Same age as me. I’d say you need to go look for a copy of Princess Maker 2, but I’m not sure if it will run on modern machines anymore, or if anyone has bothered to find dosbox settings that would make it work.
Is Princess Maker anything like Magical Diary, if you’re looking for a frame of reference to give others an idea about your game’s flavour? That’s a bit what your description brought to mind for me, especially once you mentioned a divide between class time (and potentially stats-building thereby) and social time. And I really liked Magical Diary, and have yet to find any games, text or VN or otherwise, that are particularly similar.
So yes, your setting intrigues me! I’d be interested in seeing how the story builds the player character and how classes would work.
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Reading up on princess maker 2 it seems to be a mix between that and long live the queen
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Magical diary and long live the queen put together still don’t even begin to compare to the depth and complexity of Princess Maker 2. It’s not even close. The most favorable thing you could say about it is that LLTQ and Magical Diary are shallow imitations of the Princess Maker games. And I’m not saying this to down on either of the games on question, either. Princess Maker was just that big.
Eh don’t feel bad. From what I looked up the last one was released in 2007, and even then the games have either received inconsistent translation or no translation at all (from the developer).
Anyway, the pitch:
Reminds me of another WIP a user made here a while back, but that one involved the user being forced into the military or something like that. Said user hasn’t been seen in a while, however.
“This wish ripped you out of your cozy reality, thrusting you into a world of magic and possibility”
Does this mean we are in a different world altogether or some alternate reality, or is this some circumstance the gods took as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a chosen one beat up people they don’t like?
“A fantasy world, where magical girls and power rangers (among other things) are commonplace.”
Am I a 90’s kid yet?
“But not all is as it seems.”
Bloody hell why does this always happen to us?
“Will you battle those forces… or join them?”
Yes.
Honestly the only two sources I heard of princess maker were NSFW so I also have basically no idea what that is.
So far it doesn’t sound bad but do you have any accurate description of it?
Not was I was expecting from your original description. It sounded like you were writing a story-driven game. Stat builders can have stories in them, but they tend to be more about strategy (Princess Maker 2) or guesswork (Long Live the Queen). You can influence the story in a stat builder, but mostly you are just reacting to it.
@LordOfLA and @Blazerules, I don’t know much about visual novels, but I would bet that LLTQ was influenced by Princess Maker. The main difference is that the newer generation of games are much smaller (fewer narrative possibilities and fewer available strategies). They also tend to be less creepy.
In Princess Maker 2, the only one I ever played, the player actually takes on the role of a little girl’s adopted father. (You cannot be her mother. She is magical and she has no mother.) Then you micromanage every aspect of her life, including deciding what she wears, what jobs she takes on, where she goes, and whom she spends time with.
When she turns 18, she marries someone and the game ends. She might want to marry you. The Freudian overtones are not subtle. My little girl kept running away, and I couldn’t blame her. If my father tried to dress me when I was 15, I’d have run away too.
Long Live the Queen avoids the creepiness because it does not give the player an in-game persona. It focuses more rigidly on the plot(s) and less on the protagonist’s relationship with her father. Long Live the Queen is about a princess trying to survive in a dangerous world. Princess Maker 2 is about the relationship between a powerful man and an impressionable girl who is forced to live with him.
Last I heard, Princess Maker 2 is abandonware. You can download it for free and play it on Dosbox. It is not erotica by any means, and I think it is worth playing, but it can still be a bit disturbing.
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The game is still in the concept and planning stage at this point. If a PM-like doesn’t seem appealing, it’s certainly early enough to do something else. I realize that something like that would be incredibly complex, and the story would necessarily have to be influenced more by the PC’s stats and relationships than by player choices. At the same time, though, I believe such a system would give me unparalleled freedom to branch the story, and allow for consequences to player decisions.
I think you should keep to the idea of a game book as is the case with existing CoG and Hosted Games projects. Games like LLTQ and Princess Maker would be better off made with something like Ren’Py (as LLTQ was). Although the imagination can work wonders, I do prefer actual artwork most of the time 
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Done right, I believe LLTQ could have been made in choicescript without losing anything. The point and click graphical interface could have been replaced with a multiple choice selection interface, and the rest of the game is already text. The few important graphics, like the map (and it’s debateable whether even that’s important) could be displayed somewhere in the stats interface, along with the pictures of whatever the MC is wearing at the time. Likewise, Princess Maker 2 is already mostly text, and you could easily find a place for the few important graphics, though it would be difficult to translate the adventures into a text game. Sorry, I really don’t understand where you’re coming from.
I’m coming from the perspective of trying to steer you from a path of over-complicating your work just for the sake that you can.
Can you make a life sim in choice script? Yes. Should you? No. Its the wrong tool More so if this is something you’re going to want to sell. Stick to something more CYOA.
Should have said that instead of giving an argument about preferring artwork to imagination, in a forum for a medium that emphasizes use of imagination over graphics, in regards to games that are mostly text based anyway. That kind of argument just doesn’t hold any water.
The overcomplication argument I can get behind. I do have an idea for how to use the goto scene and gosub commands to create a loop that could handle most of the repetitive daily/weekly/whatever issues, but the interrupts for story scenes are going to be an issue. Maybe I’ll come back to it in a future game, once I’ve got more experience with choicescript behind me. The story idea I have for this game doesn’t necessarily have to be done in a stat-builder, though it would make it easier to make the story branch based on how the player specialized their character. I do want to have the story flow differently depending on character choices; not just branch and shortly merge again, but actually branch into a different story arc. But that can be done just as easily by branching into different scenes, I guess.
Ah, that was just me expressing my preference for where I would actively entertain buying a life sim. I’d be very unlikely to buy a purely text based one. But there are people floating around here with many differing opinions. Might be worth posting a question as to how many people would be interested in a stat builder/life sim.
That said I find stat buidlers/life sims somewhat grindy (especially the winter wolves ones) and would prefer a straight up CYOA style narrative. You can still branch in to new stories if you want.
Stat-building games are normally not my favourites. I’ve played a few with other aspects that caught my attention - art, story, writing, voice acting, and so forth - and enjoyed them.
That said, I didn’t mind the stat building of the aforementioned Magical Diary because it was simple and not time consuming. It took a matter of moments to click and choose my classes for the week, and then I’d occasionally get an interesting event or a little bit of fun information if I hit the right class at the right time. It also wasn’t a game where a few unwise stat-building decisions would sink my game’s entire ship, so to speak.
Another reason I don’t prefer stat-building games normally is because often there are several pages of information that I find myself shifting through just to make one or two decisions. I don’t mind that quite as much with actual physical papers that I can spread around a table, but on my laptop or tablet? No thanks. That’s one advantage of choicescript games, to my mind; most of the stats are usually on one or at most two pages and I can glance at them once or twice a chapter and still enjoy the game. (I know, that’s a terrible way to play stat building and strategy games. I do it anyway.)
I actually agree with @Shadou that LLTQ could have been just as good of a story if it had been done in choicescript - different, but still compelling.
With choicescript, I know it’s possible to stack several choices atop one another in a single page (discussed here), so that would provide a simple way to set a schedule. And yes, *gosub_scene and *gosub and so forth might provide a practical way to loop the routine codes between the narrative segments. Not that I’m an expert coder - I’m certainly not.
I don’t think there really are any stat-building style choicescript games currently, or at least none that I remember. I’d be very interested in seeing if one could be done well enough to function properly and be enjoyable. Building a story around choosing coursework, or something similar, might be really fun and still be a framework to tell a branching, engaging narrative.
It’s really hard to say, too, how well it might catch on without a working demo. I fancy we’re all picturing quite different things compared to how the actual game might play. I hope you do give it a go.
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Well, I started working on fleshing out the story, and I ran into a few continuity problems right away.
If this is set in modern-day earth, then there can’t have been any actual magic in the world since at least the dark ages; if there was ever any real magic in our world, it has been extinct for hundreds of years, and fallen into folklore and mythology.
If there hasn’t been any magic in our world for so long, and a magical wish can bring magic back to the world, then there has to be a reason magic has been absent for so long; something’s keeping it away.
If something’s been keeping magic away for hundreds of years, then where did Magical Girls and Power Rangers come from? Those are modern imaginings, and it stretches possibility to the breaking point to say that our TV shows have accurately depicted what magic could have evolved into in hundreds of years, since the historical representation of a magical girl is more along the lines of pointed hat, green skin, long nose, and warts.
I could just hand-wave in Power Rangers and Magical Girls into the story, saying they come from other dimensions in which they’re real… especially if I’m taking our MC out of our reality and dropping them into one where magic is real. But that’s rather poor storytelling, IMO, and I’d be a hypocrite to try to do such myself. There’s no historical base for Power Rangers and Magical Girls, so they aren’t going to exist in this story.
So I asked myself, ‘What is the most recent magical representation in historical fiction?’
Now, I could be completely wrong here. But when I think of magic in historical fiction, I think Merlin. Arthurian legend. Knights. Dragons. Faeries. Nymphs. If you weed Tolkein influences out of lore and mythology (and the subsequent Dungeons and Dragons influences that took inspiration from it) as being too recent, you’re still left with a lot of myth and folklore to choose from to use as a base.
I’m currently doing research and world building for a setting in which these creatures of mythology and folklore were at one time real, but were sealed away. The premise of the story isn’t going to change much; magical girls and power rangers will simply become sorceresses and wizards. The wish still removes the MC from our mundane, magically dead world and thrusts them into another world where magic is real and they have the opportunity to learn it. And as magic returns to our world in the wake of the wish, the MC may have the opportunity to discover who granted the wish, how, and why.
World-building like this probably seems like a lot of work for a CYOA setting, but if this first story works out I may write other works in the same setting.
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Sounds like you have a plan there. The more research you do before you write your story, the better it and subsequent works will be.
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The role-playing game Deadlands dealt with this contradiction pretty well, tying into broader trends in the history of western civilization (disenchantment, enlightenment, modernity, imperialism, the onset of the industrial revolution, the apparent destruction of “pre-modern” ways of life, etc). I don’t think this was the first setting to do this sort of thing, but it’s the first to come to my mind.
It’s very genre specific, so you can’t exactly rip it off, but it might give you some ideas.
If you aren’t familiar with the game setting, it’s described on Wikipedia.
Found some outstanding sources of myth and legend stories from the medieval ages, and am still reading and researching. I’m putting together an alternative history, attempting to resolve and incorporate Irish and English folklore and myth, and mesh them with the story I’m working toward.
I do want to apologize to anyone that was looking for a magical girl story here. I couldn’t resolve the magical girl idea within the setting of modern day reality. Even with the alternative history I’m writing, and even with alternative dimensions… I can’t justify magical girls a la Sailor Moon, Madoka, Nanoha, etc. in the setting I’m writing.
I’ll probably move into the Works in Progress category once I have most of the story outline written and am starting to write the game into choicescript.
So, we can join the forces of evil? Because i want to destroy that planet. And how powerful we will be?