MZ - Miracle Girl Chiyoko - A Classic Magical Girl Adventure - DEMO RELEASED!

Miracle Girl Chiyoko is part Visual Novel, part RPG, part Life-Sim! The player takes the role of Chiyoko, a normal high school girl with normal high school problems. Her grades are slipping, she has a track meet coming up and her friends are distracting her with trips to the arcade! Worst of all, her crush has just left the country! But an encounter with a talking cat and an evil extra-dimensional queen have made all those problems seem small! Now Chiyoko must train to become a powerful Magical Girl before the forces of darkness overrun her city, and the world!

Chiyoko is a normal high school girl who does her best not to stand out. Her grades are mediocre, she does okay in her athletics club, and spends most of her free time hanging out with her friends at the mall or arcade. But when she encounters a magical talking cat, her life is turned upside-down! Now she finds herself in the crosshairs of the evil Devourer Queen, and in order to save herself and the world, she must become the greatest Magical Girl who ever lived! As a pretty generic anime heroine, Chiyoko is hard-working, brave, and loyal to her friends. As the wielder of the Heartcaller Staff, she excels at fighting shadowy foes and supporting her friends.

Kameko is a flashy girl with big dreams. She excels at school and athletics, and has all the high scores at the local arcade. But her true dream is to become an idol! Like Chiyoko, Kameko found herself at the mercy of the Devourer Queen, but was saved by a mysterious magical cat. Now her dreams of stardom are put on hold, but with her magical Star Sabre, she shines brighter than she would on any stage. Kameko loves being a Magical Girl because she wants to be the best, and with her newfound powers, she can become the greatest heroine in the world! She is best at fighting warrior type enemies.

Haruko is quiet, studious, analytical, and very cautious. Born with an incurable disease that puts her in a constant state of sickness, she spends most days in her room, reading and taking care of her pet bugs. Her melancholy attracted the Devourer Queen's attention, but she too was saved by a mysterious talking cat. As a Magical Girl, Haruko fights with the Cicada Bow, with her magical arrows taking on the properties of her favorite insects. She is skilled at analyzing the enemies' aura and finding their weaknesses. Haruko is best at fighting beast type enemies.

Winston is a magical talking cat that claims to come from another dimension. He gives the girls magical powers, in order to protect them from the Devourer Queen's dark magic. However, he advises them that this is only a temporary solution, and the only chance they have is to defeat the Devourer Queen. Winston is can turn himself intangible, invisible, and can speak telepathically. He took the form of a cat to entice Chiyoko into taking him home, he often pretends to be a normal cat as a cover. He advises the girls on all things related to the supernatural, and also supervises their Magical Girl Training.

The Devourer Queen comes from another dimension, and possibly even from a different universe. When she arrives on a planet, she must consume the souls of its inhabitants to sustain herself and grow in power. As she has just arrived on this planet, she can only consume three souls at once, and she is being obstructed by Winston's magic crystals. As it stands, she can not gain any more power until the Magical Girls are defeated, but as she cannot cross into the human world herself, she must rely on her army of minions to defeat them, or to lure them into her lair.



Miracle Girl Chiyoko has the player playing from Chiyoko's perspective each day, as she navigates High School life and Magical Girl Training. Most of the game plays out in a Visual Novel style. The player is free to choose how Chiyoko spends her free time - does she study for her next test, hang out at the park or arcade, or try to develop her abilities as a Magical Girl? Each choice will have consequences - studying and training will tire her out if she doesn't have fun once in a while, but neglecting studying may backfire on a test day, and neglecting her training may mean certain death when the Devourer Queen attacks!

At the beginning of each day, Chiyoko has the option to learn new skills and buy magical equipment from Winston. She'll need to do both of these things when she enters a dungeon! In dungeons, Chiyoko and her friends must defeat enemies, find treasure, rescue survivors, and drive off the enemy leading the attack! If she can't, the monsters may break through and begin their conquest of the world...



This game was originally created for the Magical Girl Game Jam #10 hosted on itch.io, where it took first place overall, as well as first place in the Game Polish and Audio categories. It was later submitted to the Magical Girls Forever Continue-It Game Jam #2, where rating is currently in progress. It uses pixel art graphics drawn in Aseprite, and 8-bit music and sound effects created in Famistudio. All assets were created by me, Ayback. No generative AI was used, or will be used in the production of the game.




The demo for Miracle Girl Chiyoko can be downloaded from its itch.io page, or played directly in the browser.

Itch.io Link: https://ayback.itch.io/miracle-girl-chiyoko

I played the demo, here's some thoughts:

The presentation of the game is really good for the style you were going for. I'm not the biggest fan of old-school graphics, but they work really well here. All the custom menus are well made. The music fits. The battlers are nice and I like that they have motions and I dig the custom shield state graphic. Maybe some projectile attacks could have projectile animations?

The story and dialogue are very "basic", but I guess that's kind of what you were going for. Some of the banter with Winstons add some spice to it, which is nice. The choose your activity for the day works really well, at least if you can keep up with creating more and more slice-of-life segments for the choices in the future.
After meeting at Haruko's house, I didn't realize you were probably supposed to pick "train magical girls"? I picked 'track' and I'm not sure if anything happened (at least I didn't get any notification that my track grade would have increased).

I liked the battles, but with the low number of skills I think they'd start feeling kind of repetitive (at least if the dungeons get longer) unless more mechanics are added. The negative energy enemies were a nice change at least, my energy took a huge hit when I wasted my first turn by attacking them with all characters, but thankfully you could restore energy before the boss. The shield nullifying attacks also seemed to work somewhat randomly(?). The boss felt kind of easy to me, since I kept blocking a lot of his attacks.

Anyway, I think this is a really well made project, good luck with it!
PS. Below in spoilers are some spelling mistakes I noticed.

Thanks so much for your detailed review, and for the spell-check! I did two proofreading passes on this game but it's hard noticing errors when you're the one who typed it. I'll be correcting those soon.

The issue in the Haruko's House scene was absolutely a bug! I seem to have messed up the jump labels when I was reorganizing the event. None of the "Study" actions were working correctly in that scene. I'm working to correct it now and I'll have it reuploaded shortly.

You're absolutely right to say that "basic" is what I was going for with this story and the characters. They all just kind of slide neatly into their tropes and you can tell who is what pretty much by looking at them. I've never seen a "proper" magical girl show before but I did some research before writing the story, and tried to stick to the formula as best I could (Madoka Magica is my favorite anime but it's a deconstruction.) I want the characters to be a bit grounded and believable, with Winston as the outlier. He's the most fun to write by far!

Combat mechanics are still being considered, and they're something I kind of struggle with. One thing I'm trying to focus on is each girl's different abilities and strengths when fighting in the front position (Chiyoko's staff can damage incorporeal enemies, Kameko is tanky and does consistent damage, Haruko's front position attack hits all enemies,) but so far it's coming down to "Character X is best at fighting Y-Type enemies" and I'm not sure if I like that. Once there are more status effects, attack types, and uses for the Power meter, I'm hoping it becomes more interesting. I'm also considering more uses for the position swapping, such as giving Kameko a charge attack that moves her from back to front and stuns enemies, giving Chiyoko a front-row shield ability that lets her reflect enemy magic, etc. I don't want this game to be too difficult, but I agree that the boss could definitely be a little tougher.

Thanks for checking it out! Your feedback is very helpful!

About a month ago, I decided I would focus on this project exclusively, because it's the one I've had the most fun making. So I'm currently working to add all the features I didn't have time to add for the original Game Jam entry. In the last update, dungeons and items were added, but the execution was sloppy. Adding new items, locations, and skills to that system would have been difficult and messy.

But I've learned a lot since I started this project, and I decided it was time to put a new system in place that was easier to work with. So instead of the labyrinthine eventing hell I had before, I'm now using a sort of hybrid plugin / eventing approach. This is requiring me to rebuild the game from the ground up, but I think it's worth it, since the previous version was so unmanageable.



But aside from more consistant scene switching and (hopefully) no errors, these changes are all behind-the-scenes. A more exciting change is that visual-novel style character graphics are being added to the game! Since most of the game is told in a visual novel style, I feel like this adds a lot to the presentation. The images I've created so far are a little rough and will need to be refined a bit, but I'm very happy with the result so far.

Aside from the character images, I am also working to add more interactivity to some of the visual novel scenes. One of the main criticisms of the game is that there isn't enough "gameplay," especially in the beginning. So the player will have more control over how Chiyoko spends her day at school, how hard she works at training her Magical Girl powers, and how she spends her free time. The player can watch Chiyoko's "Spirit" (her mood, stress level, exhaustion, etc) rise and fall in real time, and adjust her level of effort to compensate. This new mechanic will mean A LOT of balance testing, but I feel like the game will benefit by adding some gameplay to Chiyoko's non-Magical Girl life.

You can read the full itch.io update here!
Miracle Girl Chiyoko Devlog

These features are not yet in the demo, but feel free to check out the existing demo here!
Miracle Girl Chiyoko on Itch.io

And if you'd like to follow the progress of the game, follow Ayback on itch.io!

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

This week, I've been focusing on making the life-sim scenes more interactive. Since the characters spend so much time going to school, I figured I'd start by working on scenes that take Chiyoko through a normal school day.

Since the game is still primarily a visual novel, I don't want anything too complicated, and I want to make sure that the happenings of Chiyoko's normal life have consequences for her life as a Magical Girl as well. Because of this, a majority of the Life-Sim events are centered around Chiyoko's Spirit attribute (taking the place of Luck in RPG Maker.)

Spirit represents a combination of things: happiness, stress level, mental stability, and other factors. As a Magical Girl, Chiyoko's powers come from the energy flowing through her body, and this is helped or hindered depending on whether her spirit is in harmony or in turmoil. Chiyoko's spirit fluctuates between 0 and 999 throughout the game, sometimes erratically, depending on what is going on.



During school, her spirit is usually being drained, albeit slowly. The player can stop this by letting Chiyoko slack off during class, which will raise her Spirit but lower her grade. The player can also make her work harder, which will raise her grade but drain her Spirit even faster. Chiyoko's Spirit gets a boost from passing a school test, and gets devastated from failing one, so investing her energy into classwork is a good strategy that pays off! But working too hard can have consequences too, so it is up to the player to keep things balanced.

With a high spirit, Chiyoko gains Experience at a faster rate, and her combat stats get a boost as well. If it gets too low, she will have a hard time training, and her combat stats will suffer. This system is still very much a work-in-progress and will require a lot of balancing and testing to get right. I'm hoping it adds an interesting new dimension to this project.

You can read the full itch.io update here!
Miracle Girl Chiyoko Devlog

These features are not yet in the demo, but feel free to check out the existing demo here!
Miracle Girl Chiyoko on Itch.io

And if you'd like to follow the progress of the game, follow Ayback on itch.io!

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!