It’s been a year and a half since the last update, but there’s finally some progress, done on a whim for the Magical Girls FOREVER Continue-It Jam III.

This devlog is going to be a little shorter and more cursory than usual, for mostly the same reasons why the update itself doesn’t contain everything I was hoping for. That’s why this is called a preliminary devlog rather than a full one.

Here’s what was planned for the Story Mode update. Bolded is what was finished for this jam.

• Intro/cold open cutscene
• Intro chase sequence (including spaceship model, custom UI)
• Title sequence/Angelica first meeting
• First Angel battle (Charon level and new enemy model/behaviour)
• Dialogue in Ganymede level
• Inter-level dialogue (at least partial)

It’s about half of what I was hoping to finish. Let’s get dig into what got finished, why it didn’t totally come together, and what’s still to come.

Seven-what?

I don’t want to spend too much time recapping this project- if you want a more or less full story, check out the Spiral 2 devlog. The long and short of it is that it’s a spoof of Dogtopius’s Tengoku Project, stemming from a joke that got way out of hand. There’s a few n-goku games in production (mostly stuck in development hell- we’ve joked that it’s the “n-goku curse”), most of which play extremely fast and loose with the source material.

I made something resembling a moodboard, showing the influences here. A lot of The Expanse, some Mass Effect and Halo, with more gameplay influences from Star Fox, Tyrian, and Terminal Velocity. From Tengoku proper, it’s most influenced by the first game, probably because it’s the only one I was actually able to finish.

Honestly, I mostly did it for fun, but it did help clarify to myself what the feel and tone of the game is going to be. This is more about the aesthetics and a bit of gameplay- the story is still in a weird halfway point between The Expanse and Spaceballs, with a bit of Captain Marvel mixed in. I definitely need more metal in the soundtrack, though. That hasn’t happened yet, but hopefully the next update.

A story begins

The plan from the intro was to do something very cinematic, with cuts, crossfades, titles, and many objects moving to and fro. Fortunately, Unity has the perfect tool for cinematic 3D animation: Cinemachine.

Cinemachine is described as “a codeless and modular camera system, designed to easily compose sophisticated behaviors and the best shots based on scene composition. It lets you tune, iterate, experiment, and create camera moves in real-time.”

Yeah, there’s no Cinemachine here.

In fact, most of the sequences are done in code, with a handful of Animation Clips mixed in. It was very much a case of sticking with what I know- this is how I’ve done it in previous games. Usually it’s fine, but it’s never really been optimal. Honestly, this was probably the time to learn Cinemachine, as the sequences in the intro would have lent themselves to it.

The jank doesn’t end there. There are something like 4 cameras in the first intro scene. The crossfade effect involves a switcheroo with render textures, and the tablet interface is actually a screen-space canvas blitted onto a quad because I couldn’t figure out how to get a world-space canvas to clip content outside the canvas bounds.

Also, the spaceship’s engines are rice bowls from a random tableware asset. I feel that one’s appropriate for this project, though.

Despite the janky implementation, I’m extremely happy with the intro overall. The opening text is exactly as I envisioned it from the beginning, the ship “breaking through” and the crossfade to the interior shot were later additions but work great with the overall concept, and the brief section where you control the ship has pretty much every piece I wanted implemented. I’m slightly less happy with the section after, but I still think the whole intro put together is one of- if not the- best I’ve ever put in a game.

When life happens

There are a lot of things that can cause a project to stall out. The always-lurking spectre of scope creep, underestimating the tasks at hand, team issues, losing work to software or hardware failure, or unsolvable technical issues.

This time, though, the answer is pretty simple: I didn’t work on it as much as I thought I would.

Real life just got in the way. April was an insanely busy month for me, and I didn’t even really start working on this project again until May. I didn’t have as much time and energy as I’d hoped in May, either, with a lot of it going to “cleaning up” from April. A few new things came up, but I don’t know if I’ll ever publicly talk about those.

I realized in late May that I could either bash together a minimum viable version of the intended update, or drop the idea of finishing everything l and just focus on polishing up the intro itself. Unusually for me, I took the latter option, giving up on the intended gameplay section and focusing on making the intro sequences as nice and polished as possible. 

We don’t go to Charon

The current demo ends before the first level- the Ganymede level that’s already created is for later in the game- but as mentioned earlier, that wasn’t the intent.

The plan for the Charon level isn’t very ambitious. The enemy angel appears, you have a brief conversation and fight, she retreats, you fight some cannon fodder enemies, repeat this once or twice with different patterns and escalating difficulty, ending monologue and end the level. Afterwards, there will be a cutscene and brief sequence before getting to the more open part of the game, but that part was never in scope.

The angel you’ll fight is Bethany Lee, a new Angel trying to (metaphorically) earn her wings. Credit to SunnyChowTheGuy for helping out with the name. I got as far as throwing together a quick texture edit of Cornelia/Persephone, I think all the angel just being recolours of each other is the right level of half-baked for this project (the will also remain T-posed).

I also wanted to add some dialogue to the Ganymede level and start writing some of the companion dialogue that goes between levels, although those goals were a bit more tenuous even from the beginning.

Onwards and upwards

Where do we go from here? The plan was to do the Story Mode update, and then Bits and Bobs, adding some of the missing gameplay bits, and then look at building the rest of the game after that. I don’t really see any reason to deviate from that plan. Next up will be finishing off the list of things that were supposed to be in the Story Mode update. I don’t have a good guess for how many updates to get to the completed game, it depends how full I pack them, but maybe 4-6 including Bits and Bobs.

SE7ENGOKU is currently built on Unity 2022, and I’m on the fence about staying on that version. I’m overdue to upgrade, but on the other hand, there isn’t really anything I need in Unity 6.

I honestly have no idea when I’ll work on this again. It could be next week, it could be next year. This is definitely something I pick up and put down when I feel like it, more so than any other project.

It’s slow going, and it happens in bursts, but maybe we’ll finally break that n-goku curse someday.