Hello July and welcome to the second devlog of the update of Magical Girls & Mecha v1.2 which really it should be v0.2 because in retrospect what is currently posted to itch is still a much early version of the game that I realized. But its just naming semantics.

Lets talk about what I’ve done since the last devlog went up in June.

The first and I think biggest thing is I realized that as a series Neo Cities Chronicles only needs to be two games, Magical Girls & Mecha and the roleplaying card based board game Magical Girls Mecha Rising which means a lot of what I had been doing in the “Neo Cities Chronicles TTRPG” is going to be cannibalized then redistributed between those two games. Things like character creation & the character sheets, in game events, the clocks system, etc are all going to make their way into the two games. How exactly is still under development as I’m still trying to figure out what each game can share and what needs to be unique between the two. That has been a big part of the last months work because I firmly believe the game I want to make is there but its just been scattered into too many different google documents and I need to assemble it correctly.

I have also worked extensively on figuring out exactly how Magical Girls & Mecha will function as a playable system which means going sort of back to the drawing board to an extent. I realized that over the last few years since I first posted the game I lost the plot and what I wanted for the game and what I had was simply put lacking. Magical Girls & Mecha is supposed to be a narrative first play by post game in the veins of old LiveJournal Roleplaying Communities and I only provided the framework for how to create the community and nothing about how players would interact with the world. This is something I’m fixing by introducing an Adventure Guide to pair with the gameplay Guidebook I already have, think of it as the traditional TRPGs Adventure Path. It will include more story than what I currently have shared, a set events that have to happen when playing, the conditions in which those events occur, as well finally giving any sort of information about the games enemies The-Once-From-Before.

There is also the System Structure which is currently nonexistent except for the header that I’ve been working on sorting out. As I said I gave a framework for the community but nothing for the games system because I was previously working under the belief that anyone who picked up this game would have a familiarity with the LiveJournal roleplay communities of old and that was a mistake on my part and a disservice to potential players. So I’ve been working on filling that information into the Guidebook. The update including that section will probably come out as soon as I finish writing it as a minor patch - not the true v1.2 update - just because I think its one of the bigger things that I can do to make the game more of a playable game. I’m hoping to have something of that done by the end of summer.

And if you didn’t know I’ve been streaming working on Neo Cities Chronicles as a whole as well as revamping and updating Magical Girls & Mecha to give it the content update that it deserves. You can catch me streaming sporadically on twitch at AsAlwaysImani, these last week I’ve been streaming during the day but it varies. I always post when I’m going live to twitter and I’m going to also try to post when I go live on my discord server The House Of Many Cats

Or you can check the VODs that I try to update in this YouTube Playlist. This playlist also includes the turntables of some of the 3D models and location artwork that I got done ages and ages ago. I’m going to try to find the rest of them because I have art work for all of the current locations from when I was working on Magical Girl Mecha Rising.