ITCH | MEGA | ITCH-DELUXE | MEGA-DELUXE
All hail Demon Queen Aura! While last week's update focused on the mostly lewd oriented ending frame, this week focuses on bringing epilogue scenes that largely focus on Aura's new role as Demon Queen. In particular, they focus on her conquest on Roya (and a certain other world). So while it was possible to only view her Demon Queen persona for just a minute or so in the Ending scenes herself, there's now a bunch more of that in the epilogue scenes.
Many of the epilogue scenes also come with major variations based on your progress in Roya and your (Lewd and Vice) decisions. Roughly speaking, the more Aura achieved as a Hero (e.g. killed Demon Generals and saved "good" characters) and the fewer connections she has made with "bad" characters", the more troublesome her conquest will be.
In general, I expected her to sweep a bit more over Roya, but certain characters apparantly turned out to be more of a headache even for our Dark Star Knightess Aura than I anticipated. Especially the probably least signficant companion Desmond, since he doesn't have any major character shifts, his more constant character allowed me to have a constant element in the heavily shifting epilogue content.
At least he now gets his character development in the special epilogue scene "Bandit Kingdom" :D (requires to not have done the reverse summoning ritual and to kill either 5 Demon Generals or 4 Demon Generals and I think 7 Demonic enemies - Demons or Contractors.)
I found the current state makes actually for a pretty good narrative wrap, although some choices don't have scenes yet. Next week I would like to tackle those. E.g. things like giving James the Corrupted Humanitas Rune or Lorraine becoming Knight-Commander.
John will also get a larger scene to respect the completion of the Reverse Summoning Ritual a bit more. While not every character will appear in every possible ending configuration (that would make the epilogue too long I think) I would like as many as possible to have some sort of potential apperance in at least some variation, even if it's just in the narration..
For example, when conquering Trademond, if Aura allied with at least one of the influential merchants, he will help her by betraying the city and making the capture of Trademond fairly easy, and then become the new ruler of Trademond. Candidates here are the old Lord Trademond himself, Rosemond, Hermann and Victor.
Finally, you will notice that quite a few scenes have a focus on how much damage Aura's armies take, certain characters having the possibility to survive in special circumstances (Julian), etc. I would like to later on have that play a role in deciding whether the Resistance will be able to continue resisting Aura, ending the corruption ending a more positive note where the world might be ruled by Aura and Richard right now, but the legacy of her old personality, Hero Aura, is allowing everyone else to fight on. Or if they get crushed.
But we will see about that, still trying to figure out if that bloats the epilogue a bit too much or makes for a nice finish - we will find out next week, ahaha. Until then, have fun with the first iteration of the epilogue!
PS: There are quite a lot of epilogue scene variations, and I had to manually simulate the conditions by manipulating the variables to test them instead of using the proper end states, so I might have there might be some trigger bugs I didn't catch x_X
EDIT: I did a redeploy with a bunch of minor glitches (invisible aura, wrong triggers etc) fixed.
Changelog 0.46.0-prerelease-2 (09.08.2024)
Added Fighting Over Richard 5 H-CGs
Added epilogue scene Capture of Trademond
Added epilogue scene Unification of Nephlune
Added epilogue scene Fall of Verdeaux
Added epilogue scene Paulina Partial Maid
Added epilogue scene Bandit Kingdom
Added epilogue scene Earth Invasion
Added epilogue scene Fixing Alicia
Improved narrative design of some Demon-Crazy interactions/scenes
Added Bunny Girl variations for Fleura, Aria and Liria
Expanded epilogue with demon-craczy results
Expanded Demon Invasion 2 No Influential Ally with Rescued Sophie variation
Moved Aura portrait to right side when talking to Shadow minion
Added pink hearts to Liliana dialogue during Voting Encouragement H-scene
Improved flow of Voting Encouragement ending
Changed Shadow reason for teleporting Aura to shadow realm
Added missing vice checks to corruption actions in Demon-cracy
Registered epilogue variables and switches for NG+ carry over
Balancing
Increased Demon-cracy experience to 75
Bugfixes
Fixed prerelease typos
Fixed shattering idealism crystal causing a freeze if interacting from the left
Fixed extraction of Fleura logic causing multiple messages to show
Fixed being able to continue Fleura corruption mission after election is over