ITCH | MEGA | ITCH-DELUXE | MEGA-DELUXE

With the patches out of the way, let's take a look at what's new in SKA this week! The past week has been pretty crazy - managing the post-release of both the SKA major update and the initial Liora release has certainly managed to keep me working x_X I didn't get to working on detailing out the concept for the Roland ending yet, so that will need to move to the next week. However, that's not something that would be part of the prerelease anyways.

What is part of the first prerelease towards the 1.2.0 update is the artwork that has been produced over the course of the past month. Richard and Aura got a new minor H-CG for their kissing scene, and the one that was a big load of work:

Integrating the new platinum blonde hair color into all the possible CGs! Some CGs weren't yet suitable for having flexible hair assets, so I needed to shift the display layers around quite a bit. The good news is that future hair styles should be 1 step easier to integrate with this setup.

Then, as I mentioned in the Liora post, NPCs got some new animations that got integrated in this update. The guard that gets fired and becomes a drunkyard after you steal from the Congregation funds is now visibly a drunkyard so you can better see his ruined life, hip hip hurray!

Outside of that, some prep work for the Roland ending. If you lose to him in battle while having the Roland Adoration debuff you now need to pass a Willpower check or Aura will give him the party's soul dust. In contrast to the festival party betrayal scene, I didn't turn this into a big moment, but rather a spur of the moment action where Aura gives in to Roland's command (with devastating consequences). Currently , if you do the check, there is nothing to see though, as the bad ending isn't implemented yet, so all you will get is a Game Over screen. But this way losing to Roland once will be sufficient to trigger his bad end.

In preparation for new Roland events (which won't be part of the smaller 1.2.0 major update but of the 1.3.0 after that one!), our assistant developer Trihan has also refactored the Roland NPC event to decrease the amount of spaghetti. This may break something in the short-term but will allow us to add more events more easily in the future.

Aaaand that's about it! Next week I will be beginning the work on the second bad end for the game, the Roland's Bitch Bad End.

Changelog 1.2.0-prerelease-1 (05.09.2025)

• Added Richard Kiss H-CG
• Added Platinum Hair Color variations
• Refactored main Roland event for easier readability and editing
• Refactored standing images plugin to expose internal functions through plugin variable
• Added pixel art animations for drunk guard and inn keeper
• Added pixel art animations for alchemist and fence worker animations
• Implemented willpower check to drain soul dust upon defeat by Roland at Reverse Summoning Ritual

Balancing

• None

Bugfixes

• None