Posted December 27, 2024 by aura-dev
The Final Battle is done. You can kill Richard. I am not sure how we did it, but we did it in time for the Friday release! With Christmas in-between I was not sure if it was gonna happen, but here we are.
Now, I will preface this post with the following: It's very likely there will be bugs in the Final Battle! I did quite some testing today but I am 100% positive I'm gonna get like 5 critical bug reports about some crashes, deadlocks or the battle being straight up impossible because I didn't consider some specific game scenario. For those who have been following the game since the early days, maybe you remember the month the Festival of Greed released. It's kind of like that. :'D Expect hotfixes. Multiples. Also probably tons of typos
And it's not just the Final Battle, our assistant developer Trihan also finished the Clockwork Forest quest in the nick of time. Well, actually this time with enough time for me to give it a look and at least superficially play it and give feedback, but with the Christmas days being in-between we are really just talking about a very iteration.
So! Let's get into the update. As usual: For those who are new, in this monthly release update post I will focus on summarizing the important additions as well as the work done this week, for a more detailed devlog, we have the weekly prerelease posts.
I have not yet tested the actual balance of the quest and mostly followed on giving feedback on the more general flow and mechanical balance, so I'm myself curious to see how the new boss racks up compared to Dragon Firestorm.
Together with the new boss fight, there is also a bunch of new loot including a super powerful new material that you can either sell for big cash, infuse into Aura or perhaps feed your slime for both lots of stats and massive EXP gain.
Then, on the art side, we have a new character artwork for corrupted Rose. I already used this screenshot in the devlog but since these posts are public I can't use one for the new H-CG that we also added in this update. The Corruption Ending now has the beginning corruption scene illustrated, meaning we are now only lacking 1 more artwork to finish the full art milestone for the purpose of 1.0.
Finally, the third massive contribution of this update is the completion of the Final Dungeon's final segment - the Final Battle. I won't post too much about that here to avoid spoilers, but I will just say that it turned out quite long x_X. 16k words. That is 1.5 the length of the Intro or about as long as the entirety of Nothing But The Truth. I hope it isn't too long, but I wanted a lot of things come into play and get their moment of screentime. Curious here to see where the balance ended up since it's one of those events which are incredibly difficult to predict.
(Once again I will refer to the first release of the Festival which was all over the place hahaha :'D)
Okay, anyways, since I don't really want to talk abou the Final Battle itself to avoid spoiling it, I will end this section here. Note that I finished the Final Battle but not the actual ending itself! We still need the epilogue for that to be really finished, which is basically the last main item on the development roadmap to 1.0. For the full set of changes, I refer as usual to the changelog below.
EDIT: Well that was quick.