Star Knightess Aura 0.34.0-prerelease-2 (Patreon)

ITCH | MEGA | ITCH-DELUXE | MEGA-DELUXE

Before I get into this week's update: I hard originally planned to do corruption scenes this week, but as mentioned in the devlog post last week, I decided to go for the Winterfall content instead. Corruption content will therefore be next week. It's mostly to avoid having to work too much on encounter design two weeks in a row at the end of the month.

With that out of the way, this week finishes off the City of Envy and Gluttony quest! And oh boy, the encounter versus the demon generals here is probably the most complicated one I created yet. Not necessarirly because the "normal" fight is complicated, that one is actually rather straight forward (and I still need to tweak the values probably :'D), but because you can challenge the boss fight at pretty much any time in the quest. And depending on how many objectives you have achieved, the fight becomes easier, which creates quite a rat tail of technical variations to account of.

Before the fight, I also added a small cut scene with our main antagonist who we are now very close to hunting down. If you have down the Wearing Richard's Ring 4 scene before this there will be a small variation to the scene so be sure to give that a try!

I have not yet figured out if beating the encounter post day 100 is possible without using the Sar Knightess. I tried it out with a build I used to defeat Belphegor post day 100 but even with Radiance added in, I couldn't defeat this one right away. So like I said, the final stage might need some more fine tuning. With the stages before I am quite happy now after quite a lot of tinkering with it this week. You can counter the stages before by simply finishing the side objectives but you can also use the mechanics to your advantage. 

I will just spoil here that instead of summoning the remaining demons to fight for them, like Sathanas, Beelzebub will devour them instead, giving him a powerful buff. You can for example use this to have him kill a demon, lose the battle and thus a day but in exchange you have one demon less to fight. I hope these kind of tradeoffs lead to some interesting ways to use the actions of the demon generals against them.

Then on the balancing side, I have one technically small but I think overall quite impactful change. The Platform Heel Transformation in Roya with it's thick AGI debuff can now be countered by knowing Seductive Stance II. For Chapter 2, I think this creates a good balance in forcing the player to adopt more lewd skills if he has advanced in the corruption route, without creating too much negative impact on the player power level and thus making the trades for gaining power in exchange for taking corruption a bit unfavorable. For Chapter 3 though I think these kind of straight up downsides are still on the table.

For the technical work, there is one notable item from our assisstant devloper Trihan, who has continued the work on gifting items to companions. You can now also gift Consumeables, so you no longer need to wait for them to be in your party to give them Elixirs or other stuff. 

Aaaand that's already it for the week. Next week, as I mentioned, it's back to the real world for corruption scenes. The complete changelog including all changes from the patch update today can be found below.

Changelog 0.34.0-prerelease-2 (11.08.2023)

• Added boss Gluttoney & Envy Demon Generals
• Implemented remaining rescuable prisoners
• Implemented finishing quest City of Envy and Gluttony
• Implemented Eligoss, Balor and Astaroth gluttony absorption
• Implement state update in Winterfall after defeating demon generals
• Added companion book progress to update messages
• Increased max killed bosses to 99

Balancing

• Removed -4 DEF debuff from Platform Heel Transformation and make knowing Seductive Stance II negate the AGI debuff

Bugfixes

• Fixed typos 
• Fixed SAVE and RESTORE costume common events not being capable of handling nested costume changes
• Fixed not being able to perform item locked actions because of Blessed, +, etc modifiers 
• Fixed bomb areas that don't use the obstacle choices plugin
• Fixed Elite Soldier Raging on attack
• Fixed wrong enemies being enhanced in second Barry and Darry fight
• Fixed incorrect companion names being shown when gifting books 
• Fixed companions being unable to read Reading Proficiency book
• Fixed Paul(ina)'s gift option being in a different choice index to the others
• Fixed staircase acting as rope in Northern Mountain Ranges Caves
• Fixed Invidia enable condition rendering it unusable
• Fixed hedonism requirement for knowledge orb being shown as 1 higher than it should 
• Fixed incorrect choice condition for setting George sexual compatibility to NONE
• Fixed free Blue Sugar from drug dealer not always applying its effects to Aura
• Fixed free drug scenes missing the extra +1 corruption from taking the drug