It's been about a month since I resumed work on Miracle Girl Chiyoko.  Of all my potential projects, this is the one I've had the most fun creating, so I've decided to finish it before moving on to others.  My first priority on this project is to continue adding all the features that I didn't have time to add in the short game jam it was created for.

This, unfortunately, required restarting the project from the ground up.  The RPG Maker Eventing that the first demo was created with is clunky and hard to work with.  It made adding new assets a chore, and if I wanted to change something, chances are I'd break something else due to the labyrinth of Common Events and hundreds of unused variables for planned or scrapped features.

But thanks to a new plugin-based approach, dealing with scene switches for the visual novel scenes, which make up a majority of the game, is now a breeze!  And a similar approach is being used for another addition: Visual Novel style character graphics!

Having the characters shown on-screen was something I wanted in the first version of the demo, but there was just no time, and shuffling them around would have been a huge pain as well, given how RPG Maker MZ's eventing works.  But with a plugin-command-based system, keeping track of them is much easier!  The initial drawings are a little rough and need some refinement, but I feel like they add a lot to the presentation.

The update to the visual novel scenes won't be stopping with just the characters, however. Most, if not all, of the backgrounds are going to be redrawn, and more interactivity is also planned, starting with Chiyoko's days spent at school.  But there will be more information about that in the next devlog!

Thank you for reading, and have a great day!

Visual novel characters, as well as many other new features, will be added to the next version of the demo for Miracle Girl Chiyoko.  This demo is intended to be the final version, which should be a representation of the final game, so it will be more polished and more balanced.  Follow Ayback on itch.io for more updates on this project!