Hello again! As you might’ve noticed, I haven’t spoken much about the state of the game since the prior patch, except for the holiday story update last week. With the new year coming and progress on the game being slower than I’d like, I figured now would be as good a time as any to look back at the original development process of the game and what’s in the works for the future.

Magical Viking Erika was a game I threw together in two weeks for the 2024 Gain Jam, and while I’ve contributed to other games in the past, this is the first completely original project of this sort that I’ve felt confident enough to publish. A lot of it is very clunky, with systems thrown together in hours based on half-finished sketches and rough (sometimes completely incorrect) ideas of how certain plugin tags and functions worked, and it’s amazing how much of it actually works - even if it took a few extra post-jam patches to get it that way. It’s still not a great foundation to build on, but it’s at least manageable even if there’s plenty of room for refactoring. Still, there’s a lot to be fleshed out and cleaned up for future releases.

I’m tentatively planning for two major updates to the game - hopefully both in 2025 to bring it to completion. The first - version 1.5 - will feature most of the mechanical changes and big overhauls as well as the third party member and a few new months of content. The second - version 2.0 - will bring the last few months of the game to the table, and if I go ahead with any major art overhauls, they’ll feature there.

With that, let’s take a look at the various aspects of the game.

Life Simulation

This is where the day-to-day events occur, and (game-breaking bugs aside) probably where the time crunch of the game jam is most prominently displayed to the player. Besides the one-time story scenes, a lot of events were basically cut down to basic summaries, and only have a couple small chance-based variations. Ideally, these would be treated like full scenes, but this creates another problem: with a limit to how many scenes and variations there are, having to deal with bloated versions of them week after week gets tedious to progress through. To that end, the current plan is as follows:

• Flesh out the event scenes
• Add more event options, including new part-time jobs
• Add an option to view ‘simplified’ versions of scenes, much like the ones that exist in the current version. There should be options to always view these scenes or to view them for events you’ve already seen.
• Add visual novel style text management throughout the game. Primarily, this means the options to fast-forward through viewed text or any scenes, and adding a text log function so you can scroll back through the history for that one text box you accidentally clicked through too quickly. This was also something I wanted to do for the jam but didn’t have time for.
• Potentially add an option to skip a scene entirely rather than fast-forwarding it. This requires a bit more finesse in when it can be activated and making sure that all the flags the scenes should set still get set up properly, so if it gets implemented at all it’ll probably be a later addition (version 2.0 or a postgame cleanup patch).

Naturally there are other aspects of the day-to-day stuff that need cleaning up. Bonding events between Reed and the female characters will be full scenes rather than simple summaries. The chat function - an option to interact with the selected character on the homescreen and get a response about the current story state, one of their social stats, thoughts on their weight/outfit/relationship with other characters, etc. - is mostly complete after having been cut for time before. Events like ordering food or going out with friends will now properly cost money, and money from working part-time jobs is now a separate currency from your dungeon-crawling loot.

Dungeon Crawling and Gear Management

It’s not exactly a secret that the dungeon-building was pretty rushed in the game jam builds - all of the existing dungeons are very lightly edited from the build-in generator, with some flair and chests hand-dropped along the way. The goal is to replace these with larger, fully-hand-crafted maps that make dungeons feel a little less like a big room with maze-like walls dropped haphazardly, but since I am not by any means an artist this is going a bit more slowly than I’d have liked.

Gear and loot are also getting a bit of an overhaul. Defeating monsters will grant you Intel Points, the new currency for the Marshan shop, as well as standard drop items that can be used to upgrade or sidegrade your gear at the shop. There will be certain bonus goals for combat, exploration, and secret-finding in each dungeon that will reward the player with performance bonuses, which take the form of Intel Points, cash, and occasionally even rare gear.

Equipment is going to be somewhat regraded and redistributed. Magichips will be altered to be slightly rarer, and will hopefully function less like a simple stat stick with spells attached. With no skills or spells really taking advantage of the extra defense, Erika’s gear setup will scrap shields and even two-handed weapons, instead moving her to permanently dual-wielding a handaxe and shortsword.

Combat

Combat has been a bit of a sore spot because I’ve never really been able to balance things. I tried a plugin for auto-leveling enemies so that I wasn’t spending hours of jam time trying to tune things, but even after upping the XP gain I feel like the gap between dungeons still ended up being a bit much. If you’re exploring and opening chests, or grinding and buying new gear, it’s still plenty manageable, but it’s not fun. The goal is to make combat a bit more involved than simply ‘spam basic attack and win’, but not so much so that the difficulty turns away players who are here for other aspects of the game.

Naturally the length of combat is a point of concern, and with more involved dungeons that concern grows. Enhancing the player’s ability to speed up or skip combat animations is pretty high-priority, and I’d like to do more meaningful data displays for enemies as well.

Combat is also fairly vanilla aside from the mana management and magichip leveling systems. While I’m still experimenting with ideas, one I’ve come to like and will probably implement is a Mana Burst system (name work-in-progress). When a Magical Girl has more than 100 mana and a set amount of TP to spend, they can expend all their current mana at once to deal damage (scaling with the amount of mana used) to the enemy party and enter a high-risk, high-reward state - drastically increasing attack but dropping defense, for example, or sharply increasing evasion while dropping max HP to a fraction of its normal value. Any mana gained during a Mana Burst state would prolong the state’s duration rather than being absorbed, and while each character has a unique burst, a max-level magichip or pieces of high-level gear may allow access to different burst skills, perhaps with different minimum mana requirements. Mana Bursting is a useful tool for turning the tables on fights that already look pretty desperate, or simply a way for the weight-conscious Magical Girl to keep her figure in check before retreating for the day.

Story

So one of the themes of the Gain Jam this year was ‘unexpected outcomes’, and while it’s true that very few people had ‘dystopian cyberpunk future timeskip’ as one of the big twists on the bingo card, it’s also true that you probably couldn’t even make it that far in the game jam build. There was also the idea of misdirecting players towards a different twist - that the Magical Girl tech, and the shady megacorp in general, were Aliens All Along. This didn’t really go anywhere as I was crunched for time, but there’s still a bit of groundwork there - Reed’s chosen field of astronomy, and some minor wordplay with names (Marshan -> Martian, Violet Lien -> V. Lien -> Vlien -> Alien).

Truth be told, this game was one of a handful of ideas I’d sketched notes for before the jam, and that twist was there even then. It was more of a gag/shock end idea at the time, and would’ve led pretty much directly into a ‘final chapter’ type of thing - I’m keeping some of the plot ideas for that in my back pocket in case I want to revisit the ‘bad future’ timeline at some point. Still, once I saw what the jam theme was, there was no doubt that I had to go with this game, and in fact I wanted to go even further with it. The plan in the early stages of actual development was to make that the midpoint of the game, with Kate joining the party then and the focus turning more towards squad management and scavenging rather than a college-life sim with relationship building. It became pretty clear early on, though, that there was no way I’d have time for all of that, so beyond that one scene in the ‘epilogue’ all that exists is a set of alternate UI buttons.

Instead, the epilogue sees Kate (or some sort of temporal clone?) zapped back in time to the beginning of Month 3 in game, which… certainly complicates things. Short of adjusting the ending to send to the start of month 7 instead, the only options are to allow the player to go back and drop some progress to keep continuity, or force them to start again from the beginning and let them choose which route to take. In the end, I’ve settled for a bit of both - the player can start from the beginning and take the new route if they want, or they can accept a prompt to go back and get some bonuses - mostly, keeping their current inventory but resetting most of their other progress back to what it was at the beginning of Month 3, albeit with some boosts as completion bonuses.

From there, the new versions of months 3-7 are all-new, with different events, different interactions, different dungeons. Obviously there’s a lot the epilogue so far doesn’t address - the third Magical Girl bracelet is a point of contention throughout the game, and we never really figured out where it came from or why it was left there. What are the ultimate goals of Marshan Industries? Is Violet carrying out schemes of her own, or is she simply a pawn protecting her square of the board? Is the apocalypse of the future something that can be prevented by influencing the present - and if so, how drastically does the present need to be changed? How long can Kate hide her true goals and identity from the others, especially if their interests don’t align?

So yes, there’s still some cheesy drama and corporate intrigue in the future to go along with your fat girl shenanigans and cringeworthy faux-romance events. So much so that I can’t fit it into a single update. Instead, the version 1.5 update will cover through month 8 of the ‘B’ timeline. Version 2.0 will include months 9 and 10 of that same timeline, and two different versions of months 11 and 12 depending on some of the choices you’ve made up to the end of month 10. While there are still epilogues afterwards, generally speaking month 12 of either route is the end of the game, and so version 2.0 should be the last major content update.

Art

Ok, look. The art is kind of ass. For being done almost entirely in the first three or four days of the jam? It could be a lot worse. But mixing anime-style characters with the realism of most DAZ packages is a bit of a hard sell, with a lot of common expression morphs just breaking face structures entirely, and the Iray renderer really isn’t the tool of choice for making things look toon-ish. The skin for the anime-styled models I was using didn’t have support for things like nipples or lower packages built-into their textures, and the add-ons I used for breasts frequently broke if I tweaked any part of the skins, leading to the weird discoloration you see in a lot of Erika’s renders.

The problem is: where do I go from here? A few months back, DAZ released an update with a nice toon-style render setup built-in. I think it does a much better job than anything currently in the game, and if you’ve looked at the story packs I posted for Christmas you can see I’ve been playing around with it a good bit. But you’ll also see that Mari and Violet are the only character who retain their original hairstyle in those renders, that the skin textures are different (especially when I need to render anything with nipples), and so on. The fact of the matter is that it’s not a plug-and-play solution.

As much as I’d like to re-render everything with the Filatoon shaders, with new expressions that look slightly less awful, with somewhat more fine-tuned body shapes, I just haven’t been able to find any solution that I’ve been 100% happy with - at the very least, if I can’t find some tools to adjust how the shaders handle some of the hairstyles, I’d have to completely replace a lot of hairs, and I kinda like the hairstyles that are already in use.

So at the very least, I don’t think there’s going to be any major graphical changes for version 1.5. Kate’s images will all be rendered to match the current style, although hopefully her body shapes and expressions will look a little better.

I do plan on adding a higher max weight stage, but it’ll probably wait until version 2.0, and it’ll be somewhat gated behind story progression. I’d also like to add some outfits for new jobs, and perhaps even separate 3/4 view character renders for dialogue and full-frontal renders for the home screen. But all of that fancy stuff is going to wait until I’ve tweaked the render designs to something I’m a bit happier with.

So, when should these updates start rolling out? I’ll be honest, I haven’t really managed to get much work done in the last two or three months, and I’ve had a brainworm compelling me to start some work on a completely unrelated project at the same time. But I’m aiming to have version 1.5 out by July 2025 and version 2.0 out before 2025 ends.

Will any of that pan out? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. But this game is the first original project that I’ve gone ahead and shoved out the door - I’ve got no plans to abandon it until it’s in a state that I’m actually pleased to present it in.

In the meantime, have a rough summary in image form: