Star Knightess Aura 0.26.0-prerelease-4

ITCH | MEGA | ITCH-DELUXE

We reach another prerelease, only one more devweek to go to round up the year. To start with a personal note, I immediately found a new flat to move into in March in my hometown, saving me the trouble of spending a lot of searching time this week. I was hoping I could finish up the whole Rosemond story line, though that turned out to be more complicated than expected. I nearly finished it, but despite pumping in quite a bit of time, there's one last scene to be implemented. The quest had more intermediate states than I anticipated, blowing it up more than just the two routes. 

Well, in the end I still got a lot further than the original plan of only the first vice and lewd event on the respective quest path. The lewd path got finished, adding 3 new lewd scenes for this prerelease. In addition for the vice path, 2/3 scenes have been implemented, so that's the last one we are missing.

Having this kind of strongly diverging different corruption paths for side quests will also definitely stay an exception for the future. The added complexity over the "usual" approach of just having different means to achieve the same objective is larger than I expected. I might also drop the the proposed "purity" route to simplify the quest.

To the trigger the quest you need the new secondary corruption stat Infamy. Originally, I wanted to express everything regarding moral degeneration using Vice alone. However, as I was implementing this quest, I didn't really like a pure Vice trigger since Vice can also increase through mental changes and real world events, I didn't feel that it was a good way of modeling moral reputation corruption. And that's where Infamy comes in. You can think of it as a secondary stat like the sensitivity stats for lewdness. 

It increases for Vice/Corruption increasing decisions that have a witness. So for example real world, mental changes, theft, these all don't increase Infamy. On the other hand, blackmail, supporting Hermann, slandering Edwin, investing into slave trade, these all do increase Infamy. If you have 5 Infamy, the new quest will trigger. 

To view the stat, I have also added a new page in the Compendium, called Moral. Here you can see stats regarding Aura's moral degeneration. I have been tracking the number of thefts and blackmails in the background and then of course the new Infamy stat is also displayed here. Currently the page is a bit empty, if you feel like other existing meaningful moral degenration stats should be tracked here, feel free to comment.

If you open the page, you may also see that you have been retroactively granted some Infamy for prior decisions, this is however only an approximation as not all decisions, e.g. how often you invested into the slave trade, are tracked. 

In the Deluxe console you can now increase secondary corruption stats, both on the lewd side, e.g. to increase sensitivies or fetishes, and also infamy. Otherwise you can easily trigger the quest by increasing your Infamy through repeated slave trade investments in the Nephlune Merchant Congregation.

I only today finished the third lewd event and have mostly only performed incremental testing (testing the newest pieces of content, but not the whole), so bugs are pretty likely! Please keep this in mind! 

Then, what else happened... Oh, right as I mentioned last week, I decided to push back the Bunny Suit Loving Magister scenes and prioritize the new Rose sex scene. I created the brief for Emubi and if we are lucky we can get a sketch before the year is over. But I wouldn't count on it because of the upcoming Christmas and New Year festival days.

Which also brings me to the next week. I will be finishing the quest and then do a bit of work to get the Verdaux map started as originally planned in the project plan. And that's probably about what can be fit into the week as I need to meet a couple of friends and family over the next week. If I have some left-over time, I will probably invest it into doing some recruiting.

Aaaand that's about it for this report. Happy Christmas days, and see you then for the 0.26.0 release next week. For the complete changelog including today's prerelease content and the publich patch, please check below.

Changelog 0.26.0-prerelease-4 (23.12.2022)

• Added quest stub "Homewrecking"
• Added vice scene Homewrecking Vice 1 
• Added vice scene Homewrecking Vice 2 
• Added lewd scene Homewrecking Lewd 1 
• Added lewd scene Homewrecking Lewd 2 
• Added lewd scene Homewrecking Lewd 3 
• Implemented world state update from Homewrecking lewd path 
• Added infamy moral degeneration variable 
• Added compendium Moral page 
• Added option to increase Infamy, Sensitivity and Fetish stats in Deluxe Console 
• Increased max vice to 18 
• Reduce Hermann discount to 15%/30%
• Added relationship gain for Alicia in Library Club 8 (retroactively)
• Added option to learn Open Domain II from Elaine after her return

Balancing

• Added +2 Required Reading Progress for non-lewd books to Hard mode
• Removed Story mode item discount to deal with weird buy/sell interactions to gain infinite money

Bugfixes

• Fixed incorrect calculation of reading progress for mana book
• Fixed typos
• Fixed not-respawning incarnations
• Fixed add summons when boss is already dead
• Fixed glitchy guard movement when starting fortress of wrath upon leaving adventurer guild
• Fixed being able to open chest in Northern Mountain Ranges on a different height level