Because this is my first Magica Riot Fan Game Update on here I'm gonna "quickly" summerise everything I've done so far.
For starters this is a a fan project for the book series Magica Riot written by @niconicorose / @magicariot go follow them, they are awesome and have been extremely helpful and encouraging with this project by helping me find references and answering all my questions about Magica Riot and Portland and so on and so forth!!
I also highly recommend reading the books they are fantastic and have Physical, Ebook and Audiobook versions and can be found here.
Novels about Portland's hard-rocking queer magical girls, Magica Riot.
The fan demo is currently going to cover the first 2 chapters of the first book and then have a more up to date hub area in The Vault with as much of the main cast as I can get into it and a working training room for people to play with the character controller and combat. There might also be some secrets hidden about.
There will be spoilers ahead for the book so if you haven't read it and want to go do that first, you won't regret it!!
For more tech specs on this demo. I'm using the pretty much brand new Pyrite64 Game Engine, it's made specifically for deving N64 homebrew games and its updated and maintained mainly by HailtoDodongo on GitHub here.
N64 Game-Engine and Editor using libdragon & tiny3d - HailToDodongo/pyrite64
It builds N64 ROMs that can then be ran in an emulator or burned onto custom N64 cartridges for use on an actual N64. The goal for this is to get it working in both an emulator and an N64.
I unfortunately do not have an N64 to test this on but hopefully one day I will if I can get the money together.
Onto actual dev stuff!
I started by making some assets to test the workflows in the documentation and get into the swing of making N64 style low poly meshes and pixel art textures.
First was Claire, the protagonist of the book! I had fun figuring out how to make her as she requires some figuring out as she isn't out as a trans woman at the beginning of the book and I didn't want her to just entirely swap meshes as that would be very expensive on the N64 but cleverly using textures and shaders I should hopefully be able to use the 1 mesh for both "boymode" Claire and Magical Girl Claire.
The textures and model aren't final but they will get me through setting up the character controller and testing workflows.
Speaking of textures, the N64 only has 4kb of TMEM (VRAM) so reusing textures where ever possible is going to be a huge deal for making sure this will all actually run on an N64. A way I'm aiming to do this is by creating grey scale textures that I can then colour using a shader. It should end up being a lot cheaper than having individually coloured textures for stuff like each member of Magica Riots hair and clothes. This means without the colour applied Claire really looks like this atm.
After modeling Claire I then decided to make every Magical Girls instrument to make sure I had them ready and because I was having fun with it.
From left to right. Nova's Drums, Claire's Keytar, Cass's Guitar, Hana's Bass, Iris's Keytar, Jade's Guitar, a bonus reference Keytar and Sara's Guitar.
These obviously don't have textures yet however I'll be looking into texturing them all soon.
After this I started trying to import Claire into the engine to make sure everything was working fine.
It largely wasn't tbh. I won't get into everything but I had some amount of issues with doing this, most were self inflicted tbh and I have since fixed all the issues.
This is how Claire looks in engine. Yes I was fairly confuses at first too lol. For some reason the engine seems to zero every bone in the editor, the engine is still in early developement so stuff like this is expected tbh and is kinda funny imo.
When I make a build and run it in an emulator like Gopher64 or Ares everything works just fine though.
So now that Claire is finally in engine we can start working on getting the character controller built out!
So onto today!!
I was pretty tired today so I mainly just read a bunch of documentation and looked through the Pyrite64 example projects to figure out how they handle stuff like the character controller.
I was hoping I'd have more energy today cause I feel like I would have something to show for the character creator but unfortunately I've just been really tired and busy this week.
I might do some work tomorrow and update then but no promises and I'll take Sunday off to rest up and then get back to it on Monday.
Anyway with this update done go read Magica Riot!!
Kara the author also has a band called The Crystal Furs who's music is the IRL Magica Riot! You can follow them here @crystalfurs and find their music on Bandcamp here.
https://crystalfurs.bandcamp.com/