Star Knightess Aura 0.34.0-prerelease-1 (Patreon)

ITCH | MEGA | ITCH-DELUXE | MEGA-DELUXE

We start the final phase of Chapter 2-B with this prerelease. I mostly started setting up the Reverse Summoning Ritual, which can now be started at Dolus. Note that the following area is still highly incomplete except for a boss fight. After working out the structure of the event a bit more, I decided to structure it into 4 segments. I started the first one, which mostly introduces the area + has a couple of cut scenes, this week, and plan to finish it in the other dev week this month dedicated to the ritual.

Two known faces are back and---what's this?! It looks like John left a decent impression on them with his speech about becoming the true hero at the Festival. :'D You will also notice the dungeon specifiy resource Souldust in the corner. You can think of it as a similar resource as Perika. It will be necessary to perform various actions, such as mending broken tiles to proceed and in particular in can be used to reset the color, giving a progress guarantee. Currently, you can only collect Souldust lying on the ground and by winning battles. In the future, there will be corruptive / vice actions at some points where you can gain additional dust. It's possible I will also introduce some other way to spend it for beneficial effects, but I will have to see about that. It would definitely be something different than reducing Corruption though.

So yeah, the ritual is still in a really early shape but most of my ideas are starting to take some shape. As I mentioned in the opening of the post, I will continue building up the area in the next round towards the end of the month.

Then, we have a couple of new technical features from our assisstant developer Trihan! For one, the new custom Bless Menu has now been implemented. No longer clicking a lot of buttons, needing to keep track of your Mana in your head or getting surprised of the effects of the blessed version! The new Bless menu makes the daily use of your Bless skill a lot more efficient!

There is also a custom menu for crafting in the work to improve the user experience when interacting with the Alchemist and similar figures, but our UI designer is still on the task here to improve his design a bit before I will show it here.

And then we return once more to the topic of books! We can reap the fruits of the involved refactoring and generalization of the book logic that caused quite some bugs last update with this new feature of gifting books to your companions! This will give the books that you finished reading a new purpose besides selling them. Gifting books can be done via the Gift Item action at each companion. In the future you will also be able to give them Consumables in here so you don't need to wait until you have a mission with them to, for example, raise their HP via Vitality Potions. Note that the feature is really new and just got added like 5 minutes ago, so it's still quite experimental.

Finally, on the art side, I integrated the Wearing Richard's Ring H-CGs yesterday and also yesterday created the briefs for the Soap Job for our artist Emubi, though we are still in the process of discussing some details and ref pics before getting it started.

Yeah, and that's pretty much it! Only other minor change is that our mapper reworked the Entertainment Den map so it looks quite a bit more presentable now, but it's still barebones as before. Next week, we will be going to Winterfall and hopefully cross off that area as the first of the three Chapter 2-B main storylines. For the complete changelog including today's bugfix release, please see below.

Changelog 0.34.0-prerelease-1 (04.08.2023)

• Integrated Wearing Richards Ring H-CG
• Implemented custom bless menu
• Remapped Entertainment Den map
• Implemented scene Start Reverse Ritual Summon
• Added map stub Heavenly Path 1 collar reset interaction
• Implemented boss fight Darry & Barry 2
• Increased max killed bosses to 98

Balancing

• None

Bugfixes

• Fixed typos
• Fixed reading debuffs not correctly incrementing the extra reading variable
• Fixed lewd books with pink scenes only giving 2 Lewd Knowledge
• Fixed Entertainment Mage missing if entering den through Roland connection
• Fixed Blessed Lightning Jam Coating giving regular Lighting Jam Coating buff
• Fixed Alicia reunion memory mental change not correctly resetting cutscene
• Fixed Brittle II not releaving Rigid trait
• Fixed BGM stopping when caught by Nephlune guard
• Fixed incorrect enemy check for enhancement in Demonic Knightess of Envy battle
• Fixed NaN in Liquidate skill descriptions if player hasn't interacted with selfishness orbs
• Fixed incorrect enemy enhancement in entertainment challenge projection 3
• Fixed passability error in Far Eastern Hidden Caves
• Fixed underground pub costume changes doubling lewd stat increases
• Fixed passability issue in Mount Firestorm Caves 1
• Fixed Winterfall corpse interactable from lower level
• Fixed missing costume tags in recollection events