itch.io

Whoops, looks like I forgot a self switch. Good thing I never added a use for money! Thanks for pointing it out.

An Android version might happen in the future, but it’s not really a high priority at the moment, especially with Google planning on requiring licensing and verification for sideloaded apps in the near future. Unfortunately there are also too many files in the game itself to host the game in-browser, at least on Itch.

I haven’t strongly tested this and can’t really provide support for it, but you can download the PC version and attempt to run it on Android via Joiplay:

• Download and install the Joiplay and RPG Maker Plugin APKs from their latest Patreon post
• Download the Windows version of this game
• From the Joiplay app, tap the + button, choose Import Archive File, and select the Magical Viking Erika zip.
• Once the setup process has finished, tap the Magical Viking Erika icon inside the Joiplay app to launch the game.
• In-game, tap the gamepad icon in the upper-right corner to enable/disable the on-screen gamepad; the game can be fully played with touch controls. Press the pencil icon to enter edit mode and drag the on-screen gamepad buttons somewhere less in the way of textboxes and menus. While the edit mode is open, you can also tap a button to re-assign key codes; remap the ‘B’ key to ‘X’ to use it to back out of menus, etc., although the Escape key already provides the same function.
• Use the Star button under the gamepad and edit buttons to pull up Joiplay’s menu, including exiting the game and going back to the Joiplay launcher.

– This game features menus with custom touch/click buttons, but for some reason Joiplay didn’t recognize presses on them until I tried pulling down the Android notification bar for some reason. No idea what that’s about or if that’s a general fix.

Thanks for the detailed report! I think it just boils down to which input methods are actually checked while the player is in the maze, and the newest update should at least slap a band-aid over it, but if it’s still not working, please let me know.

Ah, dammit. I only tested this with a gamepad and keyboard, but apparently mouse input doesn’t work due to the way the sliding event checks for directional inputs. If you’re on PC, use your arrow keys instead of the mouse.

Now I need to check how it’s handled on mobile… probably the same as mouse.

Solid start! The art and animation are good, and the font and UI choices really bring it home. Definitely would be interested in seeing a version with some story scenes to it.

This was cute, fun, and simple. If I had a complaint, it’s the lack of resolution controls - the game opened in fullscreen for me, and at an ultrawide resolution some of the UI elements (particularly left side of the shop screen and some of the tutorial arrows) were pretty misaligned.

I do feel like the skills/actions could’ve been explained better, and they don’t really feel necessary at all, but for a jam title it’s a short, sweet, solid experience with some great art.

This was solid, and it was interesting to see the ‘travel’ theme applied to time instead of space.

I do agree that the timing is pretty punishing at the end - it almost felt like random chance was the biggest driver, getting lucky matches early on while scouting the board. The rewind functionality is good in concept, but sometimes hinders more than helps if it takes the player back to a point where they’ve already got one item turned.

I mean, I made it to the 90-95% completion mark by the end of the jam and already put a good bit of time afterwards into working on polish and bugfixes - and I’m pretty sure a number of other creators are in the same boat. Ideally, I’d like to guide players towards a more playable build directly through itch than to update the game profile or respond to bug report comments by saying “this is bugged, I’ve already fixed it, but you have to download it from [Site X] instead”.

On the other hand, I can also understand how allowing newer builds to be uploaded could influence the community ratings, and even with a requirement to leave the original build intact, it’s not difficult to obfuscate what was or wasn’t available in the jam version.

In all, though, I’m in favor of allowing submitters to upload new builds, though perhaps with stipulations that the original game jam versions be clearly marked as such, and that the community shouldn’t leave ratings based on the post-jam builds of the games before the judging period ends.

Part of the issue with web versions boils down to itch’s limitations, especially for RPG Maker titles. The version of Fatch Quest I uploaded for the jam wasn’t under 500MB unzipped (though a proper web export probably would’ve been), nor was it less than 1000 total files, making it ineligible for a web release - not that I had the spare time to figure out how to set one up anyways. The patched versions have trimmed out unused default RPG Maker resources enough to put them within the limit, but now that the jam’s entered its judging phase I can’t upload to the game page for another 12 days.

For most small or medium-sized RPG Maker games, checking the ‘Exclude unused files’ box is enough to get you within the limits (especially if you trim all the unused enemies, actors, tilesets, etc. out of your database), but there are other concerns you have to worry about. Particularly, the way the exclusion function works is that the editor just scans your maps and database for references to file names for images, tilesets, music, SE, etc. If you’re using a plugin involving any sort of image handling or custom audio - even stuff like custom interface buttons or GUI enhancements - the exclusion search will probably miss them, leading the exported game to have missing images or audio if you don’t manually copy them to the export folder before uploading. The workaround is to create an event somewhere (even if it’s never used) that references each object - a Show Picture command for each image, etc. For Fatch Quest, there’s less than 20 images I needed to do this for, and so it only took a minute or two to set up. For Magical Viking Erika, that’d require references to nearly 300 images across three dozen subfolders, with the next update increasing that total substantially - I’ve had to write a custom build script to handle what gets included and what gets excluded.

Yeah, I was working on actually testing the maps for the first time right up until the last few minutes, and the island area got hit the hardest with uncaught bugs. The lifeguard bit was especially bad because I forgot to set progress switches AND drunkenly coded a bunch of ‘move right’ (back towards the last map) as ‘move left’ (and basically skip the checkpoint altogether, with no way to go back because of those switches that didn’t get set).

I do have a bugfixed build of the game that (hopefully) solves most of the major issues, although it probably needs a new save to work properly. However, it’s outside of the scope of this jam and it won’t be uploaded to the main itch page until after the review period has ended in a couple weeks or so.

Soon! Right now I’m working on quashing the bugs, so I don’t have to build a bunch of different flavors (Windows, macOS, Linux, web, etc.) every time there’s a bug that needs fixing.

Thanks for the reports! I’m just about done wrapping up a big bugfix patch but I’ll double-check the ones you’ve mentioned.

As for the art, I definitely would’ve liked to do something that fit the overall aesthetic better, but unfortunately art is not my forte; all the good stuff, even the title screen, is courtesy of an asset pack by Gif. I just rendered some stuff in DAZ real quick for the sake of having actual art, and often it doesn’t quite mesh with some of the descriptions anyways. If I had to do pixel art by hand it certainly wouldn’t look as nice as the assets here, and would’ve taken much longer than the jam period to do.

I should’ve decided whether or not I was gonna do this before the halfway point of the jam. I cut my scope back this time but still ended up pushing the project right at the deadline (literally less than a minute left), although unlike last year it’s at least two-thirds of the way tested!

I don’t really want to have to turn off comments/posts on my project pages just because somehow Itch can’t prevent a brand-new account from posting the same scam link to two hundred different comment sections in five hours. And while it’s possible to delete those posts from my page after the fact, I’m not monitoring my page 24/7 - the malicious link could be available for hours before I see it or a moderator acts on a spam report.

It’d be nice if I could simply check a box to toggle things like ‘allow users to post links’ or even ‘allow new users to comment’ rather than disable posting entirely. because if I can’t get posts I lose one of my biggest avenues of actual project feedback and bug reports. And while preventing hyperlinks from working wouldn’t necessarily end the spam, having to put together broken-up links would hopefully force people to actually think for a second before following them.

To be completely honest I’ve never really been satisfied with the original models. Using a real-time, path-based rendering system for simple models designed with anime-like proportions is a tad overkill; the styles don’t really mesh well, shadow management is a bit difficult, and it can take some time to actually render the images - with the gloss and reflectivity on Erika’s Viking outfit, those images could take anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds. Multiply that by six unique weight stages, each with ten levels of inflation, and that wasted time adds up. A full CG would take much longer, especially with a lot of lighting or a large scene size; it took about 20 minutes to render the single cyberpunk CG at the end of the game.

By comparison, the toon-like filament rendering is pretty much instant unless I have the canvas set to an absurd resolution. Managing lighting and shadows is much more forgiving, and some of the rougher edges caused by blowing up some body parts much larger than intended are easier to hide. The downside is that every material and texture has to be adjusted for the change in rendering, which means I’d have to work on two sets of textures (and extra changes for managing transparency, properly meshing the colors of different bits of anatomy, etc.) if I wanted to keep rendering the older models alongside the new ones.

It’s definitely a significant style shift, but focusing just on the newer style allows me to do a lot more work in a lot less time, allowing me to focus on other parts of development and making it easy to add in a handful more images without too much effort.

I have a good understanding of the deindexing situation, but I’ve also never really cared about Itch driving traffic, at least for this particular title. It’s simply a convenient place for me to set up a storefront-like page where I can post blogs and update files without making a mess of things. I still post links to whatever major updates I make to other sites, particularly Weight Gaming.

I’ll admit that about half my traffic here comes from tag browsing, but overall the biggest single driver is still the Weight Gaming thread, and the rest is either external search engines. clicks back to the main page from people who landed on a blog post or my profile, or Itch collections, none of which are affected by the deindexing, though I’ll admit it does make it a bit harder for people to find it and add to their collection in the first place.

If this were something I cared about monetizing I’d be a little more sensitive about how traffic was being generated, but even then I’d still likely post on Weight Gaming, or start making use of the idle social media accounts I’ve got set up.

The situation developed rapidly, and we had to act urgently to protect the platform’s core payment infrastructure. Unfortunately, this meant it was not realistic to provide creators with advance notice before making this change. We know this is not ideal, and we apologize for the abruptness of this change.

I think this is what bugs me the most here. Yes, things escalated quickly, but not as quickly as implied here. The letter, calling out Itch and Steam specifically, was posted July 10th or 11th. Steam acted to remove certain offending content by the 15th. By that point it would’ve been prudent to assume that if even Steam wasn’t immune to these sort of pressure campaigns, Itch certainly wouldn’t be. And yet, no public action was taken here for a full week after that.

You had to have known days before taking action that the action would be necessary. Even a simple 24-hour warning that NSFW content would be temporarily delisted and reviewed and that there was no need for immediate panic - even if, indeed, there was reason to panic - would’ve gone a long way towards cooling off the sparks before they erupted into a wildfire. Instead, no public statement was issued until hours after the fact.

Obviously, yes, the payment processors taking this excuse to apply pressure are the root cause of the issue, one that puts you in a difficult position for the future of the site no matter what direction you choose. But it’s unrealistic to say that this shitshow was completely unavoidable.

EDIT: To be clear, I’m basing my assumption that the deindexing is temporary on the phrasing from the update post:

Pages will remain deindexed as we complete our review.

The unwritten implication is that the remaining pages would be re-indexed after the review is complete. If this is not the plan, that’s something you’re going to need to clarify sooner rather than later.

For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.

And what happens when the payment processors once again change what’s ‘allowable’ on a whim? Are there plans to implement support for creators to accept payments via less restrictive processors? Generally I feel like cryptocurrency - “stable” or otherwise - is a cancerous mess, but even that’s gotta be better than the rules changing whenever someone fires off a few strongly-worded emails.

Despite the scary-looking syntax error, it looks like it’s basically just an out-of-bounds map transfer. The map it attempts to load is a blank parent to a sub-map for a specific basement scene, which seems to set a flag that doesn’t get checked anywhere else and also transfers the player right back to the same blank map rather than back to the basement entrance.

For now it seems the best workaround is to just ignore the stairs, but since it’s an unrecoverable error that forces the player to reload the game, it should definitely be a priority for fixing or removing for the next patch.

Whoops, sorry about that. The funny thing is that the last game jam project I worked on (and never released) had a much more detailed character stats page, complete with height, weight, and B/W/H measurements, all designed with a toggle between imperial and metric in mind. Just one of the things I forgot about here in a rush to get a playable build out.

Next version will have a metric/imperial toggle in the game options - it’ll work automatically for the stats panel but I’ll have to double-check dialogue boxes, so a couple mentions might slip through the cracks.

This usually means the game hasn’t been properly extracted from the downloaded .zip file.

If you’re using Windows, right-click on the .zip file and choose a destination to extract the game files to, then run the unzipped Magical Viking Erika.exe from that location rather than from inside the zipped folder.

While this should allow new save files to be created and preserved between sessions, it won’t recover any save attempts from before the game was unzipped.

At the moment, no, sorry. I attempted to make up for that by giving a bit more freedom in the last month, but that’s about it. To be honest I don’t really feel like there’s enough content yet to justify it…

I guess there’s no harm in adding one for now, so I might push a change so you can do that after the epilogue bit and shouldn’t really require a new save if you just load the autosave leading into it, but it’ll take a day or two to push it as I’m a bit swamped with actual work this week.

I mean, I wouldn’t exactly call the current ending a “good” one…

I would like to implement unique game-overs with CGs for if a girl reaches, essentially, immobility. I also had an idea for a bad-end scene for losing what’s currently the final boss fight, but I couldn’t do art for it that I was satisfied with. Beyond that, there’s probably not much in the way of unique ending opportunities.

This seems to be a fairly common false-positive with Kaspersky, with Google searches showing even Microsoft products like MS Flight Simulator getting hit by it.

Ultimately Kaspersky isn’t the most reliable antivirus these days, and VirusTotal comes back with a completely clean result, including from their Kaspersky bot, so I don’t really know what to tell you. The game itself is just RPG Maker - a bunch of Javascript files and an embedded Chromium browser - but if you don’t trust it, don’t run it.

Perhaps in the future, but right now it’s not a priority. You can attempt to run the game in an RPG Maker interpreter for Android such as Joiplay or MaldiVes Player, but I can’t guarantee any sort of compatibility.

• The game currently concludes at about the point where a third character would join the party, but she’d be the last one.

• I would ideally like to add one more “functional” weight stage before immobility, and maybe single-image immobility game overs for characters that get too big. Both of those might be a bit ambitious with DAZ rendering - even for the current final weight stage I had to do some tinkering with poses and canvas size just to be able to fit the combat forms at their higher inflation stages, and DAZ really doesn’t do immobile/blob-like stuff well, so it comes down to suggestive posing more than anything.

• I believe some dark/light magic is currently implemented for enemy-only spells, but I didn’t add them as slot-in magic as the chips generally follow a pattern of (single + multi-target attack spell) + (buff + related debuff) + (single + multi-target status effect); I can do the attack spells, obviously, and new status effects aren’t difficult either, but I kinda ran out of good ideas for buffs and debuffs that didn’t feel overpowered by the third stage. Maybe once I start overhauling combat they’ll be revisited, but I think it’d make more sense for each character to learn their own dark/light/nuclear (if I ever actually separate that out from light) offensive spells to go with the basic support spells they already learn without chips.

• Right now Reed and Violet are the only two NPCs in the game, without any major plans for more that’d appear in any significant capacity. I don’t know that many people’d be here for that sort of content with Reed and I can safely say Violet’s outside the scope of this game. If I ever got deep enough into the weeds that I started adding actual characters to the girls’ friend groups I wouldn’t be surprised if some bad habits rubbed off on them, but that’d be way, way down the line.

• I would like to expand the game as far as the end of Month 12, but whether that’s the same as having 12 chapters is a whole different ball park. Right now I have a good idea of the plot beats I want to hit, but it’s still at the outline stage - seeing how the pieces best fit together, which ones might be best bundled into a package deal, etc. All I can say for certain is that the longer it is, the more I’m going to have to slow down the pace of the weight gain and spread it over the course of the game, as I kind of like the idea of looming immobility being more of an endgame threat than something that needs to be balanced against for months on end.