Magical pal

Dillon. He/Him. Solo game dev. Currently working a silly magical girl simulator. Also working on a game called Camp Creep which is on a hold right now. magicalpal.bsky.social

[magicalpal]

I’m still working on this. Just hit a wall and have been going through a lot lately.

[magicalpal]

Took a break from modeling to make some logos for the brands and services in the world the magical girls live in (city name is still tbd). Real update coming soon. I've been tits deep in blender making clothes for the transformed outfit side of character customization and needed a break from blender.

[magicalpal]

put those things back where they came from or so help me

[magicalpal]

Log 11/???

I made a wish to the time fairy and she said everything I've done since the last update happened in exactly 24 hours. Okay but these are just going to be logs now because this is a game that I actually want to finish now.

I finished creating the base customizer. It took a lot of experimenting but I got it to a place that I like for now. It will probably visually get a big rearrangement but the logic is all there. It's just plug and play at this point.

I also got a little carried away with programming smaller things that I could have put off  until much later such as the little realtime player icon, mirrors, walking animations, and modeling UI elements for the customization page. I learned a lot at least and I had a lot of fun designing/modeling the customizer icons. I'm trying to make it weird and kind of abstract, like kidpix vibes lol.

The background of the customizer is a little nasty right now since I put a pin in it after I wasn't getting the result I wanted. Instead of computers, I want the magical gals to access the internet and their magical gal settings through mirrors. Inside it would obviously look like window95 but running on a mirror. Oh the OS could be called Mirrors :0 and the site domains would be like .mrr or something! But I wanted the background to look like the player's model is in the mirror and I didn't really want to use more cameras and I couldn't get reflection nodes to work so I put it to the side for now. That's a beta problem and we will get to beta when I am 89 years old.

Next is the Transformed form customizer. Basically the same concept but the transformed customizer will have menus, more color options for cosmetics and clothes, and you'll choose each piece of your costume. Which means I am now learning how to make clothes in blender.

The player has a base form and a transformed form because it's a magical girl game and 33% of the fun of magical girls is the transformation sequences.

[magicalpal]

Learning marvelous designer now. New dev log soon.

[magicalpal]

I promise I’m still working on this thing

[magicalpal]

Day 10/100

Day 10, as I've roughly spent 24 non-consecutive hours working on the tiara-throwing feature. I need to remind myself constantly that it's just alpha, we don't need to polish anything yet. BUT I'm about to start working on melee attacks which requires me to learn how to make animations in blender. Got a very in depth start into blender animation but I thiiiiink I've got the gist of it.

The tiara throw, which still needs a lot of work in Beta. I want the tiara at the beginning to feel like a resource. You want to make sure you throw it well the first time because once it lands it will turn back into the tiara you were wearing and you can't throw it again until you find it and pick it up. As the player uses the tiara it will level up or they can buy upgrades for it. Like an upgrade to make it automatically return to you, or throw 3 projectiles or once, or be really wide/strong. I'd also like for it to push smaller enemies and have the ability to bounce gaining damage power as it does so. Until then, I'll just have to keep bullying npcs with it.

Also I know this kinda seems like it's only based on Sailor Moon but eventually I'll have some elements inspired by other magical girls.

[magicalpal]

Day 9/100

It's day 9 because I said so! After learning a lot more of how Unity works, I've gotten into a good stride of getting stuff to work on my own. Equipping items and changing between them is finished. Next, I'll be working on attacking and basic enemy implementation. When I was on a group project for school a few years ago, I was in charge of creating the enemies, so this isn't as daunting as it was back then.

When I'm not in a good spot to work on the game, I've been drawing monster ideas and looking through the asset store. Looking through the asset store has been a lot of fun for some reason. Seeing what's available (or not available) out there has been a great source of inspiration. For example, I was looking for a basic 3D model to attach to my external storage object b/c its grey box was just really boring. After looking at a few chests and storage containers, none of them felt fun. So I was thinking what would fit but be fun for a magical girl to store their stuff in. Landed on cats. Maybe they can walk around your hideouts or follow you around the city for extra carrying capacity.

[magicalpal]

8/100

Inventory is finished! Well mostly. I need to implement the magic inventory but that will come later. At least now any extra inventories I need will be crazy easy to set up. The UI is god awful rn and I really want to work on it but I'm saving that as a reward to myself in the future for doing the boring stuff first.

I want to stick to a 90's aesthetic to correlate with the game's influences but I'd also like to add some weirdness to maybe make it feel like a 90s that didn't exist or the 90s in another version of earth. Idk but for the UI I want to do a glittery pink goo look like the old windows media player. I don't know how to explain it but the sims 1 UI is a big influence on how I want the phone and in world ui to feel. Like if a different unheard of operating system became the default os. Eventually, I'd like the ui's color to be customizable so you can make it match your magical gal's look.

Here's a look at the crappy alpha inventory complete with the only 3 things a magical girl needs to vaporize evildoers with one hit. Jesus christ, speaking of, did anyone else think it was kinda anti-climactic in sailor moon crystal that she could turn every bad guy into flakes with a single attack? If I was one of the sailor scouts I'd be fucking pissed like why did I transform and run halfway across juban just watch sailor moon get ptog yet again. At that point she'd have to start paying me.

I didn't wake up with the intent of finding a fake transparency png of a cunty chicken wing. But here we are. the lord provides, hello.

[magicalpal]

7/100

Maybe it only counts as a day when I remember to write one of these. Still working on inventory. Now I'm having trouble getting  a sprite reference from one place to another. Again will probably figure it out in the morning easily. I haven't been making much progress everyday due to some personal stuff I'm going through right now but I at least accomplish 1 small thing a day. It will add up eventually.

[magicalpal]

Day 6/100

I know I missed a day, but I never said the 100 days would be consecutive. Still working on the inventory but I think I've gotten the basics down for handling the player's inventory and external storage inventories. I've been following tutorials on youtube, though some of them are outdated, causing me to run into issues that I have to fix myself. Thankfully, I'm at a point where if they show me what Unity can do then I can take over myself. A nice difference from gamemaker is how easy creating and handling UIs are in Unity. They're so easy that I was able to program toggling the inventory and storages by myself in less than an hour which has never been my experience with UIs. Though, now I'm having a problem with dragging items out of their item slots. The turn invisible while being dragged and I just can't figure out what it is. When that happens it's usually a sign to just stop for the day. Chances are I'll figure out what's wrong tomorrow morning when I start again.

[magicalpal]

Day 5/100

Coding today was a little better. I'm starting to recognize more of what I used to know and actually retaining what I'm learning to a degree. I started work on the inventory today. I had to give up after a few hours though. I got objects to save the player's inventory list but when I try to scroll through the inventory, nothing happens. Looking at it tomorrow will give me a better idea of what could possibly be wrong. I tried talking to my rubber ducky (disembodied barbie head that sits on top of my monitor) but that didn't help.

Another snag that has come up is I keep thinking about how the base inventory is going to act with the magic inventory and it's starting to look like even after I have this inventory finished, I'm going to have to re-write a lot of it to get the two to mesh. I have a few ideas but I think it will become clearer after I've had a break.

In terms of gameplay, I got a few more ideas for some non-supernatural quests that you can take during the daytime. Maybe you get a job through the magical girl app complaining that someone is talking or on their phone at a movie so you go to the movie theater find the guy and deal with him by either putting him to sleep magically or beating his ass. Or another quest where someone reports a karen harassing service workers. Maybe I'm starting to project at this point but it's a magical girl simulator, it's bound to have some power fantasies.

[magicalpal]

Day 4/100

Getting raycasting to work took much longer than expected. Coding for unity is still pretty confusing, but I think I'll get it down once I'm done watching the 3,000 tutorials that I've saved in my watch later list. What sucks right now is I know how the programming is supposed to work it's just the syntax of it all that is so confusing compared to gamemaker.

Tomorrow I'll start a rough outline for the inventory system. I want it similar to phasmophobia where you use the scroll wheel to move between the items in your inventory. I also think the player will have 2 separate inventories. You can only access the basic inventory of maybe 3 slots when you're not transformed then gain access to 2 additional slots once transformed. Or maybe certain items can only be used while transformed. I want them to feel very utilitarian at first, lots of gadgets that appear in their hands in a puff of smoke like when chibi-moon creates objects. Then eventually the player can gain access to upgraded gadgets that become more and more magical until most of them serve multiple purposes. For instance, a grappling hook for getting up high. Then next level up could pull enemies to you, and the next one the grappling hook item isn't needed at all and the ability moves to your transformation wand, freeing up an inventory slot.

Still a lot to think about. I'm worried I've blown the scope out of proportion, but when I get alpha finished I'll see what's feasible and what's not.

[magicalpal]

Day 3/100

I finished most of the movement today which tbh does not take very long but it's given me a good refresher on how all this stuff works. I wish I had something visual to attach to these posts but it will be a while before I can take any worthwhile screenshots. The map right now is a sad grey floor and ominous red floating platforms to test jumping. Next is ray casting and objects that detect they're being looked at. Shouldn't take long. Fortunately, I'm over halfway through my week 1 goals and I just started. I forgot that progress goes faster on 3D games than anything I make in gamemaker studio. Unfortunately, I'm too high to continue for tonight but I have had some spare ideas for if this game becomes anything.

I think I want the players to look like dorky low-poly people but when they transform they become these cunty, beat to the gods, high-poly dress-to-impress type magical girls. Oh and in this game it doesn't matter what age or gender you are, anyone can be a magical gal (thinking of calling them magical gals in this world). It's like a gig app, you get a pill that lets you use magic, and a transformation wand. Doesn't matter who you are, when the transformation hits- you will have no choice but to serve.

Much later on, I think it would be fun to have optional/hidden bosses based on the monster girls from sailor moon that are just like a corrupted shoe or hairdryer or something. Maybe they drop an item that gives you an ability you can't unlock by normal means. We'll see, it's all written down in my notes. 🤸🤸🤸

[magicalpal]

Day 2/100

Writing out the feature list is daunting but after writing out a majority of what needs to be done for alpha doesn't make it seem so overwhelming. I hope I can stay on task and not want to jump around too much. I haven't worked on a game so far where I don't just wing it the whole time. Jay Tholen says that's how he does it, but maybe I should save jumping around for post-alpha. I've broken taks up into weeks but will continue to work if I finish a week's objectives early because some weeks seem like they're going to be a lot. Also have to account for learning Unity from scratch. They taught me unreal in school just 2 years ago but sadly I've forgotten most of it. Last time I tried Unity I was trying to script everything like a big boy but I think for this I'm just going to stick to digital scripting the best I can. At the end of the day I want to primarily be a designer not a programmer, even though I do enjoy programming a lot.

[magicalpal]

Day 1/100

We'll see if this goes anywhere. 100 days is really ambitious for me but I'm going to try the best I can.

Writing out the basic story, setting, gameplay, and visuals. Getting everything that I can out of my brain and down into my onenote.

I want to keep the graphics simple but I do want to try and make it looks somewhat 90s anime to keep it coherent with its influences. I tried looking at assets in the unity asset store and got a little discouraged. Finding anime looking assets that aren't porn or stupid uwu chibi bullshit is going to be difficult. I'm just afraid that I'm going to burn out already and it's only day 1.

Another thing I worry about is finding a character asset with a lot of customization. I would really like for the player to be able to get as flashy and done up as they do in dress to impress but I don't know where to start with that. Visuals are a problem for the future though.

Tomorrow I'll go through what I've written and try to make a list of features I want to complete for alpha. I'm excited to start but im very afraid that this is just a thing I'll be excited about for a short while and not get anywhere then burn out and be disappointed with myself. It's only day 1 which is comforting and scary. If I can at least make it to day 30 I think it will have been worth it. I really hope something comes out of this. I so desperately want to be a game designer. I'm tired of wasting my life at my current job.

[magicalpal]

I’ve started work on a new game. A magical girl sim where you team up with friends to take odd jobs/investigate during the day and fight monsters at night. Yes it will be called friendslop, but mommy needs money to live so he can work on his other more serious projects.