papillon
Hanako Games
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2009
- Messages
- 28
Hey guys, long time no see... *ducks the thrown tomatoes*
Anyway, after a ridiculously long period of time, we are finally digging in to a new Magical Diary game. If you're not familiar with the original, it's a wizard-school-dating-sim thing where the classes are learning spells and the tests are little first-person-perspective dungeons with puzzles to solve. The first game (Horse Hall) came out in 2011 with a female protagonist. Wolf Hall is now on Kickstarter, with the first small demo available on Steam or on Itch.
We completely rewrote the dungeon engine from the first game to give us more layout flexibility and make it more practical to interact with monsters at a distance and/or to run away from them.
Practice dungeons are now available on the weekends, so you have a chance to go in and try out all your spells and know how they actually work before being faced with a test where you have time and mana limits. Many spells have been rewritten to be more useful, and every spell now has a classroom scene for when you learn it, talking a little about the spell and giving some hints for why you might want to use it. As before, every dungeon will have multiple valid solutions, so a lot of how you solve challenges will be personal playstyle, although every character IS required to learn the Light spell in the first week (there will be dark cells).
To encourage specialisation, there are now 'charms' available in the magic store. Equipping a charm gives you a boost to gaining skill points in that field of magic, and cuts the mana cost for all spells of that color in half. This makes the high-level spells much more practical.
On the VN side of things, Wolf Hall has a customisable male protagonist. There are currently three female main routes, two female side options, two male main routes, two male side options, and one bonus slot whose character will be voted on by kickstarter backers. Character routes aren't necessarily romantic, many people will have friendship options, and you don't HAVE to date anyone if you don't want to, but there are a lot of options if you do (and more may come as the kickstarter keeps clearing goals).
The kickstarter met its initial funding goal in 24 hours and is still going. The latest stretch goal we hit was for a bonus randomly-generated dungeon to be added to the end of the game, so you can run through it with your character after completing the storyline. If we get to the $40K stretch goal, we'll be writing a bonus standalone multi-level dungeon crawler where you can import a player character from either Horse Hall or Wolf Hall.
I anticipate having the full game out by the end of 2019, though as always kickstarters can sometimes slow things down by the need to cram in all of the bonus stuff people backed. (Custom characters are sold out.) Backers of the appropriate level will get access to the game as it's being written, to comment and suggest. The public demo is only the first week of school; our internal playable version is the first three months or so at this point, although again some bits will have to be changed to accommodate backer content.
Kickstarter runs til the end of February.
Anyway, after a ridiculously long period of time, we are finally digging in to a new Magical Diary game. If you're not familiar with the original, it's a wizard-school-dating-sim thing where the classes are learning spells and the tests are little first-person-perspective dungeons with puzzles to solve. The first game (Horse Hall) came out in 2011 with a female protagonist. Wolf Hall is now on Kickstarter, with the first small demo available on Steam or on Itch.
We completely rewrote the dungeon engine from the first game to give us more layout flexibility and make it more practical to interact with monsters at a distance and/or to run away from them.
Practice dungeons are now available on the weekends, so you have a chance to go in and try out all your spells and know how they actually work before being faced with a test where you have time and mana limits. Many spells have been rewritten to be more useful, and every spell now has a classroom scene for when you learn it, talking a little about the spell and giving some hints for why you might want to use it. As before, every dungeon will have multiple valid solutions, so a lot of how you solve challenges will be personal playstyle, although every character IS required to learn the Light spell in the first week (there will be dark cells).
To encourage specialisation, there are now 'charms' available in the magic store. Equipping a charm gives you a boost to gaining skill points in that field of magic, and cuts the mana cost for all spells of that color in half. This makes the high-level spells much more practical.
On the VN side of things, Wolf Hall has a customisable male protagonist. There are currently three female main routes, two female side options, two male main routes, two male side options, and one bonus slot whose character will be voted on by kickstarter backers. Character routes aren't necessarily romantic, many people will have friendship options, and you don't HAVE to date anyone if you don't want to, but there are a lot of options if you do (and more may come as the kickstarter keeps clearing goals).
The kickstarter met its initial funding goal in 24 hours and is still going. The latest stretch goal we hit was for a bonus randomly-generated dungeon to be added to the end of the game, so you can run through it with your character after completing the storyline. If we get to the $40K stretch goal, we'll be writing a bonus standalone multi-level dungeon crawler where you can import a player character from either Horse Hall or Wolf Hall.
I anticipate having the full game out by the end of 2019, though as always kickstarters can sometimes slow things down by the need to cram in all of the bonus stuff people backed. (Custom characters are sold out.) Backers of the appropriate level will get access to the game as it's being written, to comment and suggest. The public demo is only the first week of school; our internal playable version is the first three months or so at this point, although again some bits will have to be changed to accommodate backer content.
Kickstarter runs til the end of February.