Yep. Mari works now. The bug with her suddenly entering weight 2 then shifting back to her proper weight still happens, but she’ll progress to her later stages. I think I figured out the issue though. Mari shows her weight 2 cutscene when she enters weight 1 for some strange reason. She’ll then shift back and show the same weight 2 cutscene when she hits weight 2 proper.
Hmmm… Everything in the regular event flow looks right so I suppose I must be making a rogue call to the event somewhere else, especially if it’s playing again later when it should. I’ll do a deep dive tonight, thanks.
Yep… I get the coordinates right, but get the image layer wrong. I get the image layer right, get the coordinates wrong… I’d be surprised if this was anywhere near the last one.
I reinstalled the thing to check switches/variables - It never increases the ‘Mari max size reached’ value from 0(neither does it change her current weight), and only sets her ‘current size’ value to 2, so I’m guessing that’s why it’s fixing itself (when she enters size 1) and allows the size 2 scene to play again later.
I had Erika at size 2 (or entering size 2) both times this happened for me, so my guesses are it’s either tied to that scene, or it’s being changed by the switch for ‘someone reached size 2’.
Hope that helps any, I could try running it again and just leaving her size value up on the screen to see exactly when it switches.
Yeah, I think I figured it out - I wrote out a shared script that took an input weight value and output a weight level value, but forgot to set what’d happen if it was below the first WG threshold (it just returned and kept the previous value rather than returning 0), so it’d only ever return zero if it never got any input that’d put the return above zero. So until she got to WG 1, Mari’s check wouldn’t update it, and just used the value from when the check was run against Erika’s weight instead - if Erika was stage 1, Mari’s stage 1 event would run, etc. It’s fixed for whenever I upload a new build - so far it’s the last major bug, besides the flag for checking if you’ve cleared the month’s dungeon not being toggled back off when the month rolls over.
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I’m so far in love with the game so far! I would to offer any support I can toward the project if possible, I not be able to provide funds currently but, I am willing offer what I can in terms of help to make the game keep progressing
Enjoyable little game, shame that it wasn’t ready for the showroom floor at the end of the gamejam. I enjoy the writing and the schedule gameplay (More games need schedule systems Princess Maker Style)
But I just can’t look at the character faces, they just make me uncomfortable. Something about the eyes strikes a cord in the uncanny valley. But apart from that, I do really hope you continue to work on this!
Okay after playing until the end of the current game jam story, Heck yeah this was a great game and i hope to see this fully finished, heck went through the hassle to get one of the girls too fat game overs… shame you had to cut a lot of the content just to get it out in time for the Game Jam but can’t wait to see how this game develops
Edit: though i did find the last dungeon xp grind a hassle just to be able to fight that dungeons boss
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Is the magical shield supposed to be that buckler? (670)
It has the highest defense but doesn’t really fit into the price escalation pattern of the other items in shop
Viking still does a double attack even if she has a buckler equipped. It would make more sense to have her do that only when she has two weapons
Glad you’ve enjoyed it! Right now the best way to support is to give feedback, especially as I’m hoping to have the last of the major bugfixes done in the next couple days and getting ready to ask what everyone wants the future of the project to focus on.
Thanks for the feedback! I will admit, getting a pseudo-anime style to work in a realism-focused tool like DAZ isn’t entirely easy, and I am far from being a DAZ expert in the first place. A little post-processing would go a long way, as would taking the time to tweak the expressions and poses, or standardizing the camera settings between characters. Even then, though, at less than ten seconds per render (minus most of the backgrounds or epilogue CG, or Erika’s combat outfit taking longer due to its reflectivity), it still took the first few days of the Jam getting the images rendered and ready in a state where I was halfway satisfied.
In the long-term I’d like to get some sort of post-processing pipeline going where I can make the images feel more like a two-dimensional drawing without losing too much of the detail, and perhaps even hand-drawing the faces (or rather, paying someone who can actually hand-draw the faces). In the short-term, though, I’d think at least lessening the reflectivity of the eyes and getting better control of the mouths and cheek/face blush for expressions would be pretty useful.
Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed it! Balancing the combat and social stats are at the top of the list for post-bugfix updates.
Yeah, the last shield was a last-minute addition when throwing the weapon database together, since small shields didn’t really have higher-level gear; I probably copy and pasted from another item and forgot to set the price tag.
The dual attacks with shields is a bit of a plugin conflict that I still need to resolve - I’ve used one plugin for managing shields or two-handed weapons while the viking class itself is set to dual-wield, while a Visustella plugin has its hooks deep into the inventory and combat systems, as well as managing unlocking the extra magichip slots. It’s better than it was, at least - when I first had them both installed the shields were still doing full damage and player inventory screens were completely broken - but it’s probably going to be first in line to handle when it comes to combat balancing.
Well I do have slight bug to share with, I apologize if its existence was brought to light or not just yet!
In my playthrough of the game, I explored all of the second area and unlocked the boss crystal but, I did face the boss. When the game rolled into the next chapter it acted as if I had defeated the boss of zone two and gave me the cutscene about an item I did not discover yet.
Secondly when came to the sandy area, the flag that makes the party unlock the boss crystal seems to not deactivate after it first proc, so I was stuck trying walk back to the grind only to be force into the cutscene again and again until I had to simply use the boss crystal to teleport back to the start
Thanks for pointing these out! Being able to skip actually completing dungeons is a known issue, but I hadn’t actually noticed the issue with the desert cutscene (the event makes it look like you’ve activated the crystal, but forgot to actually set the flag for activating it, and the condition for triggering said event is that you haven’t set the flag for activating the crystal).
Both of these and a lot more are fixed for the next patch - I’m just getting some actual playtesting of my own in this time to avoid unwittingly introducing more major bugs.
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A few times throughout my playthrough I noticed that when I would began the week for the girls that the game would run two weeks worth of time rather than just one, Clarity sake I means that the game would run through the first week of events and immediately do a second week of events without an the normal hang out, explore or work out weekend events. I wasn’t able to find if they game was simply spooling out two weeks in one week or if was doing two weeks fully but, I did obtain stat changes for only the first instance in my research.
I will have to play around with the game more to find the true trigger but suspect the issue has something to do with overuse of the swap button and/or pulling up the schedules too fast.
More than likely, it’s simply a matter of double-tapping the Start Week button. The amount of time it takes the game to recognize a button press and add the associated event to the queue is a lot shorter than the time it takes to actually start the queued event and disable further input from the button, meaning you can stack the same event twice (or potentially more, with a very good mouse or autoclicker, or maybe just a very slow PC).
In most cases it’s harmless - who’s going to care if you accidentally pull up the schedule or shop menu twice? - but I do need to get a preventative check in for double-running weekday schedules or weekend events. Should be pretty trivial so I’ll probably break everything implementing it it should be done for the next patch.
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Magical Viking Erika’s latest patch is live - and on itch! See the full changelog here.
This should take care of the last major remaining bugs, if I didn’t create new ones. Erika’s weapon/shield slots still need fixing, but until I can work out the exact nature of the plugin conflicts she can just equip 1H or 2H weapons (or even shields, probably) in both slots. Just consider it the true power of a magical girl.
From here on out, the focus is going to be on re-balancing and implementing things I didn’t quite finish for the game jam before hopefully moving onto new content. That said, there are a couple of tiny dialogue tweaks and new scenes in this version too, either newly added or already-existing but not properly set up to play.
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The designs for all the characters are really nice, especially for the setting! I think the premise alone is super interesting and you build on it well. Nice game!
Now that I’ve finished the version before your last update, I want to say again how great I think this game is. The game loop was conceived well from the outset and is very entertaining. I appreciate the balance of planning and randomization, of VN and RPG adventuring. The character models are cute and the dialogue is well written. I like that the biggest influence on the girls’ weights seems to be how much mana you retain after exploring, which gives us a fair amount of control over how quickly they get get fat. I also quite enjoy that absorbing and expending mana comes with visuals and sound effects at intervals. I am looking forward to the realization of scenes you haven’t fleshed out yet, and just more from this game in general.
Do you think you’d consider increasing the number of weight stages eventually? I don’t know how close to the story’s end you think we are reaching at this point. It seems like you can get the girls to their maximum functional weights on the early side, so I wonder if there might be more stages with events peppered in there if the game gets a bit longer.
Thank you again for sharing your work!
Thanks for the feedback! Glad you’ve been enjoying it.
There’s a few considerations here, honestly - on one hand it’s tuned right now to get the player through everything I’d gotten rendered; if the length of the game was expanded significantly the rate of gain would probably be slowed down to match. There’s also the matter of portrait size - I can have images for arbitrary weight levels slot in wherever I want because the image width is pretty much the same across all stages, but you can see where I’m struggling to get everything in frame when dealing with the larger bloat sizes at the current max weight - but if I make the image wider, I have to adjust the coordinates of where that appears on screen to get it centered on roughly the same spot - I can do that generally with the plugin that’s already handling images, but it’s probably not going to be 100% perfect in every case.
On the other hand, I really would like to get one more weight stage in if I can, and maybe even some one-off renders for immobility-based Game Overs, although with DAZ I think that really relies on some creative posing to look decent.
At the very least, I’ve got plans for variations on existing scenes that depend on whether the upcoming third party member has joined or not, and other story or everyday scenes that actually play out significantly differently based on certain characters’ weights.
It is also possible that I could insert an extra stage between the ones already existing, especially with the larger gap leading into the final one, but it’d probably take some rewriting of scenes to feel natural.
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I already played 1.05 for about 2 and half hour, there is something wrong with the save function.The in-game save was successful, but when I opened the game again the save was lost. I don’t know why .
Usually this is caused by not properly extracting the game from the .zip file. Extract the game files into their own folder and run the game from there. Unfortunately this isn’t going to help with progress that’s already been lost.
80mana for skill that temporary boost cash from encounters? That’s a lot of mana!
I guess i’m going to start from the beginning once again, i’m curious about how big xp gain becomes now in third and later dungeons, i really started to feel the grind in third dungeon when i was playing 1.03