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A jam submission

Star Valkyrie RisingView game page

Submitted by spiritcorgi — 21 minutes, 29 seconds before the deadline
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Star Valkyrie Rising's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Magical Girl Concept#133.3853.385
Audio#133.0773.077
Overall#192.8592.859
Engagement/Fun#192.6152.615
Gameplay Polish#212.4622.462
Originality/Creativity#232.8462.846
Aesthetics#232.7692.769

Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the Magical Girl Genre?
It is a game about 4 Magical Guardians who lost their powers ten years ago and are now teachers at a school

Which theme(s) do you pick?
Kitten of Great Fortune, Smoking Dragon, Ore from the Age of the Gods, Where is that bustling marketplace now, immemorial marketeers

How does your game fit those theme(s)?
Kitten of Fortune- The mascot of the team is a cat.

Smoking Dragon- They talk about how they fought a smoking dragon in their youth and then battle the dragon later on as magical girls.

Ore From the Age of the Gods- Their regalia is made with ore from the Age of the gods.

A bustling Market - The city has a bustling mall district and is very open.

Marketeers- The memory of the guardians is talked about by collectors in the mall and the magic girls are not too impressed with how it is going.

Were the assets for your game made during the jam? Elaborate as you see fit.
The art assets were made by my team. The animations and music were purchased. Most of the assets are coming from RPGmaker with a strong use of overlays and animations.

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Comments

Submitted

I wasn't able to play as much as I wanted due to my schedule currently, but I did get in a good chunk of time. I enjoyed that the main characters were all working adults... that's something you rarely see in the genre. There were a nice variety of characters, though it seemed like the portraits were based off the same template, which stood out to me as the faces changed back and forth, and yet still matched a little too much.

It seemed like there was a good variety of gameplay... battle, story, exploring areas, investigation. I wish I had time to try more, but what I did play was good!

One other nitpick I have is that I found the dialogue font a little tough to read... and considering how much dialogue there is, that was a bit of a problem for me.

Anyway, it's clear you put a lot of time and work into this! Great work, and I'll try to play more when I have time. :)

(1 edit)

Okay, I was stuck in an infinite loop so I didn’t play too much, so I’ll just post my findings so far and then edit my comment later as I progress. I will also give my notation once I see more of the game.

Bug:

  • First, the infinite loop that got me stuck. In the building at the bottom-left you can listen to a podcast between an AI researcher and a journalist that keeps interrupting him. At the end of the dialogue, the dialogue starts again. I try holding escape to avoid pressing Space or Enter and restart the dialogue by accident, to no avail. I had to refresh the game page to restart. I thought I just had to reload the last auto-save, unfortunately, that auto-save was taken right at the beginning of the infinite dialogue! And I didn’t save manually before entering the building. So I basically have to redo the game intro to get back to this point. It takes a bit of time in Difficult mode. I could try Easy mode to finish the intro faster, but can I switch back to Difficult mode later so it’s not Easy all along? Alternatively, if you can patch the bug, I’ll be able to jump back to my browser save and resume my journey from here.
  • Some clamped text on the right of the dialogue on long sentences. Not sure why since resolution is fixed. It may be an engine bug:
  • Pressing Escape to open menu also exits fullscreen mode. I had the exact same issue in another game (a Unity game with WebGL build). It was not fixable but at least I added an alternative input: Tab to open the menu. In your case, you need both menu and back nuttons. There is already have the Touch button with a Back icon, but a keyboard shortcut is better, so you could pick Backspace or Z or whatever as alternative Back, and Tab, E, M, etc. as alternative open menu button.

Pacing:

  • cool moves at the beginning. The characters move very dynamically as in Sdorica, although they don’t have many sprite animations. It’s rare for games with sprites like these. It almost makes me forget about the standard RPG Maker Sprites
  • dialogues also go fast and fun

World:

  • you actually knock to people’s doors and talk with them instead or breaking into their house! That’s incredible innovation for an RPG! (although maybe some games did it before, I don’t know the whole history) And this means you spend less time opening chests and fridges in other people’s houses, while still getting a feel of how the main character is integrated in the city in their new life. I would have preferred seeing the outside of the neighbor’s house though, seeing the inside if you don’t enter gives too much information and the impression you could enter at first. Also, if you only see the outside, you can make the neighbor appear behind the door immediately instead of having them walk down all the way to the door.

Battle

  • Cool intro, but a bit too overloaded for an intro demo battle. The fighters have almost the exact moveset they’d have at the end of an actual RPG adventure. But that also makes it hard to decide what to do, you need to pay attention to colors to distinguish MP and TP costs, etc. Unfortunately that’s a difficult problem to solve. My advice would be to reduce the number of available skills and make the battles shorter, as it matters more to know if the player is good later in the game when the actually get a grasp of the system. In Xenoblade intro, you start with a bunch of heroes with a set of skills too, but 1. Xenoblade limits the number of skill slots in its core system, 2. Xenoblade battle system is real-time, based on auto-attacks and then you can trigger skills when you want, so even if you hesitate, something will happen on screen, 3. the battles are short, I even wonder if it doesn’t get interrupted at some point in time. So basically if it’s just for the show, you don’t have to make something too complex. Although I appreciated I had to pay attention to my party’s health in Difficult mode to actually beat the intro boss.
  • Some skills require charge time and it’s not indicated. You could distinguish Instant vs Charged skills like Othercide, using icons and/or colors; but I suspect it’s a limitation of the engine. So at least you could indicate the required time in the skill description (although without a timeline, it’s hard to visualize, but that’s a limitation of the engine without plugin).
  • I would say there are many other unexplained battle mechanics, but it all relates to that intro issue. If the battles are fast in the intro, it doesn’t really matter, as you’ll relearn the mechanics later in the game.
Developer

Oops, that podcast you got stuck on is the beginning of the next chapter. It's not supposed to be input yet, so that is definitely needing to be boxed for now.


Thanks for the rest! I was thinking about downplaying the skills or possibly adding more to the Star Dust tutorial at the beginning to explain things like the Ultimates and I can add cast time to that too!

OK, you can leave this for the first real battle though. In Xenoblade they split the tutorial like this: the intro show battle tells you about the very basics of using skills. The first real battle tells you about advanced mechanics like making the enemy fall.

In this case, there seem to be a vulnerability mechanic, but I couldn’t see skill description explaining which skill increased vulnerability to what. So at the start you could just have normal damaging skills (or the vulnerability would happen but you don’t need to understand that to win). Then the next battles would go into detail in those.

If you fix the radio show, will I still be stuck as I wasn’t supposed to be there, or just trigger an event I wasn’t suppose to see at that point? As long as you leave the door open for me to exit back to the city, it should be fine!

Or if you make the intro battles faster, it’s also fine. Finally, if I can change the mode from Easy to Difficult mid-game, I can also use fast to quickly finish the intro. Just tell me once you updated it!

Developer(+1)

The door wasn't supposed to be active to go into the studio yet. I can add something to toggle the difficulty (it just toggles a switch on and off). 


I can add some dialogue to explain things at the beginning of the fight. The vulnerability system is gone over in the intro, but a refresher never hurts.


I need to do a full playtest in the browser to make sure the text is fitting in the resolution (I've done full tests in the regular app mode, but the browser has some problems that pop up)

Submitted

It was a fun experience.

However I got stuck after leaving school. It didn't allow me to do anything, neither walking nor opening the menu. But seeing as you have said it should be around 2.5 hours I think it is safe to say that it is a bit too long for a jam in my opinion. A couple of typos here and there but a good entry otherwise.

Developer (1 edit)

Thanks!

Did you play the browser version or the download? And, can you remember the typos? I'm very severe with typos and I would like to know where to remove them.

Submitted

Yes, browser version. I walked out of school and went to the right. I saw Policemen and two other people walk along the road so I assume the game didn't crash.

As for the typos I don't remember exactly anymore. Sorry.

Submitted

I have mixed feelings about this game. I definitely liked the concept, and I'm normally a sucker for story driven RPGs. There's several aspects that are well executed, and there's clearly a lot of work that's been put into this game, but there are also some flaws, and it did turn into a bit of a drag.

The intro was excellent and served well as a hook. It's got tons of energy, it's well presented, and the battles strike a good balance between having enough challenge to be interesting while still being something the majority of players can easily make it through.

The world design is rough, and falls into some "average RPG Maker game" traps. The choices of textures for walls and floors is often odd, and often garish and hard to look at. Some areas are weirdly laid out, particularly the house in the beginning and some of the classrooms at the school. There are some places that look like they should be walkable but aren't, and a few that look like they shouldn't be but are. There's not a lot of interactivity, with some NPCs you can't interact with or even bump into.

On the other hand, the train station and some of the shops looked pretty good.

I found the city section annoyingly long and hard to navigate, with inadequate signposting. If it's an area we come back to later, maybe it'll be worthwhile, but it took me a while to get to the end (not least because you can't run in this section) and there were a lot of places I could go into that seemed to serve no purpose. Maybe these places could be closed off with the explanation that it's early in the morning and they're not open yet.

There are also some... I guess I'll call them visual issues because I'm not sure if they're glitches, odd design choices, or engine limitations. The train isn't animated as moving but I saw two sets of tracks with one sliding over the other. The parallax background for the school makes it look like a bit like the previous scene is bleeding through.

I got to the beginning of the investigation section and stopped. Some of this is because I just don't have that much time to play through each game, but to be honest, I was kind of bored by that point. I actually liked the idea of going around and investigating as different characters, but I just didn't really feel motivated enough to do it. I'm not sure exactly where it falls down, but the pacing is just too slow. Once you get to the school, the game really feels bogged down dealing with unimportant things. Which is probably intentional, and works with the themes of the games, but at that point there isn't really anything to keep me engaged. It's not a particularly witty game so it can't ride on humour, and the overarching plotline isn't yet introduced at this point to push me forward.

The writing quality is generally good, but the dialogue could use some proofreading because it's sometimes awkward and hard to follow. Related to the pacing issues, I think that too many lines are spent repeating things that aren't important and not enough making the immediately important parts clear. I wasn't actually sure what I was supposed to be investigating, exactly. There are also quotes around each line for some reason, which I found distracting.

The music works great for the intro but doesn't fit the city section well. Once again, I'm not sure if this is a bug or a weird design choice.

With all that being said, I may come back to this one after the jam when I have time and perhaps some improvements have been made.

Developer

I'll revisit some of the music.


The game follows slice of life style and I plan on growing and expanding it, which is why the city is a little big right now. The people you can't talk to are in through so they don't block pathing and they are all randomly generated from ten different people. If I have more time, I'll go back in and add different faces to each.


I have no idea why the bar has path blocking at the very beginning and may have to delete that map and redo it.

Submitted

Like I've said before, I have a hard time with RPG Maker games, I just find them boring.

Overall this game looks good, but I was playing it late at night and I was falling asleep.

I managed to get past the first two fights and managed to get to the school, but was pretty lost, bored and sleepy by that point.

Sorry. If I find some time I'll try to play it when I'm less tired.

Developer

That would be appreciated

Submitted

I think the difficulty scaling in the intro is off. I had a hard time getting past the vampyre fight, even on easy difficulty.

The music was really fun and energetic, but maybe not the right fit. That was the most pumped I've been for a tutorial in a while though lol

Developer

Let me try to tune the Vampyre fight down a little then! The debuff might stack a little too much to make fire damage do to much