Posted October 30, 2021 by aura-dev
Save games should be compatible! Just copy paste your old save game folder.
And another full cycle comes to an end. In this post, as usual, I will summarize the major changes of the 0.12.0 release. By the way, I only just now noticed because 1 month = 1 release, but this is also the 1 year anniversary release of Star Knightess Aura! In just a couple of weeks, it will have been 1 year when I opened up a text document and started writing down the game design doc for SKA. Yay!
So let's jump into the update. The big focus of this update was to build up the foundations for starting into the Chapter 2 content. In numbers, the update has 21k new words, 4 new learnable skills, 3 new lewd scenes, 3 new mental changes, 2 new common events, 2 new corruption events, and 1 new H-CG.
Getting Aura out of the Abandoned Shrine. The post-Festival game state has been updated to Aura can safely leave the shrine. Dead NPCs are removed, rescued NPCs added. A bunch of NPCs have minor dialogue variations to stay consistent with the plot, there are some remarks found by the adventrurers in the guild, and also a new member. If you cleared the pre-festival content exceptionally fast, try checking out a certain merchant in the Congregation and a certain maid in the refugee camp for some minor rewards. In general, there are a couple of rewards to be gotten since slew a Demon General after all. Try checking in with the priestesses in the church, as well as the rescued abductees that you can find in the Refugee Camp and in Trademond.
Building up new skills, items, formulas for Chapter 2. Following the game principles of Chapter 1, there will of course be new challenges to face. And there are a couple of tools introduced in this update that will help you overcome them. Of course, most of them fairly expensive, which will then serve as a another motivational boost for Aura to participate in the Chapter 2 lewd events. The White And Black Priestess have new spells to teach, there is a new Martial to be found that should be useful to those actively try to sneak attack, and a quest in Riverflow will unlock a Formula Peddler selling formulas to powerup the interactions with the Alchemist. Also try speaking to the Slime Summoner girl, as she can teach you how to make your slime gain a fire form.
Some of the content is locked until after the festival, some of it is available pre-Festival.
Increasing the lewd and vice count. A big goal of this update is also to catch up with the lewd side of things. The Festival now has 2 lewd events that can help you presever / gain Perika to make the fight against Mammon easier. There is another lewd event involving the aforementioned Formula Peddler. The event and the involving quest were written by a commissioned writer and then edited by me, so please check them out. We also have the first two Vice actions, one of them in the very same quest, another one available if you rescued a certain merchant in Arwin's cellar, who afterwards refuses to even say thanks.
Also on the lewd side, the demon worshipper handjob has been illustrated, so please give his lewd event a revisit! Currently in production is the slime H-CG.
Preparing the Chapter 2 corruption route and opening a new mental room. On the corruption side, you can now find that the Values Room can be opened with a first two mental changes. These changes don't trigger any scenes yet, though, and are mostly added as tutorial actions and for me to test that all scripts work correctly. We do have a new mental change with effects, though, check out the beakers in the Interests Room.
Though, I would recommend not destroying them on the very first day of 0.12.0 since that will block 1 of the new common scenes to play and instead directly play the associated corruption scene. Which brings me to the common scene prep work for Chapter 2. There are two new common scenes: One for the grades decline storyline and one for the George storyline.
Too bad that there will a Memory Room!
For more information on the invidiual update parts, please check out my devlog posts on the prereleases. Otherwise, you can find all changes bundled up below in the changelog.
Overall the update feels a bit strange. I keep thinking that not a lot of stuff has been added, but the changelog and increased word count tell me otherwise. So apparantly there is quite a bit of new stuff. There is just a bit of a lack of new dungeons.
That I will then tackle next month. I will focus on adding some new locations. You will be able to enter the eastern forest of runes and finally get access to an item that can teleport you to Abandoned Shrine. If the patreon poll on the first new main story location doesn't change, I will also add the first iteration of Nephlune next month. And of course, a new mental location will also be opened up.