Star Knightess Aura 0.38.0-prerelease-4 (Patreon)

ITCH | MEGA | ITCH-DELUXE | MEGA-DELUXE

More dungeon crawling incoming, this time to replace the dummy map with Richard's Anchor in it. It's a bit of a strange one as you start this one at the end of the dungeon. :'D In the future, if we have the time I want to add the extra levels which give you a way to get to Richard's Anchor without defeaing Beelzebug and Leviathan, but for now that's only a nice to have.

Two new bosses can be found in this region which has a very simple dungeon mechanic where you gain the state FREEZING (-75% AGI) unless you cast a Fire spell (FREEZING is then removed until end of battle) or have a Fire Enhance Spell active. Other than that, it's mostly just new combinations of old mechanics for a decent reward if you backwards clear this level with its bosses.

Aside of the dungeon, we also have 1 more corruption scene, involving a date between Aura and Richard so she can get her job at the modelling studio. The scene gets a bit ridiculous at one point but I guess that's just how it is. :'D With this we managed to catch up in the corruption scene backlog from the first devweek and reached the point I had in mind for the major update.

Furthermore, I have also continue a little bit of work regarding the artwork integration for Patricia and Veronica. New scenes are mostly the ones with recollection entries at the bottom of the recollection room. There's still a lot to do, as I didn't make as much progress as I wanted to on this, but it is steady progress. I plan to finish this next week.

Then, the thing that distracted me a bit, apparantly you can't import external save files on new Android versions, and doing more research on the why revealed eventually to me that my entire approach for implementing this feature was not the way google wanted it for the new Android versions. On the other hand, the framework we are using doesn't support the right way... I wasted quite a lot of time upgrading the framework to get a solution from another dev also using this framework going, but after struggling for it for literally the entire night (and eventually had success , so I guess another change this week is that the android port is fully "uptodate" whatever the exact consequences of this are); I decided that I don't want to stick around with this framework for any longer. Right now, it's only a specific use case of a feature that's an issue, but the framework got abandoned in 2020 and I feel like it's just inviting more problems to stick around with it.

So I started setting up an alternate approach for the port, one where I directly setup the android application instead of letting the framework handle that. Of course, this brought other pains with them... I managed to spend an entire day including the night again (two sleepless nights in a row yay :'D) just to get the proper fullscreen working. So yeah, lots of work for little to show as I finished the setup but didn't switch our build processes over yet. Those who read the discord maybe already read about my struggles there. The plus side is that the direct setup I now have, allows me to test android builds much faster as I can directly start them from google's Android Studion on a device or emulator instead of going through the trouble of executing the build process which took like 5min. 

Again, lots of text for "working on alternate android porting approach because the current one is outdated and that's currently causing just some small things like importing save files not working but I am fed up with constantly facing issues due to the current way being outdated" that I needed to get off because it was frustrating to work on.

Then on to some more productive changes! Our contributor Gauravd decided to pick up some of the items from the menu improvements iteration. Above you can see the change in the Status where you can now see your loadout for Autospell/Enhancespell/Stance. In the shop menu, you will now be greeted with an EYES OF GREED if your willpower is 0 while you have that curse and during battle you can now rotate through submenus by pressing <- or -> although this one doesn't have the UI layer chang yet implemented.

Other than that, I have created the next art brief for Emubi. Since everyone has christmas holidays (he's away until 26th) I decided to go along with a simple one, creating the variations for the slime H-CGs in Slime Bonding II/III. Mostly just thicker slime tentacles. Then I also added the new BGM into the game, for now as I announced I used it as the Back Attack soundtrack so the original BGM still plays during normal battle, but the new one plays when Aura has the advantage. Looking forward to hear if that's the right placement or if it should be the main battle BGM after all.

Aaaaand I think that covers everything. I still have a couple items left over that I plan to work on next week, but otherwise next week is mostly a vacation week with the major release happening on the usual last Friday of the month. The last items I want to work on are finishing the character art integration and I want to create the low popularity variation when encountering Roland after doing all his quests while hurting this popularity. 

Changelog 0.38.0-prerelease-4 (22.12.2023)

• Added area Crystal Caverns: Vault 
• Added scene Pretend Dating Richard 1 
• Added boss Crystal Ogre 
• Added boss Brightmane 
• Continued Veronica and Patricia character art integration 
• Applied refactoring pass to UI plugins
• Replaced Status Window Equipment Area with Auto/Enhance/Stat Window (Thanks to Gaurav)
• Implemented Pressing <- and -> buttons to navigate through circle sub menus (Thanks to Gaurav)
• Implemnted Eyes of Greed Lock mode in Shop Menu (Thanks to Gaurav)
• Integrated Knight's Stride BGM 
• Added formula Acid Bomb+ 
• Increased max killed bosses to 111 

Balancing

• None

Bugfixes

• Fixed trait errors in Armor*2+Passion troop 
• Fixed Dark Queen Slime missing num tag and compendium entry 
• Fixed Thrall Expert Adventurer missing fire weakness 
• Fixed Thunderbolt III cost being the same as rank II
• Fixed Tap to Confirm option being in General Category 
• Fixed mismatch between automatic Invest: Purification in Money Domain scene and manual version
• Fixed Aura retaining states after Dolus and Claire battle if Dolus is defeated first
• Fixed external save directory breaking when the external save folder would be on a differentpartition than the game