Project Plan October (Patreon)

Last round to finish off Chapter 2-B! The plan this month is very straightforward. We are only missing one last front to clear out the Chapter 2-B content which is the Reverse Summoning Ritual. This gives us the following project plan.

I was kind of hoping I could finish the Reverse Summoning Ritual by Week 2, but most likely definitely not working out; still a lot to do, buuut on the other hand I don't see any danger that would prevent Chapter 2-B from closed out this month. So, let's go into the week-by-week. I won't be going too much into details to avoid spoilers.

Week 1: The obvious thing to finish first is the Roland encounter. Also there are generally a couple of iteration improvements to make to the Heavenly Path area, like adding more spells for the Soul Dust Mage and just generally some fine tuning. And then after that I hope I can progress a bit on the narrative events that come after the Heavenly Path 2 dungeon to reach the cliffhanger point I wanted to get to end on last month.

Week 2: Not saying much about this one, except that I will start the main confrontation against Claire and Dolus, which according my current vision has more of a narrative start, but I will need to figure out the details in this week.

Week 3: Main final boss fight of the event and general close out narrative scenes.

Week 4: And then finally I will be mostly working on doing some world state updates. For those who are new, that just basically means updating NPC reactions (e.g. Claire related dialogues in Verdeaux), stuff like the Compendium which hasn't been updated in a while, and so on and so forth.

Art

We are back to being safely about the 6k€ so I don't monetary issues here. I was hoping Emubi would have already finished one more character artwork last month, but alas the main Richard and Aura H-CG took more time than expected. But it got started now and the poll results lead to the following prioritization of character artwork production:

I won't be posting the x15 poll when since it has pretty much a similar distributon and due to the size it would take up too much screen space here :'D. So it looks like the winner are Elizabeth > Luciela > Laura=Veronica=Patricia.

As I mentioned in the poll, I won't just be going by characters but also by groups. so doing Luciela for example also means we will be prioritizing Demon King Richard and. Overall, we get the following plan

With Laura getting pushed to the new year. I expect that we won't finish all of them according to plan, so probably the "free" character slot in January besides Laura would get filled with whatever we don't manage to do here.

As for the H-CGs I want to focus on finishing the Roland CGs this month. Let's how far we get there, still debating if the anal and vaginal scenes will use the same base CG or if they are variations, which make it a bit tougher to finish in this month.

RPGMaker Dev

For players, there won't be a lot of visible progress on this side by our assistant developer Trihan this month, as his main task will be on a larger internal refactoring and cleanup of the plugins that have been developed for Aura. If you are a developer and ever thought about making an Aura-like game then this might be a bit more interesting for you, as it would make a lot of things more reusable in other projects. Ideally, in the future, I would like to even create a sort of "AuraMZ Template Project" that other developers could use.  

UI/UX

I have created a new work description for our UI artist. This time focusing more on a series of small iterations rather than adding a new menu. E.g. I want to try out replacing the equipment listing in the Status screen with Enhance/Stance/Autospell. Or mark new items and skills in after obtaining them in the inventory/skill list. Things like that. 

Writing

Our assistant writer Absurdity has moved on to the third Roland quest this month. This one will focus on a muder mystery, and involve the Ex-Knight Commander Lorraine who has been banished into the kitchen. Aura will be able to solve the murder, or aid Roland in pinning it on Lorraine to break her men's remaining loyalty... and possibly her?! (I don't know either :D I only discussed the rough plans with Absurdity on the weekend so, let's see what he makes out of it)

Okay, aaaaand that's mostly it for this month's plans.