Star Knightess Aura 0.32.0-prerelease-2 (Patreon)

ITCH | MEGA | ITCH-DELUXE | MEGA-DELUXE

Mostly a technical and conceptual week this time around to setup the Winterfall City dungeon and with it the effects and concepts for the local curses. It's quite a challenge to make the dungeon so it's still a major challenge if you managed to clear the Underwater dungeon (meaning you are quite strong) but also making it manageable for those who passed the money check and took the boat. And then there is also the challenge that the loot design needs to also help progress against Belphegor for those have not managed to yet beat him.

But I believe the current level and enemy design should work out for everyone to be able to progress, with lots of sneaky routes, a good positional advantage when coming from the boat, the ability to leverage lewd skills and similar against a heavy human+male troop composition, and nearly all female enemies having an exploitable weakness against a certain item.

On the curse side, I implemented the gluttony curse Stomach of Gluttony and the related encounters have some crazy concepts for spreading the curse. :'D

I had some crazy ideas and figuring out how to simplify them to a good level and how to deal with various edge cases was one of the major fights of the weak. I'm still not 100% happy with everything but overall I am quite happy that quite a lot of concepts made it into the implementation. For the spread of the curse, certain enemies in Winterfall will drop Cursed Gourmet Meat, which gives off a smell so tempting it costs willpower to get rid off. You can also technically give it to your slime, but it will then take a bunch of damage in exchange, so you can only get rid of the cursed meat at monst once per day like that.

Anyways, said anyways that drop the meat also have a skill for causing a Hunger state which forces you to to consume an item or receive EXHAUSTED for the rest of the day. You can technically easily fulfill this by carrying around some apples, but things become more interesting if you didn't get rid of the dropped Cursed Gourmet Meat! Should you have a Cursed Gourmet Meat in your possession at the time of suffering the state, you are forced to eat a Gourmet item that can be consumed during battle. For this purpose Gourmet Meat also becomes temporarily consumeable, so you can dodge progressing the curse in exchange for eating a luxury 800 Gold item :) And if you instead give in and consume the cursed meat, you then get Stomach of Gluttony.

Which accumulates willpower debuffs whenever you consume recovery items until you consume a Gourmet item. Regarding Gourmet items, there is now a new item tag "Gourmet" which the Gouremt Meat obviously has but also Lumerian Bread can be easily used to reset the curse. Blessed Water also still works. For Lumerian Bread I am not sure if I want to keep it, maybe the Boar Hut will be selling some super expensive Gourmet Meal in the future. Or maybe there will be some Lumerian Wine in Verdeaux which can also cure this craving in exchange for getting drunk (CONFUSED state).

Like I said, there are still some details I have still not figured out since the whole  concept is a bit difficult, just like the whole Winterfall City dungeon itself, but I like the general idea of the curse forcing Aura to not be able to consume lowly food and instead needing luxury items. And I like the uniqueness of the item interactions.

For the envy side, there isn't any curse content for the player yet, but you can meet some humans who succumbed to the curse and now are your enemies in Winterfall. In general, while the pathings are not complete as I announced in the project plan, you can already do some encounters on the main map and fish for a bit of loot. Or die I guess if you didn't come by boat because you will walled quite heavily at the city entrance if you came from the forest of runes :D

Finally there is randomly also a new corruption scene, dealing with Aura dragging George into the club to make up for their usual lack of dates. It does not go well. :'D I had some 3 h before release but none of the scheduled work really fit into it and I had this scene in my head for some time so I figured I would quickly try to squeeze it.

Aaaand that's it for this week. Next week there will be a couple more corruption scenes, including the ability to finally ruin Aura's first sex with George memory and the remaining Unsexy Times With George scene. The second half of the week, since it's a 5-week dev update, I will be taking 2 days off to force myself to relax a bit and do something in life besides... dedicating every waking hour to creating content for messing up the life of a single girl. :'D

OMEGA HUGE EDIT: Okay, that was maybe not yet it for this week. Trihan just finished implementing a series of "battle flow improvements" that he had started working on last month. We had some issues and it seemed like we would have needed to postpone them to next week but he just ironed them out and I definitely want to open up the channel for feedback on them as soon as possible. So I just rebuilt the prerelease with these improvements in them. So what, are these battle flow improvements?

I don't know about you, but when I play standard default RPGMaker games, they feel terribly slow. There are lots of log messages that are actually already displayed on screen and the game always waits for them to finish displaying before moving on to the next action. And talking about actions, the way multi hit and AoE attacks work is that RPGMaker first does all the animations and then displays all the effects. This means going through all targets twice instead of already starting to display the effects while the animation is ongoing.

The goal of the "battle flow improvements" is to speed up all this to make it less cumbersome even when you aren't holding CTRL to speed everything up. We have therefore tried to evaluate which messages and delays are essential and which are not and then elimated the non-essential delays. Likewise, we have also through some reordiering of the process logic managed to achieve quite a lot of speedup. Especially group AoE buffs and AoE attacks now play significantly faster.

Of course, all this comes at the risk of making it too fast and losing "readability" of the battle, which is why it's important to get feedback on this. Does it feel too fast at times now? If so, when exactly? Also, we removed the initial "X enemy" emerged message since you can check enemies with the Attack button for names, and having the message pop up every battle felt like just noise. On the other hand maybe cutting this was a bit too much? Please give it a try and tell us what you think!

Changelog 0.32.0-prerelease-2 (09.06.2023)

• Added scene Night Club 4
• Added quest stub "City of Envy and Gluttony"
• Added map Winterfall City
• Added map Winterfall Caves
• Added curse Stomach of Gluttony
• Added boss Demonic Knightess of Envy
• Added item Advanced Techniques For Blocking Magic
• Increased max killed bosses to 90

Balancing

• None

Bugfixes

• Fixed Phoenix Feather boost not applying to Flaming Robe
• Fixed missing FIRE element for Firestorm skill and incorrect ICE element for Alicia normal attack
• Fixed generic drunk clubbing scene playing before Night Club 3 played
• Fixed passabilty issue in Jacob Forest
• Fixed mixed up check on Roland debuff for Main Cathedral meeting
• Fixed incorrect blocking rock in Mount Firestorm Caves 4
• Fixed Rose character sprite in scenes not changing to gyaru sprite
• Fixed missing adult options read in Unsexy Times With George