Posted May 26, 2023 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.
After last month's focus on advancing the main plot we have this time around an update focusing on pretty much everything else - lewds, corruption scenes, side dungeons, new corruption debuffs and many more! The character with the most content this month is definitely Roland of whom the lewd event chain has been completed!
As usual, for the detailed breakdown, I refer to the individual weekly prerelease devlog posts. Let's take a look at how the summary looks like for 0.31.0! We have in total 2 new H-CGs, blonde Aura character art, updated Paul/Pauline character art, 6 new lewd scenes, 4 new mental changes, 6 new corruption scenes, a repeat corruption scene, 1 new quest, 2 new dungeon levels with 3 new boss fights, and much more!
I this one was a bit harder to list than usual since the update is quite diverse and especially on the art department I can see the last 300€ investment increase for Emubi to afford an assisstant pulling its weight.
On the lewd side, as already mentioned, the Roland lewd event chain has been completed. And with it, a couple of new debuffs have been introduced that will make it harder to you to resist pro-Roland choices in the Verdeaux quests. Furthermore, we have quite a few new H-CGs. The Special Study event chain has been completely illustrated. Furthermore, the first two Roland events have also received illustrations. And on-top of that, jumping into the real word, the two fade-to-black Masturbation scenes now have received the missing variations to also be illustrated! In total, the number of illustrated scenes has gone up by 7 (SEVEN)!
To continue on the art department, we also have progress in the project art unification, where Paul and Paulina have received Emubi-style character art. On-top of that, I was also finally able to integrate the blonde hair style for Aura just today since Emubi supplied me with the necessary blonde hair variations for the H-CG scenes!
This is an old scene, and while I already found the line funny from just flashy cheerleader Aura, blonde flashy cheerleader Aura makes it sound even better. :D
Let's stick around a bit more in the real world! Using the other mental changes introduced in this update, you can now gain access to the Night Club which Aura will regularly spend frequent every 5 days, leaving her dead tired to explore Roya in the night! Also drunk Aura! Also in the real world we have just a little bit of main story progress through some events between George and Veronica.
Moving back to Roya, and the content I have been working on this week, I have finished the Mount Firestorm area which has both the most brutal and the most rewarding boss fights. Getting to the depths is already deadly, but beating the final and yet strongest super boss that awaits you there. In the future I plan to revisit this area and introduce some weaknesses that you can exploit using items obtained in some other part of the game.
For now, I have checked that it's possible to beat the area boss as lewd corrupted Aura and as pure Aura if you have already entered the Magic Academy and gained access to their rank II spells. Nightmare mode will kill you though :'D
That being said, even you cannot clear the last level, the one before this also gives some great rewards, including a very unique material that gives a permanent elemental resistance as well as powerup for your fire spells.
Finally, I have implemented the content related to the Luck Professor in the new quest. Either support him in his scam, because if people are dumb enough to get scammed, why shouldn't Aura rather do it before someone else does it? :) Or expose this author of the book "Luck is also a skill" for the fraud that he is in front of everyone. I thought this quest would be quite quick to implement but in the end I ended up writing quite a bit more content than expected and adding more complexity to it than I had planned. :'D
Originally, you would have been able to simply refute him if you had read Luck is also a skill and it would have been a matter of a simple check; instead you will be playing a silly Phoenix Wright inspired minigame, sorry :'D ! The dialogue interactions also have weirdly many reactions to the game state. For example, since the Luck Professor ended up having a character voice very similar to Hermann, I couldn't help but add a short dialogue variation if Aura is married to Hermann. This is what happens when I finish slightly before plan and have some time to add stuff :'DD
Other than that, it's mostly a bunch of minor additions. Oh, right, maybe a noteworthy item addition is the new drug Hyperreaction Drug stocked by the Drug Dealer. This gives you a new way to further up Aura's speed at the cost of gaining additional corruption. Of course, the slime companion also profits from this. Overall the purpose of the drug is to give you a corruption based way to raise AGI for passing jump points. In particular after getting a certain AGI reducing debuff. Speaking of jump points, you can now also use the Star Knightess to cheat jump points.
Okay, post is getting too long again. I will stop here. Let's see for how long we can go before a hotpatch is needed. While writing this text and taking screencaps I already found and fixed like two critical issues. :'D Of course during testing it looked all fine... Okay, anyways! Have fun corrupting Aura at Roland's or dying against the Dragon and Phoenix bosses in Mount Firestorm! The complete changelog can be found as usual below.