Great to hear, I always thought Tokyo Wizard still had a lot of potential after playing it when it came out! Helping out on the Lich ‘side-quel’ was fun.
1 Like
Yes, it is a bit of an older title, and I should have maintained it better through the years (I have added to it, but maybe not enough). Anyway, I am hoping that commissioning this extra artwork will kick-start me into doing more.
And… if you have any suggestions let me know! (and thanks so much again for helping with Life as a Lich! 
)
2 Likes
I’ll do so as soon as I have the time to try the update!
You’re welcome, it was fun and you did an awesome job addressing feedback, I’m glad I could help!
1 Like
Okay so I finally got around to playing the update and damn, the CoGdemo saves help a lot with testing compared to released game.
I don’t remember enough to tell what is new and what is old so I’ll just generally give feedback on everything:
There’s a bit of a skill bloat, especially with how little you’ll use most of them and how some of them could also be fused into a single stat, also the affinity stats kinda go up and down in a way I didn’t fully get nor found very engaging. Game in general could use a little bit of ‘cutting off the fat’ I feel.
There’s a nice variety of spells but you very rarely get to really use them, especially if you don’t fight the Elementals (Maybe fighting some kind of ‘evil binding’ on them could replace their fights on a nice playthrough?), also when you use them the fight / use of them isn’t really described, which is kind of a shame.
There are too many friends and potential connections which lead to little depth for any of them, like the starting BFF / Girlfriend, who cut you off way too early to have spent any time with them and only like 2 interactions afterward, the second RO choice doesn’t show up much more and Bella also only show up a few times (She looked like she’d show up more on another route tho at least), maybe cutting down some options to refine the remaining ones could be worthwhile? Yuki and Arcanus were great tho and they’re the most important ones at least.
Overall I think you’re on point in terms of width, if a tad overextend in places, you just need to work on the depth, that’s the point of content that would be the most worthwhile to polish the game IMO.
As many of you know, most of my games feature illustrations within the game. While I know that this is not the focus of CoG/HG, I grew up reading gamebooks and choose-your-adventure books, and the reason I write IF is to try to recreate some of those feelings (and these books always had inside illustrations). The two main exceptions are Life as a Lich -my last published game, as at the time the artist I normally work with -Tiffany Yuet- was quite busy and could only do the cover, and Tokyo Wizard (my first game, at the time I didn’t really know many artists, and I only ever got to know Tiffany through the forum).
Anyway, recently I have started to collaborate with two new artists. I’ll discuss the artist for Life as a Lich in the relevant thread.
Here I want to tell you about Gou-san. Given that Tokyo Wizard is set in Tokyo (a great city, I have lived here for 20 years and still love the place!), I thought it would be fitting to have an artist from Tokyo work on the artwork for the game. She is a very established artist, who works on anime, books, and board games. All I can say is that her artwork is amazing, you can check her portfolio below. I am incredibly happy that she has agreed to do this work (I think probably only because my wife and her get along really well, as she is in high demand). Today she just complicated her first illustration, of box you find at the beginning of the game with the magic wand.
It’ll be a while still until the game is patched with all the artwork (I will likely also take the opportunity to polish it a bit… it is the first of my games, and every time I check some of the files I realize many parts can be improved). But anyway, I was very excited about this artwork today so I just wanted to share! 
7 Likes
This looks good! I’m excited for the new art. The new artist looks very promising based on the portfolio and the new art. Tokyo Wizard was one of the first games I’ve played and got me interested in HG/COG, so it’ll always have a special place in my heart. So happy it’s getting worked on again!
2 Likes
It also has a very special place in my heart, as it was my first “solo game”(my first published game was with a group of other authors on this forum, Starship Adventures). I have added and polished it a bit through the years, but I have long recognized it needs a bit more polishing (I have learned a lot since it, looking back on the code/writing I see I was so unexperienced then!). Next year it will be… 10 years since it was published!
2 Likes