Posted October 28, 2022 by aura-dev
Note that the public release will be in 2 weeks. You can also skip the waiting time by buying Star Knightess Aura on itch.
Ding ding ding ding dinnnng!!!!! It was a pretty close call and I was not sure if I could get everything done (I may or may not have had no time at all to test the world state correctness after completing Eternal Day of Sloth :'D) but the 0.24.0 release got pretty much finished. And with it, I finally completed the last outstanding items towards the big milestone to the 50% mark ---- most importantly, as I mentioned in the above note, I finished the Eternal Day of Sloth quest (among other things). With this you can now complete all 3 post-Festival main quests and we are ready to go forward into the second half of the game.
Besides that, there's of course a lot of other stuff that happened this month! Let's start the update post with the usual numbers! We have 2 new H-CGs, 3 new corruption scenes, 3 new mental changes, 1 new quest, the completion of the Eternal Day of Sloth quest, 2 new boss fights, 1 new passive, and couple of other things such as new skills and important new items. And then of course, this is also the major rollout of the new UI, which patrons who have played the prereleases probably have tried out.
I already posted this one a couple of times, but I think the Status menu is probably the best in terms of aesthetics so I think it should definitely get its spot in the post announcing the major update with the UI release. For more details on this topic, for those who are new or maybe didn't follow the development so closely, I recommend checking out the devlog posts.
Do butterflies poop rainbows?
Then, in terms of main story, Aura is finally allowed to face off with Belphegor. I had some crazy inception like ideas with sub-battles in mind but ended up going with a "regular" battle. Pretty much like the whole of Mountainreach this just had to be downscaled. In hinsight I feel like this entire arc could be expanded into into its own game had I implemented everything I wrote down in my design document. There are still some twists here that I don't want to spoil and of course in traditional Star Knightess Aura fashion, you are probably going to die. I can guarantee that the fight is winnable, however, it took me all of Monday and using every single resource at my disposal to win.
Besides the main quest, we also have a new side quest "The Lord of Phantoms", which completes the Nephlune Underground content by allowing Aura to finally enter the Domain in the Nephlune Vault.
On the corruption side, there isn't a lot of new content, nontheless, there is some! Add a new mental change that affects Aura's reaction when Womb of Lust triggers her to perform a lewd action in Roya. Insert the Lewd Knowledge Orb for a new masturbation scene and to start Aura down the road to porn. And finally, you can trigger the 50% mark mental change that synchronizes the Make-Over Storyline with the Delinquency Storyline, creating the storypoint from which we can in the future start the Bullying Storyline.
And I think that pretty much covers it. As I mentioned above, more information on the individual additions can also be found in the weekly devlog posts. A little note to the "Remote Save Directory" option (got added last prelease), this has been disabled in this build as I deemed it too experimental. So if you turned it on, please turn it off before upgrading!
As a conclusion to this post, have the full changelog below. Usually I would post-process the bug report section. For example put all the tickets related to UI into one ticket since it only affected the prereleases. Same story for other things, but to kind of motivate the next goal a bit further, I decided to leave the bug report list largely unedited, which may be a bit less useful to the reader, but it demonstrates well why a dedicated Assisstant Developer is the next order to business.