Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

 Announcements and Other, Ibuki Magica (Madoka fangame), That's the Way the Cookie Crumbles  No Responses »
Oct 012012
 

We’re happy to welcome Rin to the TTG team as an artist who’ll be coloring the sprites for That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles and and drawing the cast for Puella Magi Ibuki Magica! She’s also the artist for her own project, Kaguya-hime: The Moon Princess Tale. From the Story page:

The story is based on a Traditional Japanese’s fairy tale ‘Kaguya-hime’, also known at ‘The moon princess’ or ‘The shimmering princess’. According to some source, the story is “among the first – possibly the very first – text of any culture assuming the Moon to be an inhabited world and describing travel between it and the Earth.

You can visit her project website to learn more details! Continue reading »

Making Sure Everything Is Important

 Ibuki Magica (Madoka fangame)  No Responses »
May 032012
 

One of my major goals in planning out Ibuki Magica is to make sure that your actions have major effects throughout the game. The most obvious ones will be the wishes you’ll have Ibuki make, as these will affect the outcome of the story as well as Ibuki’s abilities and actions. I decided to break Madoka canon and allow a Puella Magi to make multiple wishes, as I didn’t want a single, major, game-changing event happening at the start of the game. Plus, for the RPG parts, allowing multiple wishes at different parts of the game is basically this game’s version of a class upgrade.

The choices you make, even small ones, can affect Ibuki’s personality. The more you have her be mindful of what she says, the more likely you’ll be able to make her do the same in another situation. Similarly, the less Ibuki is wild or cruel, the less often you’ll be given the options to act in those manners. I want your influences to make Ibuki’s choices to flow as if she had a distinct personality, rather than creating another bipolar video game character who will happily go from super-friendly to dastardly and back, with everything evening out in the end, somehow.

The allies Ibuki makes may not be under your direct control, but how you have Ibuki interact with them will affect their personalities too. The way you treat a character will change how they treat Ibuki, and possibly other characters too. You may find yourself walking a thin line, trying to find the right things to say that will please everyone, and sometimes that will not be possible. You’ll have to decide who and what you value more in different situations.

Remember the last post I made, where I mentioned traits that affect how characters make actions in battle? Those same traits are the ones that affect the personalities of the characters in the VN parts of the game. It’s less essential than the wishes you make, but even the tiny choices you make will impact everything in their own small way. (If you want to be an RPG munchkin, I suppose you could just try to promote specific personality traits in the girls you want. But that might screw you over in the long run, hehehe.)

How to kill witches (aka I rewrote the battle system again)

 Ibuki Magica (Madoka fangame)  No Responses »
May 022012
 

I’ve been going through a lot of rewrites of the battle system for Ibuki Magica, trying to work out exactly what I want it to feel like, and to make something unique and matches the nature of the rest of the game. I figure I should give an update on where I’ve been and where I’m at now.

Originally, the new battle system was going to have 14 different skills, in seven sets of two. You’d choose an attack that selected one of those skill sets for the attacker, and another for the defender. Then there’d be some random number picked for each set and whoever had the higher number won or something confusing. I have simplified and streamlined it, and hopefully created something unique while not confusing the hell out of the players.

Every character has a set of three offensive ability scores, and three defensive ability scores. Each of these abilities reflects how a magical girl or witch can use their magical powers. Each offensive ability you use will rely on one of each of these: one offensive ability for the attacker, and a defensive ability for the target. The success of your attack will be affected by how much higher or lower your attack score is compared to your opponent’s defense score. Part of the strategy in combat will be working out which defensive abilities your enemies are worst at, and trying to use attacks that target those abilities. Of course, the attacks most likely to be successful might not be the most useful in a certain situation, so figuring out how to make your best abilities more likely to hit is important too.

In addition to the six abilities mentioned above, each character will have a set of traits that will affect different actions. These traits will reflect personality and fighting style more than they will raw fighting ability, and augment the power of certain attacks. For example, the courage trait would impact an attack that’s incredibly risky and daring, while the mindfulness trait might make it easier to analyze and defend against wild onslaughts. While a character’s ability scores will mostly be determined by the nature of their wish and how they fight, traits can be increased both by actions in battle and choices made outside of it.

I’m still working out a lot of this, like the exact number and type of traits, how the defensive abilities will work without overlapping (I want a good reason for why magical shields won’t protect you if you fail to dodge out of the way or something), and how to display different actions. Right now I have actions separated into ‘attacks’, ‘magic’, and ‘tactics’, but I’m not sure how accurate those are. I’m also still debating how to handle health, and protecting one’s soul gem. Thankfully, I’m a lot more satisfied with this current system is working overall compared to what I previously had. I hope to have another tech demo out soon for everyone to play with, and I hope you all look forward to it!

Development Log, 2-28

 Announcements and Other  No Responses »
Feb 292012
 

We’re still alive! And with slightly more than a month to go before demo release, we’re actually kinda hard at work! We just wanted to give you a quick update as to where our development is going.

TWCC:

  • Rewrote the customer purchasing code so it’s a bit faster and flows better when read. (We still need to find a way to speed a section up, or at least not make the game feel like it’s lagging.)
  • Added a event manager, so everything will happen at the right time. (It’s based off the Dating Sim Engine made for Ren’Py, which I would have just used directly if I could get it to work properly, but I couldn’t so I made my own.)
  • Got some pictures to use as backgrounds, and we’re working on making them look nice and fit in with the sprites.
  • Sprites are being worked on, hopefully soon we’ll have something to show.
  • Created a way to save up to 3 lists of goods, so when you find a selection that maximizes profits, you can reuse it and modify it as necessary.
  • Script is being worked on! This is one of the harder things to talk about in devlogs, since there’s a need to avoid spoilers.

What’s next:

  • Balancing prices and profits, making sure the game is fair
  • Possibly adding a system to allow you to put goods on sale (although it might be pushed back until the full release)
  • Getting all the bakery code, events, hiring, etc integrated into a proper game

See you next update! I hope you’re excited!

CheeryMoya edit: Why no turtles :V