are any other menus that you think are super important to add or overhaul, please let me know in the comments.

Another little improvement concerns the Underwater dungeons, I found it a bit annoying to backtrack whenever I ran out of Air, so there is now a new Underwater-only ability "Ascend" which you can find the Special category. Using it will transport you to the point from which you dove into the water. No more need to use Recall and then walk all the way back to the Diving Point!

There are also quite a few additional bugfixes by Trihan that require some RPGM customization, dealing with long-standing issues such as stacking of BLIND effects of different Flash Bombs or sometimes enemies going desync in sneaking puzzles.

The first soundtrack of our composer has also been integrated, hopefully giving the story climax moments a little bit more UMPF. 

Continuing on the freelancer side, the test with the mapper I had in the recruitment pipeline went well, and I am quite hopeful that we have one properly on board starting for the next release cycle. She has mostly made interior maps for the tests, so I don't know yet how good her dungeon mapping is, but we will find that out next month I guess.

And then, with project menu overhaul completed, I have now also started to move on to the next project: Project Trailer. Recruiting a trailer producer last weekend went successfully and we have already discussed various details. Here is a portfolio from the trailer producer.

Right now, the most important thing on our side is to record footage. If you would like to help out, feel free to drop footage in this shared folder

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/11lJ_Z_6nxBv3d4Lv3i9WSL05MB2H_nbd?usp=sharing

It also contains an image on how OBS needs to be configured for the recording. If you have questions, please come into the Trailer Commission thread on Discord.

Finally, on the personal side, I am currently preparing my move back into my hometown. This one has sadly not been going 100% as good as the progress on the prerelease. I still have a lot of furniture I need to dismantle or otherwise get rid of, because of various people who said they wanted to take them jumping off last minute. Also during the two years I have been working on SKA, I have seriously neglected cleaning quite a bit, and now I'm paying the price... Well, overall I don't think it's bad enough should throw us off schedule but it's definitely taking up more of my time resources than I had anticipated.

Also I'm really glad I write these posts every week. It reminds of all the stuff that has happened. When I started writing, I thought it was just going to be "made some dungeon levels, have fun dying" but then I go over the changelog and realize it's a bit more :'D

Alright, that's it for this week. Next week we will not be continuing with dungeons, although there is one cave dungeon remaining for the journey to Winterfall; as mentioned in the Project Plan we will be staying in Roya but switch to Verdeaux to some lewd content and the Magic Academy.

Changelog 0.28.0-prerelease-2 (10.02.2023)

• Added dungeon Central Lake: Depths 
• Added dungeon Central Lake: Flooded Vault
• Added Kraken + Sahaking boss fight 
• Added Lamia + Jellyfish boss fight 
• Added Hydra boss fight
• Added Mutated Rafflesia boss fight
• Added double Kappa boss fight 
• Added Siren boss fight 
• Added special skill "Ascend" to return to last Dive Point from an Underwater dungeon
• Added item Formula: Gamma
• Added item Lightning Jam Coating 
• Added item Castitas Rune 
• Integrated shop menu overhaul 
• Added Star Knightess Theme 
• Switched Arwin and Aura sides in Festival of Greed second and third stage battle
• Increase max killed bosses to 78

Balancing

• None

Bugfixes

• Fixed states with different durations stacking e.g. BLIND[5] and BLIND[10] instead of extending the existing effect
• Fixed Underwater tutorial message not displaying 
• Fixed Radiance secretely giving +4 MDEF 
• Fixed Phantom encounters in Underground Vault not affected by Radiance 
• Fixed corruption/lewdness/vice display for Festival of Greed companion battles 
• Fixed casing of resource name for shop plugin