The Maid Academy mostly reaches the end of its content! With all the remaining lewd content cleared out last week, this week dealt with wrapping up most of the remaining activities at the Maid Academy. The update is overall a bit shorter than usual because I had to deal with all the various states of progression lewd progression, pure progression, Paulina training progression... 

I tried to make things a free-form as possible - you can continue doing Maid Trainings after the graduating and receiving the Letter of Recommendation! For that purpose, I also added some "stretch" rewards in the form of a unique Material that you can get for exceeding the Maid Score of 100. (Although you currently only get them when graduating.) For every 10 Maid Score beyond the 100 goal, you receive one of this Maid Academy exclusive material which is also worth 900 Gold (So 450 Gold if you sell it) and should provide a reasonable enough motivation for Aura to potentially do some more maid activities after graduating. You can also continue to sell out Paulina, etc.

Only when you tell Claude that you want to end his patronage and take Paulina back do you permanently lose access to the Maid Academy.

It's a lot less free-form when you kill the Demon General Asmodeus, whose boss fight I also implemented this week. There were a lot of invalid states, so I had to chain a couple of events to make sure that the resulting state is well-defined / doesn't lead to a lot of handling of unnecessary intermediate states without real value. 

Speaking about the boss fight, it's probably the most bullshit one in the game yet. The guy even has a way to counter Acid Bombs (to some degree)! The fight is balanced with future rank III skills in mind but I already guess that the more veteran players will roll over him anyways.... :'D

While the game doesn't focus on battle fuck, I tried to add some slightly more erotic themed elements to the battle, giving Asmodeus a special bondage skill that adds the Aroused state. You can break out of it at the cost of spending a turn (I might add some more cost to this in the future), should you stick around for it too long, Asmodeus has a skill that can force Aura to orgasm - which is kind of funny on a pure run to have an Aura who is at 0 Lewdness but has several orgasms from this battle :'D

Either killing Asmodeus or graduating will then give you the Letter of Recommendation for the follow-up Final Shield quest I will working on next month.

NOTE: I only really got started with updating the Paulina states today! Post-breaking patronage of Claude, I have not yet handled her state update! So she's back in the Adventurer Guild afterward, but that's it. I still need to handle the update in the Reverse Summoning Ritual and other events. Furthermore, there are also various other NPCs in the Academy not reacting to this, etc.

So, yeah, as expected handling all the variations with the quest outcome x paulina's training progress is causing quite lot of states. Not that it's an issue, but it still requires a day or two of work to handle everything. Especially also due to special states like killing Asmodeus (and with that also Lilim) but the curse not being reverted because of the vice actions. Above has a special state where Paulina returns to the Adventurer Guild, remains a girl but keeps her pink hair and the maid headress. 

Outside of the Maid Academy stuff, mostly we have some technical level work from our assistant developer Trihan alongside the bugfixes.

Next week, I plan to finish the missing state updates and then spend the rest of the week on the Wrath level of the final dungeon, which will be the last dungeon update for the final dungeon for a while until we get back to it towards the end of 1.0 dev. For the full changelog, as usual, I refer to the below.

Changelog 0.40.0-prerelease-2 (09.02.2024)

• Added map Maid Academy Upper Floor 
• Implemented red herring sneak mini puzzle Maid Academy North Wing 
• Added boss battle Demon General Asmodeus 
• Implemented Maid Academy Graduation 
• Improved Magic Academy teachers to only enable options the player can select 
• Added minor text extensions to Paulina Training 3 and 4 
• Implemented generic logic to handle updating active enhance or stance skills when learning the next rank 
• Changed stance and enhance skills activate from the list like autospells without requiring actor selection 

Balancing

• None

Bugfixes

• Fixed typos (Thanks to Kytt)
• Fixed z-ordering issues from * tile and event character interactions 
• Fixed save menu showing variable IDs instead of values for stats 
• Fixed vice checks checking for influential tag in lewd tags instead of vice tags
• Reenabled enhance and unenhance tags in enhance skills to fix Air Bubble I/II not detracting Air on unenhancing
• Fixed missing dialogue reflecting Roland's death to knight outside order building
• Fixed missing Laura's portrait to library dialogue in labyrinth of happiness
• Fixed Claude vice choice not calling prepareViceAction
• Fixed text overlap issue in description for Flaming Robe I and II
• Fixed missing level 4 unlock to Verdeaux Workshop info
• Fixed Medium and Small slime incorrectly inheriting Enhanced state after splits in Queen Slime fight
• Fixed Blessed Water having no effect at 1 Corruption in difficulties below normal
• Fixed repeated Alicia line and incorrect item name when paying for Curse Trap Barrier