aura-dev

Star Knightess Aura Release 1.3.0-prerelease-1

Added 2025-11-07 23:12:31 +0000 UTC

Actually it's not that many release posts after all. I forgot Trihan had already done the maintenance patch yesterday so I only had to do the itch.io build and steam deployment of that one.

So, this week, there isn't anything particularly exciting from a player point as I focused mostly on technical work, automation and various cleanup tasks.

For those who are also into development with RPGMaker, it will probably be interesting that I built an update to the framework AuraMZ, which contains all the plugins I either collected from thirdparty developers, commissioned from our freelancers or made myself for Aura and Liora. While we SKA and Liora we made various improvements to the plugins, I have bundled all these improvements into the new AuraMZ release and synchronized them between our projects. It's why Liora may have some extra bugs, although it should be fine.

I also generally improved our repository structure so that we don't have so many duplicate files between SKA and Liora lying around. Again, not particularly interesting for the regular player experience, but all stuff that I had been negelecting for some time in favor of pushing content development, but that really needed some cleaning up.

I managed to automate a couple of things with some new python scripts. I was trying to completely automate the replacement of the mega links, but it turned out that patreon's API for editing posts is turned off, so this kind of died on the last meters... At least my script can automatically invalidate the old links and output the new ones ready for me to copy&paste into the posts. Better than needing to use the mega UI. On the automation side, https://kamilburda.github.io/batcher/ turned out quite useful for speeding up the export of artist files into the individual cg layers. With now needing to integrate two artist's artworks that's definitely a speedup I can use, also with the new Twin Tail asset integration coming up...

Finally, from my side the last item has been some extra work on the Paulina Training scenes, which are now a bit less static. I was hoping to also rework a couple other scenes which have a high CG reuse rate but going through these 4 scenes already took nearly two days x_X and didn't leave a lot of time left over.

Then, besides me, our assistant developer Trihan has also been developing some new features. The first on again a purely behind the scenes feature, where he cleaned a bunch of hardcoded system message strings (like the gold and item pickup messages) and replaced them through generated ones. This way our translators don't need to translate those anymore.

And then we have a new experimental feature that has been discussed a couple of times and is probably quite highly valuable both for replaying SKA and also for Liora - Skipping only unseen text. Thos who read renpy visual novels are probably familiar with ith. To activate this, flip the Option Interface -> Skip Unseen messages to OFF.

I say, activate but actually a big problem is that this feature is not free :')

In order to track which message have been seen and which hasn't we need to maintain an extra file (you can find it under the name seenMessages.rmmzsave in your save folder). And since the game has quite a lot of messages, this file risks becoming big, causing load and save time increases. For now, I have limited the seen texts to only perform a save when you quit the game, hopefully keeping the impact on those who don't want to use this feature to a minimum.

We have quite a few ideas to reduce the file size so hopefully it will in the end not be noticeable to thsoe not making use of this feature. While I don't consider it super important and more a minor QoL feature of SKA, I think it's quite important we can get this to work efficiently for Liora, as it has a lot of repeating scenes with variations. This way it will be possible to hold down skip for everything you have already seen and but prevent skipping over new variations.

There's also that the seen messages tracking is global, rather than file-by-file so you won't be able to distinguish between seen or unseen text between saves. Whether that will be a problem or not we will need to find out.

Alright, that's it from my side for the week. Our artists are still busy with their ongoing commissions.

Next week: We return to Roland lewd events, focusing on the consequences of the Nothing But The Truth Vice Ending (also since the last patch the bug that prevented players from accepting that quest should be fixed.)