"Star Crystal Warriors Go!"—Is your magic strong enough to save reality?

Announcements
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Originally published at: “Star Crystal Warriors Go!”—Is your magic strong enough to save reality? - Choice of Games LLC

We’re proud to announce that Star Crystal Warriors Go!, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.

It’s 30% off until 9/4!

It’s tough fighting evil by moonlight and being an ordinary kid by daylight! Can you save your city’s dreams from monsters, halt a magical plague in its tracks, and still help your new club prepare for the best school festival ever?

Star Crystal Warriors Go! is an interactive magical girl anime novel by Holly McMasters, with additional content by Brian Rushton. It’s entirely text-based, 250,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You were just an ordinary teenager at Northside High School—going to classes, hanging out with your friends, spending time with your dad, occasionally staying up too late watching your favorite TV show.

Then a talking animal unlocked your magical powers.

Now, thanks to the Star Crystal in your heart, you can transform into a Stellaria, a magical warrior tuned to the light of the constellations. You’re one of the very few with the power to defeat the terrifying monsters that you call Nightmares. It’s just in time, too, because Nightmares are creeping into your city, corrupting people’s dreams to weaken the veil between the Dream Kingdom and the waking world and spreading a terrible sleeping plague. If the veil falls, the Dream Kingdom will engulf reality and the Nightmares – ruled by the terrifying Empress Nyx—will take over your world.

Fortunately, you’re not alone. Your friends in the waking world will always stand by your side, and there are other Stellaria out there fighting against the Nightmares—some of whom might be closer than you think! How will you push the Nightmares out of your city? Will you strike them down with your magic, use your wits to turn them against each other, or heal the darkness in their hearts with the shining compassion in yours?

As you learn the truth behind the Stellaria and the Nightmares, you’ll also learn the truth about your own past: your own dreams are filled with visions of a crystal castle and a love that feels like a memory. But even with the very fabric of reality at stake, you still have to go to classes, keep your grades up, and plan the school festival. How will you balance it all?

  • Play as male, female, or non-binary; gay, straight, bi, or asexual.
  • Customize your outfit, weapon, and the color of your magic for a truly spectacular transformation into a Stellaria!
  • Wield the power of dreams! Fling sparkling colored light, animate objects, bend reality, and more!
    Romance your loyal compassionate best friend, the new kid at school with a mysterious secret, or even a dangerously beautiful Nightmare!
  • Bond with your talking animal companion.
  • Uncover the mysterious past of the Dream Kingdom, cure a magical plague, and withstand the temptations of the Nightmares.
  • Plan the best spring festival that your school has ever seen—if you can negotiate with the Student Council!

Will you keep your heart’s Star Crystal full of hope and defeat the Nightmares, or will you fall to despair and join the darkness?

We hope you enjoy playing Star Crystal Warriors Go!. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

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At this time, neither the discount nor the demo seem to be available on Steam.

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Congratulations on the release @Brian_Rushton!

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We’re working on the Steam pricing issue; the launch discount didn’t go out on release.

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Thank you!

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Huzzah and congrats on the release!

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I’m leaning into the genre vibes with this one, playing way against type for me: flighty, idealistic Lyra, dancing into battle with reckless abandon. But I’m already (chapter 4) so invested in the mystery of the dream world that I won’t be able to help playing an Insight-driven character, later on.

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Have to ask, can MC be evil or go more villainous route ?

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Yes, starting in the second to last chapter, but it’s hard to get without planning for it ahead of time, so I’d recommend doing it on a second playthrough. For completely specific details (with a lot of spoilers) You need to have low shine when you reach the mirror on the second floor of Nyx’s tower. Shine goes up when you succeed, so you basically need to fail a lot of challenges throughout the game in order to turn evil.

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I really appreciate the stat guide in the game. Helps ease the burden of a somewhat stat heavy game, knowing about the levels the checks are gonna look for, knowing about how many stats to build up, etc, and it’s helped further by the stars being pretty generous to build up. Appreciate it a lot, the little meta guide stuff the game has, so I know what to be expecting, what sort of checks to build for. Not feeling as stressed about it like most of the typically stat heavy CoG label releases

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I haven’t finished yet, but I am having such a blast with this game!

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I really appreciate the feedback!

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I really enjoyed this, it’s a fun story!

I do wonder about this in the startup not showing up later:

Summary

*create morganRomance 1
*create jessRomance 1
*create orionromance 1
*create kitRomance 1
*create polyRomance false

I saw that in the save file and felt it gave me license to pursue all the ROs, but so far as I can tell it’s an unused variable?

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The original author intended on including a fully executed polyamorous ending. I don’t have much experience with polyamory and asked around on the forums for how best to complete it, but eventually decided to leave it out so that my inexperience didn’t create something unenjoyable.

However, during beta testing we found a bug where you could romance multiple characters at once. I was going to fix it, but some readers enjoyed it and said that it worked well for polyamory in their opinion. So I restructured some of the endings to account for characters acknowledging the other romances. They’re chill with you being with the others as well, but they don’t have direct romantic involvement with each other.

The original throuple was you, Jess and Morgan, and that’s what the variable was for, but it’s unused in the newer version

If you have any thoughts on preferred way polyamory should show up in games, definitely let me know. It was hard to research and you’re literally part of the target audience so it could come in useful for future games.

Edit:speaking of romances, there is technically an “evil power couple” ending, but’s it’s mostly hinted at and only briefly shown.

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Yeah as someone who grew up watching magical girl shows, I knew this would be right up my alley. I really enjoyed all the lore with the Stellaria. Fun read - great job on this.

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I don’t know anything about polyamory in real life so all I can tell you is that I want to romance Minthara and Shadowheart and Lae’zel and Karlach all at the same time, I firmly believe in my heart that Polytrix Rumi/Zoey/Mira is canon, I’ll read anything with the Glitradora tag, and I can think of at least two animes airing right now where most of the fandom is essentially chanting “They should kiss!” and being intentionally nonspecific about Who should kiss - because they all should kiss. (Watanare & Bad Girl).

The poly relationships in the Creme de la Creme-verse all make a lot of sense because they are with characters who get together whether the player dates them or not. That’s appealing in an extra sense because one thing that doesn’t happen nearly often enough in IF is playing matchmaker. In Royal Affairs you can help your bodyguard get together with a ballet dancer and it’s so much fun rooting for them!

Probably some authors might handle the MC flirting and dating and kissing all the ROs with a carefully-written scene where people talk about their boundaries and expectations and everyone has a mature conversation but screw it, make it awkward and messy! My character in Infamous can and will hook up with every other girl that so much as blinks at me all while pining away for Seven Lawless. I hope for drama!

When the characters are on the younger side, and when the entire story plays out in a relatively short time frame, I think it’s best to just design for all of the different romances to progress in parallel, and not to move too quickly.

Nothing is dumber than a couple of teenagers declaring undying love for one another after spending a few days together. We can imagine a better world where teens don’t do stupid shit like that. What if Mercutio had gone to the orchard with Romeo, and Juliet decided to hook up with both of them? It probably still would have been a disaster but at least it wouldn’t be because kids swore undying love to total strangers.

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The game is discounted on Steam now!

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Absolutely loved it. I didn’t watch much magical girl stuff growing up (I did read Fushigi Yuugi though) but this game has me thinking I really missed out. I really enjoyed both the Dream World and the slice-of-life stuff.

If I have any criticism, it’s that the last choice and resulting ending feels… really abrupt. Not that I didn’t like the lead-up to it where you discuss your future with friends and family, but I would’ve liked a little more elaboration on what kind of future your character has beyond, for example, just choosing to be an ordinary human. Very cool to see what ended up happening with the other characters though, it feels like a lot of other games skip over that “where are they now” stuff.

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Just finished the game. I wished there can be a sequel with having a full team of them to romance one of them!

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Shine: 95%
Shine: 95%689×447 24.9 KB

I don’t think I can get any shinier. Mathematically speaking.

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