Liora's Price of Dignity 0.7.0-prerelease-3

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It is time. For Rean to suffer x_X ! My approach has been to keep the number of difficulty levels low, so that we can better concentrate the amount of feedback which makes it more actionable for me. But we have reached the point where we need to split the people who want an even more hardcore experience from the ones who struggle to deal with Normal mode. So here it is: Hard Mode.

Before we go through the modifiers so I can explain my train of thought as to why I added them, let me first discuss the modifiers that are not here: Extra stats (especially in the form of % based extra stats) for enemies and modifiers for negotiations.

From my experience with SKA I have not been super positive on enemy buffs. Just small buffs make the early game significantly harder due to the way they interact with the damage formula, to the point where you feel like you can't do anything. I think this is fine for SKA's Nightmare Difficulty as it kind of is in line with the story of Aura being at a complete disadvantage. The second downside of enemy buffs is that it drastically decrases viability of certain strategies as the ceiling of what a strategy needs to scale towards in the end game is also raised. This is particularly noticable for Magic vs Martials where Magic is perfectly fine in Normal and Hard, it requires extreme stat stacking (or dipping into lewd knowledge) to properly work on Nightmare.

So I decided that for Liora I didn't want to create extra difficulty through raised enemy stats. As for negotiations, they are kind of fickle - increase the negotiation value and certain clauses may not have good counterparts. So rather than making it harder to get value from negotiations, I wanted to focus more on things that push the player towards needing to perform negotiations.

Finally, I also opted against making Edgar stronger in Hard Mode as that is a two-edged sword and it's not clear at all if it would make the game harder or easier.

And that leads us now to the selection of modifiers for Hard Mode:

• Workshop prices x2: This is a modifier from SKA's Hard Mode that I have been very happy with. It lowers the available stats for the player, increases the demand for more gold (=more negotiations), and forces the player to substitute stats with consumeable items, leading to more interesting gameplay.

• -50% EXP Gain for Liora and Rean until Level 10: To further reduce player stats, I opted to slow down Liora's and Rean's natural level growth. Since this negative passive only applies until level 10, I expect it to mostly slow down the early-mid game, without massively affecting end game scaling. I chose level 10 as the removal point mostly because it's where Edgar's start level is at.

• Awakened Infection: This Disease that Rean would originally only unlock at Decay 15 adds an extra time component to Hard Mode. I deliberately balanced Normal mode so that time progression is not too cruel if you go along with Edgar's demands, it's fairly easy to keep Rean healthy. For Hard Mode, I wanted time to be more important and to give more of a feeling of despair - even if you agree with Edgar's every demand, Rean's Decay will mercilessly progress. Although slowly he will keep on getting worse even if you meet every payment...

For those who have been trying to get into states where Liora is both sexually corrupted and Rean is unhealthy, Hard Mode should help you facitliate you to get there with more natural role playing.

Want to start the game with Awakened Infection but play on Normal Mode? You can start the game on Hard Mode and then drop the difficulty---- ORRR

Use the new NG- Disease carry over feature! Pick diseases for Rean to start by paying with Score and receive Score Bonus as a reward. (If you pick Awakened Infection and then pick Hard Mode, Hard Mode will instead start you with Awakened Infection+ which triggers every 10 days instead of every 14).

In general, the NG+ mode for Liora has been adapted to work with both and Liora and Rean now. You can now invest into extra stats and skills for Rean just like you could with Liora.

Then, Trihan and me have been developing some alternate versions for the day transitions as I have not been super happy with the Wheel effect (the icons his wife drew are cute though!). I wanted something simpler that gives more information with less animation time. If you go into Options -> Interface -> Day Transitions you can currently pick between the three available day transition effects. I will make a poll tomorrow between them and the other two will be thrown out. We now have:

Wheel

Walking (Liora walks from Day Icon to Day Icon)

Selector (more like SKA / Persona)

Please try them out!

Moving on, the title BGM has been replaced with a new one, reducing the amount of time the SKA Corruption soundtrack gets played in Liora and further increasing our diversity in soundtracks.

Finally, Trihan has done some work on adding more juice to the game. I think talked about this on this month's project plan post. Neither Trihan nor me are artists, so I have been putting off juice work in favor of other features mostly focusing on usability / UI stuff. But we have some high value candidates by now which promise to have a good time-investment vs payoff.

States can now turn enemies transparent, which we used for specter type enemies with the Phase Out passive.

Furthermore, Trihan has taught enemies who receive the Flying state how to actually fly. They will now visually lift-off and then wobble in the air. Those who play a lot of RPGMaker games probably have seen similar effects already. I think these effects are particularly useful for us since they don't just juice up the game, they also help convey useful information about important enemy states.

Aaand that's it for the Liora prerelease - stay tuned, there will also be an SKA prerelease with new (although unillustrated ) lewd scenes.

Changelog 0.7.0-prerelease-3 (17.07.2026)

• Implemented difficulty Hard Mode

• Implementd NG+ bonuses for Rean

• Implementd NG- Diseases for Rean

• Implemented two alternate day transitions

• Implemented transparency and fading effects for battlers and applied to Phase Out state

• Implemented second thugs playing cards pixel animation

• Added bgm Title Menu

• Implemented flight effect to battlers

Balancing

• Decreased value of mining right contracts from 1600 to 800

Bugfixes

• Fixed passability issue in Darklake

• Fixed passability issue in Highwarden

• Fixed Edgar still training skills if HP replenishment strategy is no longer valid

• Fixed missing Rean sprite if negotiating his release while bedridden

• Fixed Edgar inventory check resulting in never being able to have 99 of an item Edgar also has

• Fixed Dracoling applying Flaming Robe effect twice

• Fixed Tactical Strike still applying below 50 relationship

• Fixed Darklake Depths not being tagged as underwater

• Fixed Dracoling having 5 MAT bonus twice

• Added check to encounter_11 in HighwardenKeep2 to trigger it if standing on it after exiting tower

• Fixed incorrect area level check for Nymphaea

• Fixed contract filtering bugs