Star Knightess Aura 0.46.0-prerelease-3

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Epilogue scenes done! Well, I will probably revisit them during Polish Weeks in order to add more minor variations in places and then there's of course the ending CGs that are still missing storywise we are now officially done with the Corruption Ending!

This week's batch of epilogue scenes ties together the work from last week. Various optional scenes may trigger depending on factors such as giving James the Humanitas Rune (and him surviving to the end) or getting a good amount of Maid Score so that Aura will make attending the Maid Academy a compulsory form of education. Sell out Paulina for a small bonus.

After I finished a scene where John and Aura finally properly meet for the epilogue, in its True Hero variation, Aura becomes sooo angry I now really want to make an ending variation where corrupt Paulina and corrupt Charlotte help her to capture John and then do the full procedure of turning him into a women into sweet memories, special study, maid training, curse, and so on. Dreams for 2.0.!

Also James turned out a bit more silly in the epilogue scene than I thought - apparantly he has not made the dots to connect Aura = Mary, lol. :'D

Anyways, based on all these triggered scenes and their variations, Aura's cult and demon army gain a hidden power variable (or it gets decreased) and likewise the Resistance may gain/lose power as well. The comparison between these two variables then determines the state as to whether the Resistance is successful or crumbles apart. (With further minor subvariations where certain saved side characters may keep even a broken Resistance alive)

All of these triggers are based on how successful was as a Hero before "falling". Although there are a few couple of cases where things become worse mostly because the weakened demon army fails to kill certain other people who aren't good for the Resistance either.

Finally, this is also a thing now

I will just drop this here without further context. :D :D :D

Since I was progressing very well with the Corruption Ending epilogue, I finished a bit earlier and managed to add a couple minor improvements to the Game for which I will just refer to the changelog.

Also our artist who has some vacation scheduled for the second half of this month managed to super-fast finish the last CG on the Fighting Over Richard event sequence which I integrated today.

On the assistant side, Trihan has continued refining the Demon-crazy quest. I gave quite a bunch of feedback on how I would have liked the boss battle of the quest to be changed, although the changes only came in today, so I didn't have yet time to check them out.

Finally, our mapper (who is also a pixel artist) agreed to give the pixel art position a try, so let's see how that turns out. I had him to do some pixel art work in the past with mixed results. The Level 2+3 Plants and Rock edits for example are by him, based on how quite a few players have trouble telling them apart from the Level 1 version, I would say, they weren't too convincing. However, he also made the cheerleader pixel art costume which was imo quite well-done. In the long-term the workload would a bit high together with the mapping work, so even if it goes well we need to see how we best proceed here.

Well, we will see. No need to worry about workload distribution until we find out what level his artwork is on.

For next week, I have my "vacation" week where I will be mostly attending Gamescom to do some networking - who knows maybe I can find another promising pixel art candiate there?! There will be a prerelease but with only little content (mostly whatever Trihan manages to do). I also plan to do a bit of planning work during the week (or more likely during this weekend) to create an update to the long-term Roadmap.

Changelog 0.46.0-prerelease-3 (16.08.2024)

• Integrated Fighting Over Richard 6+7 H-CGs

• Added epilogue scene Maid Academy

• Added epilogue scene John (Resistance)

• Added epilogue scene Slime Club

• Added epilogue scene Fate of The Resistance

• Added epilogue scene James (Alive)

• Added Fall of Verdeaux Variation for Knight-Commander Lorraine

• Iterated Shadow boss fight

• Iterated Demon-cracy rewards

• Added unique quest variable values for losing to Shadow depending on whether player backed him initially

• Added choice for picking up individual items in A Just Reward

• Added replacement enemy in Richard's Domain in case Sathanas is defeated outside

• Saved party formation before fighting Claire and Dolus and restore it afterwards

• Expanded Eligoss Domain with backattack route

• Implemented analytics for NG+ bonuses

• Replaced CREDITS.txt with CREDITS.json

Balancing

• Gave mental change count a 0.25 multiplier on Victory Score computation

Bugfixes

• Fixed Paulina capture event triggering when curse got removed

• Fixed incorrect/missing paulina training checks in Lady Charlotte 1

• Fixed missing transparency restoration after Hermann variation of Capture of Trademond

• Fixed prerelease typos

• Fixed version number mismatch in migration script from

• Fixed various minor large sprite issues in forest and vulcanic areas

• Fixed incorrect enemy IDs for Shadow occupying a minion on death