Magical Viking Erika (post-Jam/dev thread) - v1.0.5 "It Works Now" available on Itch!

[jimbobvii]

Erika Yoshino is an introverted college student with a secret: her internship with Marshan Industries is actually a cover for her gig as a magical girl!

But not everything’s rosy - the interdimensional rifts she’s sent to investigate pump her body full of mana with each enemy she defeats, destroying her metabolism and increasing her appetite.

Can Erika save the city - and her waistline?

FEATURES:

• A hybrid of Visual Novel/Management Sim and JRPG gameplay!
• More than half a year of in-game time! Five different dungeons! Calling them ‘unique’ or ‘handcrafted’ is only slightly stretching the truth!
• Five stages of weight gain and ten stages of inflation!
• Evolving equipment system! Cast spells from your installed magichip often to unlock more versatile spells!
• Multiple outfits for Erika to wear at home!
• Fat girls! Frontal nudity! Stretch marks! Highly suggestive scenes! No explicit seggs!
• Violence that some people may find mildly triggering, a half-assed jumpscare somewhere in here…
• A small cast of lovable companions!
• Shady international conglomerates! Corporate intrigue! Insane mad scientists! …Murder?
• And so much more! (note: not really much more)

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? Download version 1.0.5 HERE (Windows/Mac/Linux x64, Mac ARM64 for Apple Silicon; all Mac files untested) or v1.0.5 Patch Only (for anyone who already has version 1.0.3 or newer downloaded)

Balancing and equipment issues aside, v1.0.5 should be about as playable as it gets - all known issues have been addressed, along with a handful of others, plus the beginning of some balance tweaks and a couple scenes that hadn’t been fully or properly implemented. Granted, I probably created some minor new issues as well, so let me know what’s still broken and I’ll get it fixed up.

---

Okay, look. About three hours before the 2024 Gain Jam closed, I took a shit.

• Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of what I accomplished with this game, even if I’m unsatisfied with how much had to be cut or simplified. But it was that cram, that push to cut as little as possible that led me to working on content right up until the deadline instead of taking a day or two at the end to actually playtest and bugfix, and even then I lost the last couple hours as family started to show up for the holiday weekend.

• I had hoped it’d mostly just work. It really, really didn’t, and I have insane respect for players like @jeffskeep who pushed through anyways, shaving a lot of time off finding and fixing bugs. To make matters worse, I did a five-minutes-of-playtesting ‘bugfix’ version before the deadline that a) didn’t even make it to the biggest showstopper, even when it could’ve, and b) didn’t work, as I just stuffed the new data files from the project straight into the exported and encrypted build I’d first uploaded, meaning the game failed before initializing because it couldn’t decrypt anything.

Version 1.0.2, linked above, fixes all the reported bugs and then some.

• Like, even when I fixed the bugs that were mentioned, there were linked bugs that could’ve been even worse. For example, a report led me to realize I’d never had anything calling to check whether certain outfit unlock conditions had been met, leaving Erika stuck wearing her everyday outfit around the house. But had I fixed it, the game would’ve hardlocked if set to anything else, because I seriously fucked up the UI code for everything but the standard outfit. I think there’s 27 entries in the changelog for this version, and only a third at best are quality-of-life changes rather than actual issue fixes.

Is the game perfect or bug-free now?

• Absolutely not. But I’ve at least tested it as far as the beginning of Chapter 2, which means all the major logic switches are working, and by some miracle it was possible to progress at least as far as Chapter/Month 5 in the original build, so I’m hoping at this point you can at least progress close to the endgame even if there’s still something that breaks along the way. All that aside, you should probably expect text boxes in the wrong style or with wrong/missing nametags, incorrect images called/erased/moved, facial expression overlays having the proper coordinate sets or being chosen for the wrong character, etc.

Where does the game go from here?

• First and foremost, once the weekend’s over I need to sit down and do a full playtest, jot down even the littlest thing I notice, fix it, run everything again. I really need to do some balancing, too - almost nothing meaningfully reduces academics or mood, and the battle system’s barely tested either.
• There’s other stuff I had to cut for time - the bond events, which basically flesh out character backstory and relations, the closest there really is to a ‘dating sim’ element here, were reduced from full scenes to a couple of summary paragraphs each. Many weekday/weekend events are similarly sparse, and also roll one of usually three variants of an event, with very few actually taking social stats or character weight into account. There’s a framework for a chat system - hit the button and Erika will comment about a social stat, story progress, her outfit, her weight, etc., etc. - but in the end I just hid the button for it because I never had time to write any of the responses.
• Without spoiling the ending, I think I made it clear how there could be a spinoff title, a continuation of the current game, or even both. Whether I proceed with any of that largely depends on reception to this game, though.

Waddaya want from me, Jim?

• FEEDBACK. I desire it. I crave it. I need it. It NOURISHES me.
• No but seriously, feedback. Any issues, no matter how small - I’m not going to catch all of them alone. Things you liked, things you didn’t like (although believe me - I’m aware that some screen fades last too long or that the main BGM loop gets grating fast), what you do or don’t want to see more of (besides more ‘fat of she’).
• This is and always will be a free game, but I do have a Ko-Fi somewhere in my profile if you really want to donate.

[jeffskeep]

Oh boy here we go

Will report back later with anything I’ve found.
I think I’m just gonna continually update this post to let the thread be cleaner

Just a little quick one,

Not pictured - It pulled up the ui for changing schedule when I clicked explore, so I think the issue is that the weekday ui isn’t getting turned off when it turns into weekend, cause the buttons are in the same place on the ui.
I think it was some weird combo of weekday and weekend ui’s on, it started exploration and pulled open the schedule window, the exploration should have flipped the weekday ui switch, and the schedule page should have flipped the switch back on.
Hanging out and going to dinner (havent tried the others) culminates in a black screen,

the weekday start switch is enabled, but that isn’t flipping the ui switch to come back on. Luckily I can just flip the switch to turn it back on to continue, but it’s a problem.

[bloodrain327]

First things first I want to say I love the premise and potential this games has that being said I ran into a few things almost immediately the biggest being you cannot progress past the first weekend. I haven’t tried exercise but both the hang out options and the rest option lead to a black screen after the scene plays out. The second being the solo-target wind spell, the multi-target lightning and fire spell, all the multi-target status effect spells and all the stat debuff spells remain unavailable despite having enough mana to cast them. Some other things that may or may not be intentional finishing the intro rift does not heal you and I may be shot for this leveling feels kinda fast after completing the intro rift and completely clearing the rift during explore you go from level 4 to level 9. I really want to see where this games goes and I hope my testing helps in some small way.

[jimbobvii]

Thanks for the feedback - I’ll start double-checking some things.

• I can’t even say how I broke the week end → next week start thing, but I managed to. Fix up shortly.
• The grayed-out spells mean the magichip providing them needs to be used more to unlock them, although it should be the multi-target wind spell locked, not the single-target. I’ll double-check
• Fast leveling is somewhat intentional - the goal for the game jam build was to ensure it was fairly easy to actually get through the game, so the balance is way out of whack.

[themaninmidnight101]

How are you toggling the switch? I can’t seem to get the game to properly transition from weekend to weekday.

[jimbobvii]

Version 1.0.3 is up - get it here

• Finishing a weekend event should properly progress
• Fixed which wind spells were locked/unlocked by default on wind-based magichips

I suppose I’ll have to stop using encryption with the next build so I can just push hotfixes without making people redownload the entire game, but it’s too late for this one.

@themaninmidnight101

How are you toggling the switch? I can’t seem to get the game to properly transition from weekend to weekday.

That’s my bad - I made a stray edit to the event after I finished playtesting and didn’t capture it before uploading the last build. Should be fixed in the new version if I didn’t muck something else up.

[jeffskeep]

RPGmaker mv cheat plugin - basically the same thing built into joiplay (for phones)

But its a pain to install cause you have to do it per game.
I’d just wait cause Jimbob said he’s working on it

[jimbobvii]

Okay, I missed the edits to this post, my bad. I’ll start looking into it - the UI might’ve been a one-time thing but if the week start events aren’t firing that’s concerning. That might’ve been because of manual switch toggling, though.

EDIT: Can’t reproduce at the moment with the 1.0.3 build, so I’m going to guess the way you were toggling switches must’ve skipped parts of the usual event processing, both for the UI and weight events. In the previous version the event that checked for the Week Start flag was broken - I somehow fat-fingered an extra blank event page at a higher priority as I was saving and building - which is the event that processes all of that, so it’s no wonder it never worked.

[jeffskeep]

Yeah that’s likely. Sorry for the false flag,

[jimbobvii]

No problem. I had a feeling the new build would’ve fixed it by the time I finished, but it’s always good to take another look at things. I’ll admit I’m a little embarrassed by how often I seem to be messing up the little details here, though.

[jeffskeep]

That’s just how it goes,

I crush one bug and that makes 3 more

[jeffskeep]

First weekend still seems to have that schedule/ weekday ui present while exploring issue I talked about, every other weekend is fine though.

Mari shows up at size 2(? I think? If starting state is 0) Despite just doing the one dungeon, (I did kill the hydra the first run, if that matters) It plays her scene where she blames Reed for shrinking her clothes and then he tells her to check how much they shrunk by. Erika is also size 2 at this point, if that has something to do with it. Mari’s weight is only 145 at this point, and all she had was the base max mana from the dungeon. Oddly enough, this fixed itself after a while.

Erika’s Closet is working, Mari’s doesn’t seem to be.

[jimbobvii]

From a quick look at the database, I can’t really tell why the weight event issue would be occurring - I’ll have to dig deeper into that tomorrow, although it turns out that the Fitness adjustment from killing enemies is looking at the complete wrong variable.

I haven’t experienced the schedule bug firsthand but I’ll double-check that the tutorial event isn’t accidentally bringing back or failing to clear the UI.

The closet thing is just a copy/paste error, it’ll be patched tomorrow.

[themaninmidnight101]

Yeah, Mari is bugged. She’s showing her level 1 weight despite being 175lbs.

[jeffskeep]

Sounds good. I’m just about back to month 4 and it’s been basically perfect otherwise.

Mechanically - and I might be a minority here,I think the weight gain from mana should be massively tuned down, alternatively the gain needed for each stage doubled or tripled. - I haven’t finished the game so I’m assuming it ends month 6? Issue’s mostly (for me) that both of them are probably gonna hit max-size 2-3 months before that point.

I threw both mana infusers on Erika, so her mana cap is 650 at this point. Mari is about 400-425 or something Meaning I only have to do 2-3 explores to bump them up a weight size.
Violet warned her she might gain 70lbs over ~6+ months, and so it’s amusing to me that she can gain that in about a weekend.

While I’m takin a dinner break:
Here’s some brainhole stuff that (you can safely ignore, honestly) I think I’d like to see someday, but won’t expect -

There was another scheduling game on here called BoB, but based on your character’s stats you could kind of lose control of them. I.e you set a reasonable diet on the schedule, character decides they want to eat unhealthily. If they’re too out of shape and you tell them to workout hard, they’ll go for a light walk instead. Reverse could also be true, if your character had a high enough fitness/low enough greed stat.

You kinda have something like that - in that the midnight snacks seem to unlock at size 1 - I’d like more stuff like that.

EDIT: If Mari is to the right of you when you interact with the terminal that allows the killbot through the gate in dungeon 4 the game will freeze cause it can’t path to Erika. Also It will still be there after the fight, so you can kill it once more.

Act 5 start has the weekday ui show up at the start, and when you get the dialogue that pops up before the crystal, the combat outfit models stay on the screen, which doesnt really matter cause you fight the boss right after.

On second thoughts, I think I take back everything I said about the mana stuff, I do think it scales maybe a little too hard. But it’s a management mechanic and that’s fine

[jeffskeep]

DO NOT CLICK if you’re not done Alright the ending was incredible. and I soo hope Cyberpunk Berserker Erika becomes a thing someday.

Can confirm that other than the 2 ui bugs in the act 5 dungeon (which are mostly just an annoyance), it’s perfectly playable and a fantastic game.

[bloodrain327]

Found one more bug
Mari doesn’t get extra magichip slots despite text saying they’ve been unlocked

EDIT: Also unless I’m incredibly blind which is a possibility there doesn’t seem to be a lvl2 wind magichip anywhere

[rimean]

How do i raise third stat? One that looks like something related to music.
I remember that game explained it at the beginning, but i forgot about this one and i can’t figure out how to raise it

[jeffskeep]

It’s mood, so sleeping in, hanging out with friends, bathtime

[rimean]

This game is indeed enjoyable, although sometimes i dislike that your schedule is affected by RNG, three weeks in row i was unable to swim due to “problems with pool”
When i try to make girls gain weight, almost always at least one of them gets jumpscare after trying to have a midnight snack.
Now all i need to do is wait till Mari is fixed and play it once again, once i finish my current run