The train of progress marches on! On our path to 1.0 and only a couple months left, I have been steadily progressing towards closing out the remaining milestones; this month the main ones were

• Finishing the final Demon General
• Handling the aftermath of killing Roland
• Closing out lewd skills / lewd books / the remaining interaction point in the mental world.

As usual, for more details, I recommend reading the weekly devlog posts. In this post, I will summarize the important advancements and go into detail regarding the new additions from this week. To start off, let's look at the usual summary in numbers! We have: 1 new H-CG, 2 new boss fights, one new final dungeon area, 2 new lewd skills (inlcuding all 3 ranks), 1 new Vice option, and lots of "small stuff".

As we have kind of entered the polish phase, it's getting more and more complicated to put things into just a couple of numbers, as progress is mostly done on various small fronts. Besides the "bigger" additions we have lots of minor improvements and additions such as two new pixel art chars from our pixel artist to better distinguish some minibosses in the overworld, various new NPCs with complex and reactive routines wandering Nephlune & Verdeaux, and lots of minor technical advancements.

Let's work out way through the changes!

As mentioned above, the main addition this update is the completion of the quest "Judgement of Pride". Deal with the last Judgement and challenge the final Demon General to battle! The big deal with this battle: You have a second chance to kill Roland. And this time around it doesn't require you to go through all the Popularity reducing effects (just reducing his popularity a bit more than increasing it is sufficient). Although it still make the battle a lot easier. In particular this meant updating all the Roland quests so that they could deal with the possibility of his death, which was also 99% possible. There is just one part in Poisoned Elixirs where a main option to progress the quests disappears, although the backup is luckily in-tact.

Then, also on the corrupt side, the Entertainment Den has also been completed through the last set of NPC additions, most importantly one offering a new opportunity to invest into slavery, but at a much higher efficiency than the Congregation branch in Nephlune - and higher Vice of course.

This week, I progressed further on the final dungeon, working my way through Richard's Domain. With the fourth level in, we are now half-way through! The Final Battle is closing in! As you can see from the screenshot, we will be revisiting the concept of an Underwater dungeon in this domain, but this time combined with the traits of a demonic domain. You won't have to learn Air Bubble for the dungeon, but not doing so will definitely put you up to some challenges.

Yesterday I mostly spent on iterating Clockwork Forest's Eastern area, and I believe minus some more balancing passes that one should be in a nicely playable state now. When you kill Ether Golem, you now also (among other materials) obtain the new material "Power Core" which gives a huge buff to MP OR has the secondary ability to recharge runes. An effect didn't have yet and for which I am curious what kind of applications players will come up with. Trihan has also made some more progress on the Western area, although as usual kind of last-minute so I haven't had the opportunity to check them out in more detail yet. :'D

And then, as mentioned, we have mostly a lot of minor changes. I finally replaced the stub credits and implemented an automated way to parse our CREDITS.json, expanded the NPCs in the cities, and focusing more on this week, also performed quite a few performance improvements. Since there isn't really one big major bottleneck to optimize, it's quite a grind, but I believe tackling the largest outliers from my performance analysis is likely to be worth it for older laptops and mobile phones. Overall eliminated the about ~10% contribution to CPU usage, not a lot but perhaps what some on the lower hardware spectrum needed.

I also improved my automatic build processes which have been mostly chugging along the past years, but recently the stability had deteriorated, leading to various instances of them deploying garbage (which some users then saw as 22 Byte sized downloads). The builds should be more stable now, I think the out of date mega dependencies were at fault. In case the deploy produces garbage, I have also improved the process to instead fail the build and not upload it (instead sending me a mail that the build pipeline failed so I can react faster).

Finally, we have some minor visual improvements as also mentioned at the begining of the post. The Ogre King and Mature Spider Queen now have dedicated overworld assets so they don't look like their early Chapter 1 counterparts on there.

Oh, right! And then, to close out the post, a final word to the balancing improvements. Slay the Demon has become a bit easier through 2 extra free starting perks and a reduced Class Point cost for acquiring skills. Also the skills Bomb Proficiency I/II had their power doubled to improve the capability of item focused builds. For the other balancing touches, I refer to the previous devlog posts for my reasoning behind them.

Aaaaaand I think that covers most of it?! Like mentioned, a lot of progress on different fronts, closing out our remaining items so we can make the final step to version 1.0. The goal of next month: Finish the Demon General levels of Richard's Domain!

Changelog 0.48.0 (25.10.2024)

• Added Veronica and George 8 Part 2 H-CGs
• Addded map Richard Domain 4 Envy
• Iterated Clockwork Forest Eastern Area
• Iterated Clockwork Forest west
• Judgement of Pride: Implemented Sixth Judgement
• Added boss Lucifer
• Added boss Thunder Golem
• Added skill Seductive Dance I
• Added skill Seductive Dance II
• Added skill Seductive Dance III
• Added skill Seductive Command I
• Added skill Seductive Command II
• Added skill Seductive Command III
• Added lewd book "Skillbook: Seductive Command I"
• Added lewd book "Skillbook: Seductive Command II"
• Added Slash III to John at level 14
• Added option to learn Seductive Dance I at Maid Academy
• Added option to learn Seductive Dance II at Maid Academy
• Gave Paulina Seductive Dance I at Maid Score 70 and Seductive Dance II at Maid Score 90, moving Seductive Stance II to 80
• Added material Power Core
• Gave Ether Golem Security Chip, Power Core and Etherplating drops
• Added emerald tea reward to Money Domain refugee if player paid debts of the other two competitors
• Nothing but the truth: Updated quest in case Roland dies before the quest becomes or is active
• Judgement of Pride: Implemented objective quest hand-in
• Poisoned Elixirs: Updated quest in case Roland dies before the quest becomes or is active
• Rampaging Golem: Updated quest in case Roland dies before the quest becomes or is active
• Luck is also a Skill: Updated Quest with variations for Roland death
• Gave one of the fishers in Nephlune an npc routine
• Expanded Order of the Knights Prison
• Added Order of the Knights Vice Chest
• Implemented credits plugin
• Added Goblin Shaman Compendium Unlock by Albrecht
• Added compendium partial info unlock for Mutated Hydrangea and Mature Spiders
• Added nobleman wandering NPC to Verdeaux
• Implemented mental changes for Chapter 3 Lewd Skill Shrine
• Implemented Entertainment Den Slavery section
• Added wandering NPCs with complex routines to Verdeaux
• Added post-reverse summoning ritual variation for Verdeaux nobleman
• Added custom pixel art for Dark Star Knightess TV/SV/TVD
• Added custom pixel art chars for Ogre King and Mature Spider Queen
• Added improved key unlocking pixel art for doors needing keys and remove no longer necessary door keys
• Added improved key unlocking visual for chests
• Refactored enemy Shadowcloak to be gained on combat start like the player instead of Turn 0
• Refactored hard-coded Rune usage logic to generic tag-based logic
• Improved performance of Event Shift plugin
• Improved performance of artifact plugin
• Improved performance Turn Count Lables
• Improved performance by CAE_MapEvents plugin by adding flags to deactivate unused features
• Increased max killed bosses to 121

Balancing

• Updated Seductive Stance III to affect both enemies and allies
• Added Heartbreak state giving CHARM resist and being gained upon CHARM removal until end of battle
• Reduced learning requirements Overcharge I to 30 ATK, 120 MP, Overcharge II to 50 ATK 200 MP, Thunderbolt II 60 MATK, 125 MP, Thunderbolt III 80 MATK, 250 MP
• Reduced HP cost progression on Assassinate II and III
• Slay the Demon: Raised number of free starter perks in Slay the Demon from 1 to 3
• Slay the Demon: Decreased Class Point cost per Skill from 5 to 4
• Increased Bomb damage increase from Bomb Proficiency I/II to 50%/100% #6688

Bugfixes

• Fixed typos
• Fixed remains of soldiers after Roland battle in Goddess Domain blocking path
• Fixed Luck Rate affecting probability of 100% State Application Effects on Normal Attacks
• Rampaging Golem: Fixed Tell Truth option looping
• Rampaging Golem: Fix mixups in state variables for end choices
• Fixed phantom Fleura and repeated choice after she wins corruption mission duel
• Fixed Fire Mage in Pasciel causing crash
• Fixed weather fog not resetting on load
• Fixed incorrect Magic Academy book variable post-reverse summoning ritual
• Fixed graphical glitch on mental day end in identity room unlock
• Fixed secret door in Laval mansion overlapping fireplace
• Fixed Reading Proficiency not affecting Tales of the Artificer
• Fixed A Child Needed not always giving Shadow support
• Fixed softlock case in Twin Adventurers corruption mission
• Fixed merchant not appearing in underground city when teleporting into it
• Fixed Demon-cracy flow issues when adult content is set to OFF
• Fixed Elizabeth boyfriend H-scene showing with adult content set to OFF
• Fixed apple merchant only restocking 1 apple a day on story difficulty
• Fixed Desmond incorrectly saying player defeated forest bandit leader even when they did not
• Fixed nonexistent objective trying to close in Something Is Fishy if Roland is dead
• Fixed Eyes of Greed not applying to pure recruitment option on Demon-cracy merchant
• Fixed vice choice in Poison Swamp still being offered before vice is unlocked
• Fixed missing system messages when enhancing Unicorn Horn
• Fixed Shadow investment option not increasing vice or corruption
• Fixed shadow mismatch on rock in Winterfall
• Fixed patrol desync in Clockwork Forest hidden cave

Stats

• Estimated play time: 36-52h
• Word Count: 844k
• Lewd Scenes: 131
• Real World Scenes: 325
• Epilogue Scenes: 16
• CGs: 51 (+1 Bonus CG)