Magical Viking Erika

[jimbobvii]

HEY! LISTEN!

The Game Jam version of this game sucks. Cool dudes (and dudettes, and whatever the gender-neutral equivalent of dude is) play the newer, non-Jam-eligible version from the development thread: Magical Viking Erika (post-Jam/development thread)

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?

Download the game HERE (Windows build only, for now) This is the final Game Jam version, as 1.0.1 doesn’t actually run due to a packaging issue.

Download version 1.0.1 of the game HERE, addressing the following non-critical issues:
- fixed nametags being used in certain non-attributed messages
- fixed wrong background for cafeteria scene
~~- fixed event name not showing for meals selection ~~
- fixed improper variables in midnight snack event

This is just the stuff I found in five minutes of free time, so I can only imagine what kind of clusterfuck it all still is. Wow! This was actually more of a clusterfuck! What an unexpected outcome! I get score points for that, right?

(WARNINGS: Frontal nudity, heavy violence, stretch marks, ladies of the very fat variety, scenes of the very suggestive variety, etc.)

---

Okay, look, I bit off more than I could chew. The game’s complete, or at least has an ending - five dungeons, six-plus months of in-game calendar time, all that, but it’s gonna break. Like I mean, this isn’t even playtested, let alone balanced. There’s a skill you can use to force the screen to fade in and clear most non-UI images, but that’s about it. I did make it easier to grind infinitely if any enemies are giving you troubles, though, and events that should need cash don’t actually check if you have it. But I’m out of time, and I promised myself that I’d actually post something this year. So please, let me know at what point it breaks to being unplayable - I have serious doubts you can actually get through to the end without dev tools.

Something I failed to properly note: parts of the game feature a custom interface designed for mouse or touch use. For gamepad users, the right stick should act as a virtual cursor, with the right trigger acting as the click. I don’t have a keyboard-only solution, unfortunately.

[DraskVorton]

.1 version is giving me a fail to load due to ‘img/system/windows.png’

I really like the models and the dialogue but I ran into some fairly significant bugs at least in the pre- .1 version.

1. I wasn’t able to go to the dungeon weekly, it kept giving me the message that I’d already gone after the first week locking me out of it after my first go. This made it very slow to gain weight and more or less impossible to keep up with enemy levels.
2. I couldn’t change the type of food Erika got (always set to home) and Mari had her dialogue to open up the delivery option every lunch regardless of which choice was set. I think changing Mari’s food also changed Erika’s but I’m not sure.
3. changing Erika’s evening schedule to ‘work’ changes her morning schedule instead which gives you an error, the other options seem to function fine in the evening.

Hopefully none of that is too complicated to sort out - I like what you have started her and hope that you’ll continue to develop/support it.

[rimean]

I also can’t play newest version of game

[randomguy]

i also have the error of failed to load window.png

[jeffskeep]

Kinda funny bug.
If you look really closely the weekend exploration is that tiny reflection on the table.

Doesn’t seem to be a big problem cause it doesn’t softlock me or anything

Overall, really like the game so far.

[jeffskeep]

This one seems to be a softlock though,

Going home, or killing the boss triggers this line from reed,

Which then sends me back into the same dungeon level. Clicking the ‘start week’ will culminate with being back in the dungeon with a pitch black screen.

[jimbobvii]

Oh wow, this is all kinds of fucked. A face image gets stuck as early as week 2 because I managed to set the wrong image layer, and my eraser script didn’t call that high because I didn’t need that many layers. The go-to-dungeon button doesn’t set the proper flags to hide the rest of the UI, so that monstrosity comes up. I had the calendar handler checking if “weeks >= 4” instead of “weeks > 4” for rolling to a new month. so the event that forces you to clear into a dungeon (at a time where that weekend UI wouldn’t be active) never runs because it looks if it’s the end of week 4 but starting week 4 rolls the counter to next month, week 1.

I am impressed that you persevered all the way to month 5, though maybe spoiler the images so no one sees how badly I fucked up in case people want to go in a bit more blind. All the other bugs mentioned are fixed but I probably set some dialogue progress flags wrong there.

Build 1.0.1 is borked because I just shoved the updated data files into the old package, which broke because I forgot I had RPGM’s useless-ass encryption enabled. I’ll revert the OP to 1.0, and have 1.0.2 up pretty quickly, but I’m probably not going to do a deep deep dive until after the holiday weekend.

From the above it looks like I should at least rebalance how easy it is to improve Mood and also properly cap non-combat stats at 100 unless there’s just an event that, like, accidentally multiplied it or added 50 or something to get that high. Balancing social stats hasn’t been a huge concern, though, since the focus was on actually getting people through the game, and boy howdy did I mess that one up.

Really kicking myself for trying to force feature-completeness instead of spending the last day or two making sure it actually ran, but live and learn, I guess. I’ll probably put up the new build but mark it clearly as a post-jam version before moving progress entirely to a post-jam development thread.

[jeffskeep]

@jimbobvii

though maybe spoiler the images so no one sees how badly I fucked up in case people want to go in a bit more blind

Whoops my bad, sorry. Done now.

@jimbobvii

e I should at least rebalance how easy it is to improve Mood and also properly cap non-combat stats at 100 unless there’s just an event that, like, accidentally multiplied it or added 50 or something to get that high.

Uh to be fair, while trying to see if I could bug my way past the softlock (teleport out, click the week button, kill boss, save then load) it would run the schedule statchanges every time, and then the weekday would endlessly loop if an enemy didnt attack me out of it.

So basically those are the stats of like month 8 or 9 or something.

@jimbobvii

Really kicking myself for trying to force feature-completeness instead of spending the last day or two making sure it actually ran, but live and learn, I guess. I’ll probably put up the new build but mark it clearly as a post-jam version before moving progress entirely to a post-jam development thread.

Honestly I really like the game, and once the bugs are killed it’ll probably be my favorite game this year.

Trying to think of any other bugs I found:
the clothing sets never unlocked anything for me, wasn’t sure if that just wasn’t done yet though.
For the meals option for Erika specifically, the text doesn’t update if you change options (still works though).
At lunch everyday Mari would tell us about the delivery service (then it would say ‘unlocked delivery’)

[UrgUrgUrg]

The sheer amount of ambition on dispaly here is blowing me away, I’ve encountered a fair few glitches so far (mostly with pictures not disappearing when I switch to Exploration) but nothing game-breaking.

The Daz 3D stuff on the girls is really well done (the dude seems a little rushed - it’s okay, I understand :p), I love the slow progression you got going with the mana stuffing.

[jimbobvii]

Thanks for the reports, they’ve been massively helpful in double-checking things. The dungeon for month 5 is unique in that it doesn’t even unlock the first week of the month, so you being there at that point was a very distinct indicator of where things went wrong.

As for the last few things

• the meals option text not showing in the schedule was fixed for 1.0.1, but that build broke anyways so no one would know.
• i will double-check the closet thing - either i forgot to plug in the event that updates availability or i accidentally reset some switches somewhere, but it’s complete, other than that it only applies to the weekday/weekend ui and not other events around the house
• that last one should be fixed for the next build

Anyways, I’m glad to hear you’re enjoying the game other than the complete lack of bugtesting. Thanks again for the feedback.

[jeffskeep]

Does leaving an expedition at full mana actually do anything ‘under the hood’?

[jimbobvii]

@jeffskeep

Does leaving an expedition at full mana actually do anything ‘under the hood’?

There are two major effects on weight from dungeon crawling, applied after leaving:

• Every point of unspent mana left when a dungeon crawl is finished is added to ‘weight points’, one-to-one.
• For each enemy mob killed (a unit on the map, not an individual enemy in battle) per expedition, lose 3 weight points and gain 0.1 fitness, capped at 100 mobs killed (if you’re really serious about grinding) for a maximum of -300 weight points and +30 fitness.

So if you’re just grinding the first dungeon early on and not spending MP, you’ll probably see anywhere from +95-140 points depending on your mana cap. The ‘weight point’ value is never directly shown to the player, but it’s about 200 points to the first weight-up (10-15 pounds) and 4000 for the final visible weight stage. The weight value shown in the stat panel is a rough estimate based on the slope between the starting weight and an estimate of the final weight stage, rounded to the nearest 5 pounds.

While I’m documenting it, the maximum mana bloat stage is stage 10 (with 0 mana being stage 0, not 1). This requires 1000 mana, which is only currently possible with boosters found in chests - there’s a base value of 100, and a total possible of +400 cap each for reaching new weight stages and first-time-clearing dungeons, to 900 points. If I continue developing the game further, the mana cap will naturally get higher, but it’s VERY difficult to actually get any more bloating stages implemented without serious clipping or deformation on the models.

@UrgUrgUrg

(the dude seems a little rushed - it’s okay, I understand :p)

Fun fact, there’s not actually a male model that uses the same skin type as the “Sakura” model used as the base for the other characters, so there’s some creativity involved (and not entirely mine) to get the feminine character closer to a masculine form. As a result some of the clothing fits are off, and the expression sliders I like to use get a bit wonky, but it works well enough. As for the design, I definitely didn’t spend much time on it - mostly a 20-minute attempt at a parody of RPG Maker MZ’s default hero, Reid, for another project that I’ve stuck on the back burner, refitted here with some new duds.

[jeffskeep]

Thanks for writing that out!

[Czyzman]

I also, also have the error of failed to load window.png

[Goof_Sosiska]

Who tf is Windows.png and why there’s a lot of PNG_ files but no any png files?

[5_mer]

These are encrypted images. The RPGmaker allows you to avoid spoilers this way. you’ll have to decrypt them yourself if you don’t want to wait for the author to fix the dependency

[Goof_Sosiska]

Nah, I’m not gonna decrypt all 945 PNG_ files, there are other games to check out.

[5_mer]

a wise choice. It’s just worth waiting a little bit

[jimbobvii]

Yeah, I apologize. The way I built 1.0.1 broke decrypting the files; it’s not gonna load. 1.0.0 does but as posts above have mentioned it’s also got serious issues. I’m out of the house for the day but I’ve already got just about all of it fixed for the next build; I just need to test it when I get home this time.

In the meantime, while it’s certainly possible to use a decryption tool to get the images working, I’d ask that if you do that you at least keep things to yourself as the actual endgame stuff isn’t going to be generally accessible until I push a fixed build.

[jimbobvii]

If anyone’s still getting pings for this thread: Turn 'em off, go get the new build of the game from the dev thread: Magical Viking Erika (post-Jam/development thread)