aura-dev

Note: GmbH is roughly speaking the German equivalent to an LLC, everything is just more complicated over here. As mentioned in yesterday's prerelease post, I am becoming an evil company. In this post I want to elaborate a bit more on that and then proceed to the more interesting part, as to how I fo

For those who care about this kind of stuff, I have created a small spreadsheet to collect data on how many players the Dokomi event brought to us. I mostly focused on the Steam side since their analytics tools give the easiest to use data as I can only look at only stats from Germany. I gave some s

Star Knightess Aura and Liora's Price of Dignity will be at the anime convention Dokomi in Germany tomorrow (and the duration of the event). If you happen to be there, check out the VNi-Stand (Halle 5, 5D38). There will be giveaway events for steamkeys, Alicia cups with her Fashion Magazine motive,

It's been a while since I made this kind of post as ever since the 1.0 release of SKA the number of joins and cancellations have been huge. However, starting with the 1.1.0 major update of SKA and the 0.1.0 release of Liora, we have gone back to growing pretty fast again. It would have probably been

The following form contains a couple of soundtracks that occur quite often in the game. I'm curious to know which ones are popular and which one's aren't. FORM (Requires Google sign-in so I could turn on the limit to 1 response option)

Apparantly at some point we crossed the 1300 Patron threshold! Thanks for supporting, everyone! Some days ago I also updated the investment plan for the next milestone at 7500€ which currently looks like this: 100€ -> Mapping Assistant 100€ -> RPGMaker Dev Assistant 50€ -> Writing Assistant 50€ -> G

I have started dropping the original soundtracks we commissioned on Youtube. In case you were looking to add them to your playlist or something, you now can. Note that it's only the soundtracks that were composed during the brief duration we had a composer onboard. For any other soundtrack, I don't

Alright! I recently posted that we got really close last month, close enough to start the pixel artist search for this goal, and now we have properly reached it! So, in total we have a budget of 300€ for the pixel artist - 200€ from the goal and 100€ because our composer quit and I relocated the fun

I want to try out a different way of polling input for things that aren't simple votes. Let's try using a google form to collect proposals for Steam Achievements. The topic is still a bit off but the game is I think close enough to completion that it makes sense to see if there are some cool ideas o

It's been nearly a year (March!) since I last made the milestone post for 1100 concurrent patrons, but starting with the Chapter 2 release in November we finally picked back up some growth! Although only little and we will most definitely drop below 1200 again at the end of the month - we might mana

Before I go and waste money on Fiverr or similar places only to get mid results, I'm looking for some new banners that can be used for ads or in forum signatures. Currently I am using In case you were lacking an SKA forum banner: There you go. I am looking for new ones I can use, especially featurin

tl;dr If you are on Android, activate the External Save Option in the Options menu BEFORE upgrading to prerelease-1/major release! If you are playing on Android and don't want to lose your saves, please read this! Over the past month, I had been fighting with the external saves feature and made some

Also, I recently submitted a demo to Steam for the upcoming Steam Next Fest in February. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1827650/Star_Knightess_Aura/ In general, as I wrote in older posts, I'm pursuing a strategy similar to Kagura Games for steam where the steam version will be censored and then

A couple while ago Patreon banished the option to filter by post tags into a separate Tab called collections but also expanded the ability to, well, bundle certain posts into collections. I have used the ability to bundle tags to create some collections. Downloads which is just the downloads tags an

Since we dropped under the 6k€ goal (goal for +300€ art budget), I will be postponing the commission of more character art until we can finish a month with 6k€+. I hope that will be next month. Regular H-CG production budget is unaffected by this. I will still commission the character art update for

Been a couple of months since I could write this, but we have breached another goal. :) This one was super boring and deals with getting someone onboard I can outsource some of the marketing/community management work to. Though rather boring, having to advertise the game after a release, while deali

x25 was maybe a bit much lol

Just a small meta update rergarding Isekai Author+ tiers. Since the number of people (like 5 people :'D) in these tiers is so small that they basically have no effects on the vote, the benefit of the secondary vote currently feels a bit useless. So, to bump it up a bit the voting power in the second

Since Patreon is shutting down the goals feature, I will be using this post to keep track of the upcoming monetary goals. 14500€: I will bring back our Assistant Writer Absurdity (Worked amongst other things on Roland, Nothing but The Truth, Homewrecking) to support the writing side of content produ

I will probably start tasking our assistant RPGMaker dev Trihan next month or so to have a look at improving some the dumbest AI behaviors. What are instances of obviously dumb AI behaviors, for example where they use a completely useless skill, that we should take a look at? Example: A guard using

And here's the "NSFW" trailer version, which is pretty much the same as the in-progress version I have been posting during trailer production. And it's also pretty much just yesterday's SFW version but with some non-explicit CGs - which are apparantly still too much for Patreon which is why I have t

And here we have the SFW version of the finished trailer. In the SFW version, the CGs have been replaced with SFW cutscenes. https://youtu.be/s6Q9LctdQ5U Tomorrow the trailer producer will render the NSFW version. EDIT: Also please press the like button in the trailer, maybe youtube does some free a

I originally didn't plan on adding different options for this one. But since it's basically a free feature and I'm done with working today anyways, feel free to propose additional options to fill in the ???. If there are useful proposals by tomorrow when I restart working I will consider adding them

A bit more than half a year ago Patreon introduced an alternate schedule for billing where instead of at the end of the month, you get billed 1 month after joining. The major advantage for patrons is that this avoids double billing when joining at the end of the month. The catch: Once a creator swit

Second iteration of the trailer. I believe the overall structure is a lot better now with a clear segment structure for Roya - Mental World - Earth and the progression of the appearance corruption. For the beginning, I was unsure with the 3D and its potential to be misleading so we have different in

Managed to hit one last milestone before the month is over! Thanks everyone!

First version of the trailer with nsfw content. Texts are mostly placeholders. https://drive.google.com/file/d/12QrmcWhXTVCax6hUahP3aBTW05JT-Y_Y/view Thoughts?

Patreon may be abolishing the goal progress bar, but that won't stop us from having the 500€ investment rounds. And we just reached another one! This time to upgrade our art budget for a secondary artist. Thanks everyone! I will have some more discussions about this with our main artist Emubi and st

:(

Thanks everyone! We have finally reached the 4 digit count!

Thanks everyone! Another goal reached, this time for a 300€ budget for an Assisstant RPGMaker Developer. Our growth had stagnated quite a bit after we reached the full-time goal and I thought we wouldn't be making it here, but I hope that with this I can transfer some more technical RPGMaker work (b

I have seen quite a few player guides and also the wishes of some players to exchange their tips and tricks on strategies and so on. To provide a better infrastructure for this I have setup a wiki https://wiki.starknightessaura.com/ It was a bit of an adventure since I don't know too much about host

Also this. Only 100 more until we break the 1k patrons mark!

Thank you everyone!

...And after checking the new support level after waking up it seems we have taken the 4500€ Goal! Thanks everyone! The poll is still ongoing so I will probably post the results in a future devlog posts. Last 500€ to go to the full time goal!

Thank you everyone for raising your support! The recent increase of average pledges has finally brought us over this treshold. Less than 1k to go until the full time goal! As a reminder, once we breach the 5k goal, since I will be financed, the re-investment rate into the project for pledges after t

I usually prefer to focus on developing features that advance the game content, rather than monetization, but it seems to be that time again where I need to think about on how to further increase our funds. I already mentioned the increase of cancellations that we are facing. However, there is a sec

I think we very briefly reached this goal at the last day of last month before all the cancellations were subtracted, but I forgot to make a post. We are back 800 now, so here's a yay to reaching 800 Patrons! Thanks everyone! Let's see if we can also stick above 700 after cancellations this time. :D

If you downloaded the prerelease build within the last 24h, please redownload. I had deployed some bugfixes for last week's prerelease yesterday but for some reason I have yet to figure out a major data corruption occurred in the file tracking the connection between maps and their IDs. Which can mak

I just saw this. In case you see an internal release on a piracy site: This was not put there by myself. I have thread control over the piracy thread on the biggest piracy site in order to be ontop of things and post public builds. All internal builds are uploaded by leakers. I consider piracy inevi

:////// The itch and patreon integrations used to work quite well over the past year, not sure why they are suddenly making so many problems for some people. Anyways, since again some people have troubles with downloading the latest builds from itch using the patreon access, here's a link to a MEGA

I got a couple reports in Discord that some people had trouble downloading the game. If you are experiencing issues with downloading the game at the default download location: https://aura-dev.itch.io/star-knightess-aura-prerelease/patreon-access Here is an alternative MEGA download link for 0.20.0a

And another important mark reached! (Although I can see the number of cancellations and know we are going to fall far back intot he lower 600 range when the month is over :'D) In addition, I have also decided on how to proceed with the goals post the full-time goal at 5000€. Since at that point we h

Yay! Next milestone towards the big full time goal met! And with the administrative costs covered, we can go back to increasing the budget on the actual game. I haven't deciced on the poll options yet, but increasing the budget for the assistant writer will be definitely be one option.

I recently signed my an extension of my contract for my day-time job and wanted to communicate the effects on the Full-Time Goal at 5000€. My contract has been extended to 31.12.2022, so the earliest point for going full time would be the first of 2023. In case that we reach the goal sooner, I got t

Yay! One step closer to the big fulltime goal. At the same time, another 100€ to invest right now. Since the poll winner is fairly clearly 2D Artist, my monthly spending budget on Emubi can now increase from 700€ to 800€. Don't expect too much of a speedup, but it should eliminate some dead time bet

You can download all prerelease builds for March - or until itch resolves their issues for their patreon connection - using the below link: DOWNLOAD

Yay! Thanks again! With this I can up the dedicated monthly assistant writer budget to 200€ :)

Yay! We are also nearly at the half-way mark for the big full-time goal. Thanks everyone!