MahouShoujo SakuraSan

Did a craaap ton, mostly a ton of work on the audio and implementing enemies and a follower in the platformer segment.

I’m actually super proud of the speaking audio. It’s five vowel sounds that play when the dialogue box types the corresponding vowel, and the pitch and such is altered by a table storing pitch, modulation, and voice set (some special characters have different recording sets, such as certain demons/enemies) and then modulation and pitch are used to calculate the actual pitch of the blip played, with modulation being used to multiply against a randomized number between 0 and 1 and then added to pitch. The lower modulation is, the less difference in pitch between sounds. For instance, the main character, Sakura, has a voice (pitch) of 0.89 and a modulation of 0.2, so she has a lower and more monotone voice. Her friend, Haruko, has a voice of 1.1 and a modulation of .6, so she has a higher and energetic voice.

After calculating the modulation, pitch, and random number, the program also adds the punctuation pitch. If the sound is the last one before a punctuation mark, it figures out what type of mark it is and changes what it adds accordingly. For instance, if it’s ‘?’, the pitch rises by .4, if it’s ‘.’, it adds -.2, or if it is ‘!’, the pitch rises by .3.

Aside from the work on the dialogue boxes, I also added Haruko as a follower in the platforming segment! Currently, she can jump and follow you and that’s about soon. She can also teleport to you if you get too far and she can’t get to you. However, there’s one small problem… Sometimes she takes a hot second to teleport, and just ends up jumping aggressively against the wall with increasing speeds, creating a horrible cacophony of sound T-T. It does fix itself eventually, but I might just like. Have to mute her. When she does that. A bit of a bandaid fix I know.

I plan on having her be able to attack soon! The player also needs to be able to attack too, I’ve just been focused on getting everything in there.

I have attached a video of some test dialogue I’ve made to test everyone’s voice (though I removed a certain slightly spoiler-y oneP). It is a little bit quiet, my apolocheese.

various screenshots :) most of the work i’ve done has been on the engine and artworks. these are a few screenshots (not in order) of the opening cutscene, and the main menu

Spent ages getting a typewriter effect working, and added some sfx, composed a song, and here we are :D we have the intro (the first dark bit) and then the test dialogue afterwards (yes, i know the choice boxes are super janky, that’s the next thing im fixing). and yeah our main character is super angsty and not very nice but she has her reasons i promise you
normally you probably would not hear the whole song because that beginning blurb is pretty short, but it also plays later on

Lots of changes have happened since I last devlogged! I fixed the physics, added GUI, collectables, level hazards, changed the background (via prerendered models I made in Blockbench and then rendered in Blender), and extended the map and made it so the camera follows the player. Also, made it so collectables/level stuff spawn via placing them in Tiled instead of me just having to manually input coordinates. Next up, enemies and CPU follower! :D

after like… forever… of trying to get this freaking map to scale properly… i finally got it. oh my gosh.
it was literally one argument i had gotten wrong. literally ONE oh my gosh. end me /silly also ignore the fact the player is suctioned to the upper screen, i am sTILL trying to fix physics.

Fixed the dialogue boxes! Probably won’t get much done this upcoming week, though, I’m on vacationnnnn to the beachhhh~ yay!
Fancy shmancy text wrapping for now, wow. I did a little bit on the platformer section, but the tilesets hate me right now I fear.

Finally finished the desktop integration stuff, and put it into the actual main file. It works! More or less- the platformer segment is a little broken, but that’s from the physics screwing up and not the new screen stuff. I plan on fixing it up next time, probably later on tonight or tomorrow, because I’ve been coding for a while already and am getting a bit tired lol
Here’s a screenshot of the visual novel segment of the game (The textboxes are going to be slightly reworked, because right now they can’t fit much text at all.)

Menu screen is more or less complete! This is still in the alternate file I made for modifications that lacks any actual interactibility, but once I get everything sorted, I’ll replace a lot of the code for the visuals in the main project folder with the stuff in here. Also, the menu animates now! Though, of course, you can’t see it in a screenshot lol

So, originally, Mahou Shoujo Sakura San (As the full title is called) was being made for a different console than PC. However, I really wanted to get the game actually. working. And there were some annoying technical difficulties getting in the way! So, now I’m making a desktop port, and I just copied its files to a secondary location for whenever I want to continue with the console version.
Then I realized, ah frick, if I’m going to make a desktop port, I now have to account for window sizing and generally changing up how it’s displayed, since the PC displays differently than the game’s original console. So I made a THIRD copy (albeit extremely stripped down, containing just the .vscode with the launch.json, all the image files, and an extremely barebones main.lua that basically just loads the files) and got to it.
Lo and behold! A resizable main menu screen! Missing its buttons and not animated, but you know what, I’ll take what I can get for now! ^^
(Yes the border is annoying, I know. However, I realllly don’t want to stretch the images too horribly. I’ll make it look nice, I promise!)

Finally managed to get VSCode to work with Love2d, holy cow that was. weirdly difficult. or maybe im slow lol