Project Plan March (Patreon)

 Very early release in the month also means very early project plan for the next! The big item for the next update will be the follow-up location on the Maid Academy: Lord Trademond in order to finally unlock the "proper" way into the Final Dungeon. Let's take a look into the detailed plan.

Week 1: I used to call this kind of week "Technical Week" since it also focused a lot on programming related work like bugfixing and refactorings, but since a lot of that has been moved to our assisant developer Trihan, I think a name change to reflect that focus is in order which is why I have the term "Mechanical Week" here.

One item I will be working on are conditions to automatically trigger certain mental changes - "Auto Corrupts". The mental world represents how Alicia uses the curse in order to corrupt Aura. But in general, it kind of works as a sort of a gameplay system that model character progression. And while in most cases, it's desireable for the mental changes to be triggered by Alicia, there exist various "edge" cases where an automatic corruption (Auto Corrupt) to represent Aura's character naturally corrupting because of her actions.

I will give a concrete example: Imagine you have 20 Vice but have not corrupted the first Selflessness Orb. You now sell out Paulina - effectively performing personality murder. After than, you now walk up to a chest in a nobleman's mansion (say the one in Lord Nephlune's). Stealing from this chest is merely locked behind 5 Vice, however, the act of stealing itself is locked behind the passive Theft II - which is locked behind corrupting the first Selflessness Orb into s Selfishness Orb!

As you can see, it would make a lot of sense, for the Selflessness Orb to automatically corrupt without Alicia needing to take action upon Aura reaching some sort of Vice treshold (say 10 Vice). This would be one example.

I mentioned this concept a while ago in the devlog post that kind of added the first Auto Corrupt with the Masturbation Is Not Enough mental change automatically triggering (I think upon orgasm? Or was it sex? I don't remember). 

Back then I used a concept of Corruption Discounts in order to tackle this issue, but I think those are better suited for things where Alicia HAS to take an action and natural moral decay doesn't make sense. For example, corrupting the first sex memory with George becomes discounted when having high cheating. But it wouldn't really make sense for it to Auto Corrupt because it requires Alicia to actively meddle in the memories.

Well, I will give some more details on all this in the devlog post next Friday when I worked out the details on which mental changes should Auto Corrupt under which conditions and implemented them.

Then the rest of the week will mostly be dedicated to Skill related items. Companions learning new skills (and gaining the ability to teach them to Aura), some Slime forms getting the Level 13 skills they have been missing, Assassinate II getting added into the Nephlune Demon Worshippers, and so on. It's mostly a bunch of small work items. I hope I can also get to the first Rank III skill teachers, but we will see. I might also invest a little of time to expand a bit further on the Club Floor of the Magic Academy.

Week 2: And then we dive into the meat of this update. Aura trying to get the Rune for the Final Shield from Lord Trademond. Either by passing a money check or by working for him as a maid. I will probably go for a simple 2 lewd scenes + 1 repeat version. After getting the Rune you will be able to continue working for him, triggering the repeat version.

Week 3: I will probably need half of the third week to finish off the Lord Trademond content and then I will move on to implementing the two brother customers from the latest manuscript of our assistant writer.

Week 4: Finally, to start setting up for the final Demon General and his quest, I need to work on one predecessor quest that will both unlock the last Demon General quest and also lead to to unlocking Charlotte's lewd scenes. In this week, I plan to do some conceptual work on this quest. Originally, I also wanted to already start implementing it this week, but I will most likely instead write some real world corruption scenes so we at least have a couple there. I am not yet sure which ones I will pick for this week, there are still so many things to do. It's either going to be a checkup George, Rose or the Library Club. 

Week 5: Five week update and I get to have some vacation! As usual, there's too much to do to take a full week. :'D I plan to spend 1-2 days on furthering the AuraMZ Template Project. As a reminder, it's basically an exracting of the RPGMaker features we developed for Star Knightess Aura, into a Template Project. 

Trihan started on the refactoring work for this last year in September, in order to make everything reusable. I want to push at least a little bit on this in the vacation week to verify that his refactorings work the way we want to, and also extract some more logic that I developed from SKA into the Template Project. It's important to me that the refactoring work on this completes before the 1.0 release since it has the potential to cause quite a lot of bugs.

Then, that's what's happening on my side. Now let's check out what our freelancers will be up to.

Art

I hope Emubi will be coming back to action in the first week in March. Following the H-CG plan, we will tackle the Paulina H-CG and the Cheerleading Game H-CG next. I also wanted to start production on non-H-CGs so we at least have some in the game, but currently this front is not looking good. Especially with the time we lost in February on art production, we will definitely have to skip the plans I had here for March.

RPGMaker Dev and Writing

Both assisant developer and writer will be working on a small Adventurer Guild quest. I already mentioned it last month. The only development here is that we decided to include Desmond into it and have him propose another Vice action to get the corruption content nicely connected into the quest.

There is one other point I should probably note here, our mapper is uh currently pregnant and expects to have a baby end of March/beginning of April and will of course be unavailable in this time frame. Since I will be working a lot on real world corruption content in April, it's not a problem for me, but we need to properly plana round but generally we need to properly plan around this.

BGM

I didn't have enough time last month to get the next BGM production rolling. We will do one for March though. I wasn't suuuper happy with the work on the Combat BGM, even though we ended up using it for the Surprise Attack. We could try again this month but I'm not sure if it would yield a better result.... Somehow this topic is just cursed. I tried it with quite a few composers now, however, none of them really made me feel "yes, this is definitely better than the default track that we are using and better suited!" 

On the OST plan the remaining open entries are Combat Normal, Combat Crisis, Combat Miniboss, Title, and (Combat) Final Boss. Not sure if any of the other combat tracks would end up better, so maybe give a try for Title? Again, something where we are currently just using the default RPGMaker MZ title music. And I have by now seen quite a few RPGMaker MZ games come out that also used the exact same soundtrack... So it might be a good place to continue.

Aaaaand that's the plan for March. Quite a lot of lewd content with Trademond and the brothel customers. Sadly, Not so much real world corruption content and new mental changes. As a minor preview for April, I will give a quick heads up on this front. 

With this update, we will have finished most of the major Roya lewd content that Aura is directly involved in (the only content missing being a close out to the demon worshipper contentthat our assistant writer will be working). 

This means, I will start the development of Chapter 3-B in April and, with that, the number of weeks we spend on the real world corruption content will increase to a minimum of 2 per update, potentially even for 3 in some! Aiming to reach the Corruption ending in a relatively soonish manner.