Magical Diary

Visual Novel Community Visual Novel Talk
#1

FINALLY. Man, this is the biggest thing I’ve written, the dialog came to 150K and that’s probably not counting a lot of the dungeon stuff. … Okay, hang on, backing up.

So for the past year I’ve been working on the start of a magical school dating sim / RPG / adventure series inspired by fanfiction. All the weird crazy things that fangirls come up with; that’s my canon. The school itself is split up into six halls, three for each gender, and the series is intended to have at least one game for each hall. The first game is in Horse Hall, which is the hall for sporty girls (the other two girl halls are Butterfly Hall for more social/girlygirls, and Snake Hall for the weirdoes). After this I will probably start working on Wolf Hall with a male protagonist, but for this first release, you are a girl. There are both GxB and GxG romantic options.

But romance is only half of it. You’re attending a magical school and you learn different spells as you go along. You have to figure out how to use those spells in order to pass the exams and get through the year. And since as I mentioned there is fanfic influence here, weird stuff happens too. :slight_smile: While there are twins in the game, they’re male and they’re not capturable in this particular installment - they will be later. I don’t rule out having female twins later, there just aren’t any onscreen at the moment.

Also, you get to design your own character. (Are there any japanese games with protagonist customisation? There’s a customisation tag on vndb but it doesn’t seem to mean much.)

There’s a trailer video and free demos on the webpage here - you can upload your character design at the end of the demo.

… and once this week of launch stress is over maybe I should FINALLY start playingt he copy of crosschannel i’ve been toting around with me everywhere. i am so behind on playing games!

#2

Grabbing the demo, will check it out tonight. I need to get back to game dev myself sometime…

EDIT:

Plenty, as I doubt would surprise you. But I’m sure you mean eroge with protagonist customisation in which case: very few, if any.

#3

It looks pretty cute and amusing from the youtube video :smiley:
I think I’ll try the demo sometime!

#4

I am intrigued by your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your mailing list.

#5

There’s a link to it on her website, actually!

EDIT: am I playing an otomege Harry Potter here?
EDIT 2: finished the trial. Not sure what to think at this point, since it doesn’t quiiite go far enough to show any actual gameplay, but I like the art and I’ve no problems with the story so far
EDIT 3: oh what the hell, getting it anyway
EDIT 4: whoa, this game is aspect-ratio clever! I fullscreen it and it actually uses the whole screen, giving me a menu on the side with the extra space. I wish eroges did this!
EDIT 5: the random element to stat training doesn’t work for me. shira oka did it too. just make results constant please >_>
EDIT 6: okay, I’m enjoying this
EDIT 7: whoops, I crashed it!
EDIT 8: huh, finished it. Didn’t seem to get on a route though. Shall have to give it another shot

#6

It looks fun and I like the art. I’ll definetly try the demo.

#7

I’d like to try it but where can I get time to play it when there are many japanese VNs waiting for me… :roll:

#8

Target audience +36%!

#9

Bought this the other day and have been playing through it 7 or 8 times (friends and romances, plus the two attempts where I got myself expelled).

The dialogue is… surprisingly good, actually. That’s not to say that I had low expectations of it, but it’s just a very good blend of funny, witty, serious and genuinely believable writing that took me by surprise. I always play my characters goody-good, but had a great time in this game getting detentions and getting on Grabiner’s nerves (which got me expelled two times and a romance with Donald one time). And of course, I’m a sucker for stat-raising games as a whole which made it even better for me. The art was nice, the facial expressions of the characters very well done and fit the conversations well (I love the sly/smug look when my characters is/thinks she is clever, or is flirting). I very much enjoy this game and still need a couple of more playthroughs before I can put it down.

That said, there are a few things about it which I felt were lacking.

Magic, as a whole, feels like it doesn’t get the kind of central role it deserves, or more specifically the actual spells don’t. There’s a whole host of spells you can learn, but very little reason or opportunity to use the vast majority of them. One of the things I enjoyed the most was getting the opportunity to influence events by using spells I had learned (or seeing reactions like Donald’s when I hadn’t even learned Push), but sadly such opportunities were few and far between, partly because the game is relatively short per playthrough. The same kind of goes for dungeons; there are a few spells that are universally useful, and a lot of spells that are either useless or redundant due to the lack of combat and/or an excessive mana cost. It’s understandable that it happens given the complexity, but a shame nonetheless that it didn’t get a bigger role in the day-to-day life of the students, and the exams.

The randomness of studying results brought out my min-max OCD and caused me to save-scum in order to not lose precious time (and accumulate excessive stress) for nothing. Not a major issue, but the added stress from failures as well as the time constraints between exams makes it hard to resist reloading after bad streaks of failures/1 pointers, even if you don’t actually need all that many spells to get through the game (without demerits, at least!). I just like roleplaying a great student who knows a lot of spells, even if I don’t get to use them all, and random chance being the deciding factor of how many spells I can learn in the span of the game is hard for me to accept, hence the compulsive saving/reloading ^^;

The storyline, if I understood it correctly, is over for the current PC and there will be a different protagonist in later games. This compounds the lack of opportunities to use spells (especially the highest level ones if you max out a colour), and also bothers me a little bit because I kind of felt like I had just started getting to know the characters, and then it’s over. I guess it’s the lack of an epilogue for the time after the first year that bothers me; it just felt like I was left hanging. It’s a credit to the characters and the story that I feel that way :slight_smile:

Overall though, I loved the game and will be first in line when the next game hits. Here’s hoping it will contain many more opportunities to fling spells haphazardly :slight_smile:

#10

Just a quick note about thanksgiving sales - you can get this for half price for the next three days at ShowMeTheGames (as well as jack’s Planet Stronghold and some other indie stuff)

For people in the US, a big pile of downloadable games are on sale at Amazon.com for $2 each this week because of Black Friday. That includes Date Warp, Fatal Hearts, Science Girls, Matches and Matrimony, etc. The downside is that they are Amazon purchases and therefore usually not the latest versions available if you buy directly, but hey, when you’re getting it for 90% off you can’t complain too much right? :slight_smile:

#11

Aaaaaaaaand we got a steam launch. Woo!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/211340/

This and Analogue are the only VN-like things I know of in the system so far, although Cherry Tree High Comedy Club is supposedly coming eventually. So there’s still hope for Aselia, maybe? Speaking of which I need to install my copy of that once I get through the rest of this week of terror!

#12

There really is quite a lot to this game, isn’t there? I’ve played over the thing a few times and the number of different ways the events can play out is pretty crazy.

Wish it was longer, but due to the complexity that would probably balloon the script size out a lot.

When’s the next one coming out? =P

#13

Just got mine since I noticed it was on sale, along with Ys Origin.

#14

I live for ridiculously convoluted! See our latest game which is all incestuous political backstabbing and finding out how many different ways you can get a cute little girl killed. (Blame Puella Magi Madoka Magica for this one. Partially.)

As for the sequel - that depends on when I can either get the artist free to work again or decide to formally give up and start the next one over from scratch. A lot has happened in the intervening time.

#15

And how much blame goes to the good old Song of Ice and Fire series? :mrgreen:

#16

Heh. While I’ve heard a bit about it, I’ve never read it or intentionally watched it. I think I accidentally saw a few minutes of it on television while channel-surfing at my hotel from Fanime-Con. If that was it, I was pretty quickly grossed out by the gore. There is a fantasy novel series which has a strong influence on the plotline of LLTQ but it’s a much more obscure one.

For this game, we wrote up a sort of dwarf-fortress-like procedural generation of Noble Politics to cover deaths, births, marriages, affairs, feuds, and so on for the past two hundred years, so we’d have a ready-made set of secret enemies and alliances. Sometimes the results were a little weird… but not at all out of character for nobles!

I suspect we didn’t code the possibility of twins, though, I don’t remember seeing any ever come up. It was a fun toy, we may play with it further and release a public version sometime.

#17

Look who got a Siliconera article:

http://www.siliconera.com/2013/09/29/wh … ako-games/

Congrats :slight_smile: