Star Knightess Aura 0.38.0-prerelease-3 (Patreon)

ITCH | MEGA | ITCH-DELUXE | MEGA-DELUXE

The Maid Academy becomes a dangerous place this week! I didn't get to the part of adding some NPCs to drop hints about the dangerous area, so good luck finding it :'D

But beneath the Maid Academ you can now find the Catacombs which pose a pure way to clear the area. Well, will in the future. I implemented the encounters and boss fights in the main dungeon area, but we still need to do the North Wing of the Maid Academy to properly connect things together. That together with the remaining trainings will be something to be tackled in the new Year in January. The area itself is (big surprise :D :D :D) on the more difficult side, at least according to my testing. But with the player stats and everything diverging to widely towards the end game, who knows.

While working on the area, as I added a powerful optional boss with an equally powerful drop, I was thinking if maybe we should unlock the Maid Academy at an earlier point after all. Liliana does already mention the barrier protecting Richard if I remember right, so the knowledge that you need to be able to clear a strong barrier is technically available at an earlier point of the game. At the same time, since you need Mira and Paulina there would still be quite some requirements to actually enlist. I need to think about it for a while, not something that needs to be decided right now.

The dungeon was the main point of work during the week, but besides that there are also a couple other minor additions. There is one more corruption scene continuing the Wanting to be a Model story line so we at least have 1 reaction scene to the side tail hair style. I really hope I can sneak in the scene following that next week because then I think we have a good ending point for 0.38.0.

Furthermore, I started just earlier integrating Patricia and Veronica's character artwork into the game, but here I am just at the beginning. The scenes where they got added are Shopping with Patricia and Going To Hair Salon (with Veronica). I skipped scenes where both Veronica and Patricia appeared as that requires a bit more editing.

And here's a scene with Veronica ingame. Yeah, overall, still a lot of scenes to go, I will probably work on this peu a peu over the weekends so don't expect this to finish in the next prerelease either but it will probably be done by the time of the 0.38.0 major release.

Then, we have one final item on our list for the devlog, a technical contribution by Gaurav. I have been facing the issue that the game has become quite large and at the same time players are segmented over 5 difficulty levels, making it difficult to judge if something is a problem or not. In order to help with that, we added a simple analytics option

So I know Analytics always gets everyone scared. We have put it as an option that you need to explicitly activate in the Options menu. There is nothing forcing it to be on, or for you to be online when playing the game or anything like that. Also from my investigations the service we are using gameanalytics.com is gdpr conform and also anonymizes all the data. So I hope that should be a step up from using something like google analytics.

There is a chance that in the future I might add a window when starting the game for the first time, but I hope for now maybe some people will check this to share some of their data. Things that get tracked are for currently at which day a quest was started, completed, battle results, and which options are being used, most of these differentiated by difficulty. In the future, I would probably expend this by stuff like which items or skills get used, etc. Polls on Patreon have been useful in the past to help here, but I feel like I would need to spam them nowadays in order to obtain meaningful data - The game is just that big by now.

Aaaalright, and that's it for this week. The plan for the next is to continue on some more dungeon work, this time to replace the Crystal Caverns placeholder map with Richard's Anchor. Besides that, hopefully sneaking in one more corruption scene and making some more progress on the Patricia and Veronica character art integration.

Changelog 0.38.0-prerelease-3 (15.12.2023)

• Begun adding Patricia and Veronica Character Artwork
• Added area Maid Academy Catacombs
• Added scene Wanting To Be A Model 5
• Added analytics with gameanalytics.com (Thanks to Gaurav)
• Moved Interface options into new Interface Options Category
• Added boss Spirit Fox
• Added boss Queen Slime
• Added boss Thralled Expert Adventurer
• Added day to save file info as in mockup (Thanks to Gaurav)
• Added formula Anti-Magic Coating+
• Increased max killed bosses to 109
• Added denial message to Boar Hut stairs if Impostor Refugees is not completed

Balancing

• None

Bugfixes

• Fixed typos
• Fixed chase events on develop again without breaking doors
• Fixed workshop enhance item does not end day on explorer (Thanks to Gaurav)
• Added post-recess intro that factors in the "Back Down" option into Nothing But The Truth
• Fixed Autosaving on menu exit when that isn't selected (Thanks to Gaurav)
• Fixed Slime not using auto-skills at the start of Claire and Dolus battle
• Fixed "cannot move" states being added by events not preventing tactical advantage gained from a skill used the same turn
• Fixed Aura taking willpower damage from skills even if she wasn't the target
• Fixed out of place tile in Balor Domain
• Fixed impassable sofa in Maid Academy
• Fixed Slime portrait not displaying in Dolus and Claire fight if HUD is turned off
• Fixed inconsistent extra windows and party members in clear room and when leaving
• Fixed Aura portrait not appearing in intro dialogue
• Fixed clear room cleanup crashing with only one party member