Magial Viking Erika version 1.1.0 "Erika Slims Down" is here!

Yes, you’re reading that right: It’s high time to cut the fat. This release makes Erika significantly less chunky by cutting out unused files, optimizing images to near-lossless WebP, and (for the Linux version) shipping with the proper NWJS build instead of the bloated debug SDK. Windows and Mac users can still expect to see a decrease in both zipped and unzipped file sizes in the range of 70-80MB - not huge, but not nothing.

Of course, that’s all for Erika the game, not Erika the character. Her weight woes are no different than before, though she can quite easily cut the number on the scale by more than half… with the new metric toggle. You can now switch between imnperial (pounds) and metric (kilograms) either by using the option in the Options menu or simply clicking on the Weight bar on the stat panel. She won’t actually weigh any less by doing so, but seeing a smaller number surely puts the mind at ease a bit, right?

What else is new? Well, we’ve also got some fancy new options for text boxes that’d be right at home in a visual novel. When a text box is open, you’ll see a button bar on the bottom that lets you open the message history or options menu, skip scenes or automatically move to the next textbox, hide the message box and UI if you want to look at what else is on screen, and even save or load mid-conversation, an option I’m sure will work flawlessly and break nothing at all; most options also have keyboard and controller shortcuts. Admittedly the buttons do clash a bit with boxes with a fourth line of text, but there’s a fancy custom window skin too that helps minimize the effect. It didn’t occur to me until everything was about ready to go that I could’ve just stuck the button bar on the top of the screen, but I’ll wait and take feedback before deciding how best to handle it.

Beyond that, there’s not really much to talk about - in fact, you’re free to skip this release entirely. I’ve fixed a number of minor dialogue errors, some of which range from minor (missing name tags, repeated event commands) to absurd (dialogue boxes in the tutorial replacing Erika’s name with that of a character who doesn’t appear until the epilogue, or an instance of Reed pissing Reed off). A longstanding issue where buttons seemed to call the wrong things during the first weekend was knocked out too. But overall this release simply adds a few quality-of-life features that I really should’ve added much earlier, and lets me collect feedback on how those might break so I can address them before the big 1.5 update sometime (hopefully) this summer, all timed so I can slap on a title that looks like an April Fool’s update but really isn’t.

I do need to address the elephant in the room here: THIS UPDATE WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT WORK WITH OLD SAVES, and that’s no joke. The long and short of it is that the plugin I’m using for visual-novel-like commands expects a bunch of its data to be present in save files, and doesn’t have any handling for what happens when that data isn’t there. In time I could probably read through it and add some error handling, but the fact is that version 1.5 will require new save files anyways, so I don’t feel too bad about breaking things too early. Still, if you’ve got files you’re attached to, keep an old version of the game installed.

There are probably some other minor issues to work through, and I want to get as much feedback as possible on them. In particular, skipping scenes actually skips tagged chunks of scenes, instead of simply fast-forwarding like most visual novels do. This means that there’s stuff I probably didn’t tag correctly, and some edge cases where you’ll still get a box or two of text while skipping a scene because it rolled a minor variant of it that hasn’t been seen yet. If it seems like there’s anywhere that the skip function doesn’t work like it should, for more than a box or two at a time or important plot/tutorial scenes, let me know so I can take a closer look. Honestly I can’t even guarantee I didn’t break any events while I was working through the skip tags.

It’s also the case that pressing/holding the Cancel key doesn’t move text forward at all anymore. This is part of the same plugin’s handling of custom actions, and I can’t really do much about it immediately You can still speed through text by holding Confirm, and the option menu also has new settings for allowing textboxes to display everything instantly or skipping scenes even if you haven’t read them before, if you really have a need for speed. Again, if any of this breaks, let me know so I can work on tweaking it now - it’s one less issue to debug in the next major release.

Thanks for sticking around to read this, and supporting the game in general! I’m always open to questions, comments, and other feedback.