Miracle Girl Chiyoko's visual novel scenes are getting another upgrade!

One of the biggest complaints about the original demo was that there really wasn't much "gameplay" between the dungeons.  This was especially bad during the first few game days, before Chiyoko begins fighting evil as a Magical Girl.  To hopefully make Chiyoko's non-magical girl life a little more fun, I'm adding some interactivity to the life-sim part of the game.

The player already has the ability to choose how Chiyoko spends her free-time, but that itself created some issues.  Chiyoko can only do one thing at once, which means the player wouldn't be able to see the rest of the story scenes.  Now, instead of each scene being played on a specific day, scenes can be triggered in a range of days instead.  So instead of a funny scene at the Arcade triggering only on day 5, it will now simply trigger the next time Chiyoko visits the Arcade if other conditions are met.  I am also considering adding icons to the Free Time menu to show the presence of unique events, and whether or not Kameko and Haruko will be tagging along.

But the main focus of this week's update was Chiyoko's school life.  The player now has the ability to decide how hard Chiyoko works at her classes.  While working normally, Chiyoko's Spirit attribute goes down, and her grade for the class goes up.  If she chooses to work hard her Spirit decreases and grade increase is even faster.  She can also take it easy, which lowers her grade, but restores some Spirit.  

Chiyoko's Spirit stat is a combination of her mood, mental state, stress level, and the flow of energy in her body that gives her her powers.  It affects her combat stats, experience gain from training, and many other aspects of the game, and it fluctuates wildly depending on what is going on.  So it's important to keep it high.  But messing around and bombing school tests will crush Chiyoko's Spirit in the long run, so maintaining a balance is important!

Of course, school life is chaotic, so there are story events that will affect Chiyoko's grades and Spirit as well.  A pop quiz is more likely to raise Chiyoko's grade if Chiyoko is already doing well in a class, but even if she isn't, she might guess randomly and get lucky!  Getting caught not paying attention or getting in an argument with a mean student might hurt Chiyoko's Spirit.  But encouragement from a friend, or having some good food at lunch, might raise it as well.   Events that happen outside of school will also raise and lower Chiyoko's Spirit stat.

With all these new ways Chiyoko's Spirit stat can go up and down, some balance passes will be needed, and I will probably spend an entire week trying to find ways to break this system.  I am planning to add a similar system to Chiyoko's Magical Girl training as well, possibly to control how much Experience she gets, or how much certain stats go up.  I am also working on getting the game day structure finalized, and hope to have that done by next week.

There will be more to come in the next devlog!  Thank you for reading, and have a great day!

Life Sim Scenes, 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!