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We progress closer towards the good ending! This week, I added the first of the three final segments of the good ending. It's largely just a narrative section where we can meet the Goddess once more and learn more about her and Roya (and to do some difficult jumps for last minute extra mats :'D).

I probably spent more time double checking if I wrote anything inconsistent than doing the actual writing in this area. Mostly because while the general direction has always stayed the same, various details have changed over the development time, so I hope it all fits together. Besides the new segment in the Final Dungeon, you will find quite a lot of "stubs" in the changelog. I started working on the second segment on Thursday, but didn't reach a good stopping point. Today I mostly implemented the mechanics of the Luciela fight, but without the aftermath, you would just end in a bad spot for an end-of-content point, so I made that area unavailable for now. Similar story with our assistant developer Trihan, who has begun developing elements for the last two floors of Clockwork Tower, but our mapper (and pixel artist) has been having some troubles recently and is a bit behind, so it's not in a playable state yet.

To avoid spoilers on the final part, I will just use this new cut-in thingy as the post screenshot. I didn't like the hard change in the pixel art when Aura removes her collar and the sprite switches to the Star Knightess one, so to improve the transition I integrated a little Skill Cutin plugin that displays the above. Also looks cooler. I need to play some more eastern RPGs, I randomly stumbled upon the plugin in some random game I checked out. And in contrast to other cutin plugins it was relatively self contained without adding a bunch of other unwanted side-effects in to the game.

Then we have a couple of minor additions. I expanded on the corrupt aspect of the Nephlune Guild Clerk and gave him the option of cheating you +1's in your Novice Adventurer and Intermediate Adventurer count. In exchange for an increasing amount of Bloodshot Eyes, this allows you to reach the next rank sooner or while skipping out other quests.

Then the Verdeaux Workshop has a new mini-quest where you have to charge an Orb with a bunch of Mana - nothign particularly special about the quest itself. It was a candidate for a Roland quest where we ended up going with the Golem one instead, but since it's quite simple and provides an additional way of putting left-over Mana to use, I decided to add it to the game. It also gives a +1 to the workshop but as the quest is unlocked on level 5 and there are no additional artifacts yet unlocking on level 6+, that has no real effect yet.

Balancing wise, we also have some minor changes. The fee to join the Mastery Club in the Magic Academy got reduced to 5k to accomodate for the fact that the Humilitas Rune is now mandatory to obtain (kind of hard when you just spent 10k on getting a Rank 3 spell). Then, Clockwork Forest is no longer locked behind the Reverse Summoning Ritual and instead unlocks immediately as you reach Expert-Rank, so you are guaranteed to always have an Expert-Rank quest unlocked upon reaching it. Finally, the Patentia Rune got a little power up and increases your MATK by 50% instead of 25% now, to increase its tactical impact.

Finally, on the art side, we have a couple of points of progress. Rose now has her demonic corrupted form as you might have already seen in another post this week and we started the development of the Final Corruption H-CG. It's a wopping 2300 USD x_X pushing out our total expenses quite high for the month. But I think it's important to have a strong finisher image. Also, I mentioned our mapper and pixel artist earlier, while they are quite behind, they did make some progress on the last batch of 1.0 pixel art work. Most notably,

The Goblin Shaman and Goblin King now have distinct character images (although I now notice that when looking up the crown seems to be missanimated :'D). Anyways, no longer thinking an enemy is a Goblin Shaman and then getting surprised by it being a different enemy!

Aaaand I think that covers it for this week! See you next week!

Changelog 0.50.0-prerelease-2 (13.12.2024)

• Added Demonic Rose Character Artwork
• Added mini quest in Magic Workshop: Orb Charge
• Expanded Nephlune Clerk to offer fake Novice and Intermediate Rank quests to advance towards rank-up in exchange for Bloodshot Eyes Drugs
• Implemented Richard Domain 8 Memory Fragments
• Implemented Richard Domain 8 Goddess Meeting
• Integrate CutIn plugin to cover over SK Costume switch mid-battle
• Added Luciela Cut In when she uses Nightmare Claw on a DROWSY target
• Stubbed out map Richard Domain 9
• Added meeting Richard in 9th level and stub battle against Luciela
• Added customized pixel chars for Goblin Shaman, King and Empowered Avian
• Added stub boss battle Artificer
• Began implementation of Luciela battle
• Setup timing of Clockwork Forest F3 traps
• Updated Clockwork Forest manuscript

Balancing

• Changed Clockwork Forest quest to unlock upon Expert-Rank unlock
• Decreased Belphegor AGI to 15
• Reduced Magic Mastery Club joining fee from 10000 to 5000 Gold
• Increased Patentia MATK buff to Drastic buff

Bugfixes

• Fixed typos