Magical Viking Erika - v1.1.0 "Erika Slims Down" available now! (Blog update 07/31)

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Honestly the flowchart was mostly notes and scribbles - the biggest reason the other endings are labeled C and D are to differentiate them a bit from the main (B) route. I don’t want the default assumption to be that either of them is naturally the “canon” ending.

I haven’t actually ruled out the possibility of a bad end there, if the player/party is too ambivalent about unfolding events, but it’s not really a priority - I just haven’t been able to come up with an idea that I like yet, and it’d have to be something more engaging than a simple “But the heroes refused to act…” sort of fade-to-black that some RPGs like to hand out if you refuse the main quest at the start of the game.

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Version 1.1.0 “Erika Slims Down” is live now! Get it here!

Unfortunately, this version does break saves, and that’s no joke. Since this is mostly some quality-of-life enhancements that I want to nail in before the next major release later this year, feel free to skip it if you’ve got saves you’re attached to, as there’s not really any ‘new’ content. I also expect that I missed something dumb and game-breaking again on my way out the door, because that’s my life.

You can see the full write-up for this build on the itch devlog.

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QOL+bugfix releases are always good and valid! Also looks like this adds the skip function I asked for, so :heart: Gonna give it a spin and see if there’s anything to report.

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Qol and optimization are always a good idea, especially before another release. Really enjoy this game, love the concept, the game play, the writing and art. Magical girl gain is a favorite.

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Late, but here, my feedback:

Some odd lines with metric units selected:

Erika: S-seventy pounds? Over 30 kilos …

The equipment store interface could be better. There are enough kinds of equipment, and enough of each kind, that the whole list is unwieldy. Maybe don’t show things that cost more than twice current funds, or that have worse stats in every way? The caps (leather through dragon) don’t have any listed benefit (until Mari shows up, which is of course later).

Error:

You done fucked up:
Invalid value for Erika Morning Schedule: Beach!

Save just before that happens: file2.rmmzsave.zip (12.6 KB)

Waking up and finding themselves … would be … for any … young woman

Should be “herself”.

Same scene, when Mari flees the gym, she leaves her face behind. (This kind of
graphics glitch is my favorite, tbh, but still.)

When I start the game, echoey dripping sfx start. I can’t tell whether they eventually stop or I tune them out.

This run I delayed WG as much as I could, avoiding combat once I beat the latest stage’s boss. Turns out that was a really viable strategy, which is great. Once I got the girls’ grades and fitness up (mood nearly maxed automatically, lame), I switched to bond+WG maxxing. Two comments on playing that way: farming mana for the WG side effect is kinda darkly funny; I like that; but it’s also grindy. I suggest the game track player’s W/L record against common enemy parties and grant auto-success at a certain point, maybe 5 wins 0 losses. Charge a statistically-average amount of items and HP loss over that same 5 battle window. As for girls’ stats, bond feels a bit slow to grow; even though I deprioritized WG at first I was able to blow through most of it before I got the girls in their undies, what a shame…

Also worth mentioning that the pace of the story and the little daily events is great! Doesn’t rush, doesn’t drag.

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Thanks for the feedback, it’s much appreciated! With the next major update I’m planning to overhaul combat and inventory, as well as add a new character and months 7-8, so I can’t guarantee that concerns about pacing and combat as they stand will be properly addressed, but I plan to continually make adjustments as development continues. The other stuff should be easy enough to address and I could probably push out a v1.1.1 patch for the obvious offenders.

  • The 70 pounds/30+ kilos dialogue is awkward to handle for the metric toggle - I wanted to leave Violet’s freshman 15 → sophomore 70 segue intact, but also keep metric-using players informed, so I had to compromise a bit on how natural it ended up sounding. I’ll make a note of it anyways, since the intro’s probably going to get tweaked or rewritten at some point in the future.

  • The inventory and shop menus are definitely unwieldy, and while some of those suggestions might be a bit awkward in terms of rewriting RPG Maker’s shop handling, I can say with certainty that there’ll be a shopping overhaul that aims to address the actual inventory available and bring it a bit more in line with character progression.

  • That’s a typo I’m surprised never got caught - the event handler for mornings is looking for “Beach” rather than “Beach!”. Weird, because I did a lot of copy/pasting to save time and the afternoon handler has it checking properly. Fixed for the next update.

  • Definitely an awkward bit of phrasing. A lot of the prose and dialogue was written in a fourteen-hour marathon in the last couple days of the game jam last year, and I think the sleep deprivation really starts to show in the dialogue for the later dungeons and the sloppiness I’ve had to correct in some of the weight-up events. Thought I’d nabbed most of the floating-face issues too by now, but that one’s logged for the next update.

  • I think the dripping is only called the event at the beginning of month… 4? I probably forgot a BGS fadeout somewhere, meaning it’d probably stick around until the next time a background sound was called to be faded. If this is happening at the beginning of the game or something that’s more worrying, as I can’t reproduce it, although it is a good reminder that I never gave the forest map its own BGM… anyways, I’ll dig into it.

  • Bond and stat growth - and to some extent, the pace of gaining weight - weren’t at all balanced due to a lack of actual time to playtest the game jam release, and are going to be tuned up a bit for the next update, although there’s still a fine line to walk. On one side, the next update extends the calendar up through the end of month 8, and brings a third character into the mix as well. On the other, I’m planning for the game time to run a full year, eventually, and it wouldn’t make too much sense to be able to max everything in six or eight months; it works well enough to hit max weight in that timeframe since I’d like to try adding an excuse to go up another weight stage in the final months, but not so much for bond unless I upped the cap later on for some spicier events or something. I can definitely say that stats like fitness, mood, and academics will play a bigger role in weekday events in the next update, though.

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It is my deepest regret to inform everyone that Magical Viking Erika will not be coming to the Nintendo Switch 2. My sincere apologies to those who were expecting and anticipating such a release.

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Any deviations from the planned update schedule are due to my lasting sorrow or attempts to overcome these technical hurdles, and certainly not because I have a new toy taking up too much of my time.

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Every game needs product research, you’re just doing your due diligence. :rofl:

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I can live with that honestly, Nintendo has been too strict with this console and is only inviting trouble down the line

Hopefully progress for the game itself is going smoothly thus far.

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I got a dirty chortle out of this, kudos to you, sir.

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Oh, no, absolutely. I very much doubt any major platform (barring perhaps Steam) would officially allow the game to be published, even if I scrubbed out the nudity. But RPG Maker MV/MZ games are just a a mass of Javascript loaded from a webpage, bundled into a convenient standalone browser by default. There’s nothing stopping anyone from hosting a game on the web and loading it in the web browser of whatever device they’re using - on Xbox, Edge even has a convenient feature to let the loaded site take full control of the controller for embedded games.

Sadly, the Switch and Switch 2 browsers are locked down and barely accessible (there’s no actual web browser support, so the only way to load anything is to trick the system into thinking it’s logging into a network access portal like you might see in hotel or storefront Wi-Fi), and fail to properly load the game at all as they apparently have no WebAssembly support. Given that Nintendo’s apparently scrubbed even video-streaming apps from the eShop for the Switch 2 I don’t expect it’ll get more user-friendly features in the future, either.

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I do like what I’ve experienced in the game so far. Even though I intentionally tried making Erika n the girls immobile for the lolz just to see what happens. Keep up the good work dev, take your time on updates!

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Figured I ought to post a minor update here, both because the game is currently hosted on Itch and because I’d initially estimated a release for 1.5 around July.

The tl;dr is that the game will remain on Itch as long as Itch will host it, and if they refuse to host it I’ll just go back to posting files and updates somewhere else. As for the update, it’ll be ready when it’s ready, which sadly doesn’t look like it’s going to be any time in the next month or maybe two. I’ve let the scope get a bit out of hand, and it doesn’t really help that I’ve decided to move the artstyle update into the next release rather than putting it off, since there’ll be new NPCs and a lot of stuff for Kate was never done in the first place.

If you want a longer read, or just a sneak peek at the art changes (and some bonuses on what that means for the next update), the full blog post is on Itch.

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That’s really cool! I played the previous version just recently and really enjoyed it, and I’m eagerly awaiting any updates.

I’ve had a great experience, characters are fun and there is a ton of content already. I’m not one to skip through dialogue and it took me 6 hours to complete everything.

Plus I really appreciate the Linux version. My computer broke recently and I haven’t had the time to setup wine again…

The combination of JRPG and VN came out really nice. Probably anyone playing either, thought that it would be cool, but yours is the first project that I’ve seen actually combine them and the effect is really good :+1:

Although I’m more of a stuffing + “maybe a little wg”-enjoyer, I had great time playing this. If you wish to target that audience more, even something as simple as conditional comments of characters added to the dialogue, when they are stuffed and uncomfortable would go a long way.

I’m not gonna ask for more in-between stages, since I do know how insane the amount of work needed is. It would be cool though…

When I learned that it was developed in two weeks, the information almost gave me a heart attack. Maybe it’ll be the final stroke to motivate me to see a project through myself…

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I didn’t know you were updating the art style - but based on the previews in your post, I’m a fan! While I enjoyed the game during the jam quite a bit, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the original character models took a bit to grow on me. Something about the more realistic body proportions and lighting with the anime eyes felt a little off. I really think they look a lot better with this more “cartoony” style. Keep up the good work!

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So a couple minor updates:

  • In order to hasten re-indexing, donations for Magical Viking Erika have been turned off on Itch. I don’t really use Itch’s search function as the primary way of getting views to the game - generally speaking, this page is more effective, although other users adding the game to their collection also helps and re-indexing the game makes it easier for them to find it in the first place. The game’s earned less than $20 in donations over 11 months, so turning them off seemed like the obvious choice.

  • Open Fly Games is now on Patreon. There’s no real reason for this, or even any content there yet, and new game versions ceratinly aren’t going to be gated there. But Patreon’s raising their fees for new creators next week it seemed like a good time to set one up and get grandfathered into the lower rate. There’s nothing there right now, but I’ll have at least some previews of Kate’s content going up in the next couple days and maybe a new short story by the end of the month, for anyone who wants to chip in $1.

Thanks for the feedback! I will say that ‘developed in two weeks’ is probably misleading, since it took another week or two and about six patches for everything to actually be playable. I can say for certain that if I choose to do anything for the GET LARGE Jam it’ll definitely be smaller in scope.

Thanks! To be honest, I was never fully satisfied with the style of the original models - I set out to do something different from the standard DAZ look, and I don’t think I really could’ve done much better inside the time limit, but real, path-based 3D rendering doesn’t simplify down to an anime-like artstyle as much as I’d aimed for. The newer rendering system wasn’t really an option at the time, and while it does have some drawbacks of its own it’s much closer to the style I wanted and much faster to render as well. I’ve seen others with more mixed emotions about the switch, but I think this is an instance where I’m going to have to let them down - it’s just too time-consuming to go back to Iray rendering, and too much material work to do both styles at once for people who’d like to switch between them.

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Think the steam deck can handle the beast?

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C’mon, now, it’s not like I have a native Linux build for nothin’.

deckedout
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If I really wanted to, I could probably get RPG Maker (MV/MZ) games running on one of those $30 Temu Game Boy knockoffs with a few days of work. Probably not the best choice for a widescreen-format game, though.

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