Welcome to 1.0! Monster Girl Manager has officially released!
Developer Comments/Post Mortem:
Since Early Access started, the following have been added:
- 7 more dungeons
- 18 more monster girl species
- A full artifact system rework, including 75 new artifacts
- Replacing the take-home artifact system with the much easier to understand equipment system
- A consumable system
- Steam achievements and workshop support
- A custom girl creator system
- Town npcs and work station upgrade system
- A permadeath/aging system
- 10 new status effects
- An improved tutorial system and skill information system
- A reworked resistance and immunity system
- Numerous new outfits and the ability to change hairstyles post summon
- A rework of the milestone-trust system
- Story cutscenes
- A reworked gift system
Along with numerous QoL changes, bugfixes, and balance changes.
Here were my favorite balance issues:
Dungeon tiers had 25 floors. A single run often took 1-2 hours before this was changed to 10 floors per tier.
Bears could one-shot even prepared teams. If a bear landed a crit it could do 500+ damage.
White dragon scaled up to 700 dodge. Even a team with maxed out accuracy couldn't hit it.
Comments on what could be improved and some suggested features that didn't make the cut.
Gameplay Loop: When you fight the first dragon boss, difficulty has a noticeable spike. I was tempted to nerf all the dragons (might still do that), but I felt it was a good spot for the players to really start focusing on their team comp. At this point in my playthrough I had unlocked most of the town upgrades and my teams were able to quickly hit max stats. I had to grind a bit to get milestones at this point. Not the end of the world but it did annoy me a bit to have my playthrough slow down when I felt like I had figured everything out. Otherwise the gameplay was pretty smooth. Girls tended to die right as you finished a dungeon, so you weren't stuck on a tier. You earned just enough milestones to level up your team for the next tier. You earned just enough gold to get the next upgrade and some gifts. Beyond normal training, it never felt like I needed to grind a dungeon.
Story: The story turned out ok I guess. I don't consider myself a great writer. I loved the monster girl dialogue, but the overall plot feels weird.
Dodge: The dodge stat still feels like a dump stat. Despite countless buffs to dodge, I still would rather focus on a healthy defense team. With avoid, focus, armor, stun, charm, blind, and plentiful healing, I never felt like leveling dodge was necessary. You can also just spam talk to the post office manager to get the upgrades and enemy orb overflows just ignore hit chance. I'm not sure what I could really do here to make dodge feel like a good investment besides a full system rework.
Orb Overflow: It feels a bit tacked on at times. It adds a little bit more complexity to the battle system, but between the statuses, type immunities, and all the different equipment/artifact/skill interactions I feel like combat is complex enough. Plus when a player focuses on orb overflows, it completely steamrolls everything. Remember when Blood Moon used to give a red orb whenever you inflicted bleed? That feedback loop completely broke the game. I can't remove the orb system now, but I regret adding it in the first place.
Charm and Transforms: They were super buggy. The combat system was not designed to handle new stat blocks being introduced and enemies checking to see if they had artifacts. I wouldn't be surprised if there are still some issues with these that I'm going to have to fix post release. I think they're really cool (The first time a werewolf transforms is awesome) but I wish I had coded them so they didn't dip their toes in nearly every combat script.
Mod Support: This was incredibly difficult to force into Gamemaker 2. From the start I knew I wanted to see if mod support would improve community retention, so I made the game compile all the text, sprites, and dungeon data from external documents that players could edit. There were some players that were incredibly enthusiastic about the system as well. However the mod system couldn't change code on the back-end, so mods like new species and new skills aren't possible. Unfortunately most of the early players that requested mod support had no interest in actually making mods and hoped that someone else would do it. The result is we had almost no mods for almost an entire year, and the mods we have now are mostly player reskins. Looking back, all the work on adding steam workshop support feels like a massive waste. I'm incredibly thankful to the handful of players that took a swing at making a mod, but future games almost certainly won't have mod support.
Art: It is acceptable. My biggest issue is the use of "mixels". A lot of the time the pixel resolution is not consistent. This can give the game an unprofessional feel at times. Regarding the palette: I like the restricted palette for the rng summoning, as it makes random girls far more likely to look nice. It also makes the town look better. It was a pain in the neck sometimes, and sometimes I feel like it hindered the game. We didn't have pink until this year, and instead had an ugly purplish red. I really would have liked more shades of yellow, orange, red, and white. It did force me to improve my pixel art though. Food for thought I guess. Players can always change the palettes if they don't like it.
Optional lifeforce system: I was very against permadeath at the start. Now most players just turn it off. After playing with it on, I do enjoy it and it really makes the game loop smoother. I was wrong here and I acknowledge it was a mistake to not add it from the beginning.
A random seed system: Early on, it was easy to predict what letter and number combos would make what girl. There were some players that were very vocal about how awful this system was. After changing it, other players then asked for custom generation and to have the old system back. I prefer the original system, but I'm not going to change it now that we have a custom girl feature.
The custom girl system: I still think it shouldn't exist, but this is an issue with the lack of focus on the target audience. Monster girl fans want their waifu, not a random girl. If I don't want a custom creature creator feature in my games, I need to design the game theme around the gacha system.
What about features that didn't make it into the final game?
NSFW content:The game is pixel art and it would take a tremendous amount of time to make these animations. I would need to redraw every animation for every species, and every outfit. The gameplay also isn't designed for nsfw. There isn't a romance system, and it has a complex training/combat/exploration loop. I know now that monster girl games are NSFW for a reason, but this game just isn't big enough to warrant several more months of work to make this happen.
More species: Goblins, mermaids, bunny girls, medusas, unicorns, dullahans, futakuchi-onna... There are a lot of species I could add. Some of these wouldn't be too difficult, like the bunny girl. Ultimately the reason these weren't added was the community wasn't as enthusiastic about them. Others like the goblin would require a rework of all the animations so they could work with different body types.
Hats and different body types: Similar issue as NSFW. Everything is hand drawn and these features would require a lot of drawing. Already some of the species have special sprites for dresses and pants. Hats would be so much worse.
Quality of Life: Changes like being able to open your team's stats in a dungeon, holding down scroll bars, etc. I tried to add these whenever they were asked for. The ones that didn't make the cut aren't in mostly because I need to wrap up the game or they would take a lot of time to implement.
More complex town interactions: I think it would be possible to write up a personality and species response to every other personality and species, but that would be several hundred, if not thousands of lines of dialogue. When you consider weather and varying trust levels, the amount of dialogue spirals out of control. Maybe if I had AI generate it? It would be a tremendous amount of work for something that would minimally impact the gameplay.
Dating: It doesn't fit into the game, just like NSFW. Your wife dies. Do you get married to a new monster girl? You are managing 5 girls at a time. Do you only date one? Do you have an harem? It does not interact well with the existing game systems, so I did not add it.
What's next for you?
I won't be adding new content to Monster Girl Manager. I will still patch any bugs or crashes that are reported.
For my next game, I probably won't be working with monster girls again. It feels like monster girl games have to have romance/nsfw to be successful. I'm not a fan of either of those game genres so I can't imagine making one. I still really like monster girls, but more from a lore and slice of life perspective.
I probably won't be running early access again for new titles. I'm a bit burnt out from this one. I think in the future I'll just release my games in a completed state and add post-launch content if I want to keep working on them.
Regarding future communication: I will be leaving up the discord. I probably won't be talking as much on the steam forums or as active on the discord, but I'll continue to check them.
There were a lot of players that I connected with and would consider my friends. You guys are really awesome and I hope I get to work with you again.
Thank you to everyone that supported the project. I hope you enjoy the game!
-∇
Now for the changes between 0.99 and 1.0
QoL:
- Battle music will now only stop when you defeat all enemies in the final fight
- When you defeat a boss, you will no longer abruptly be taken out of the battle screen
- Slightly moved up the week results UI so it is farther away from the next week button
- Slightly moved down the map so it doesn't overlap the leave dungeon text
Bugs:
- Fixed a crash caused when charming enemy zombies
- Fixed a draw error when displaying the learn skill tutorial after earning trust through talking
- Fixed an animation issue with croak, howl, and moan drawing size two enemies multiple times
- Croak will now give normal mimics armor
- Croak, roar, and howl will now longer give size 2 enemies double status
- Fixed a sprite issue with bat idle
- Plague mask now buffs damage against poisoned targets instead of fuzzy socks
- Beggar's hat will now increase gold earned from artifacts. Previously it was miscoded to slime helmet and winter coat.
- Possession and Puppetry will no longer draw two of the same enemy if it is forced to attack itself
- Fixed some clothing for the ghost raise animation
- Quick Knife will now trigger on the first turn
- Adjusted a floor 17 iteration of the cave
- Adjusted a floor 26 iteration of the cave
- Adjusted a floor 29 iteration of the cave
- Adjusted a floor 37 iteration of the cave
- Camouflage will no longer draw size 2 and 3 enemies multiple times
- Items that reduce damage will now properly show the new damage numbers
- Yeti fur no longer requires frenzy to trigger
- Porposion will now show the correct damage numbers
- Bottle Artifacts no longer trigger multiple times on larger enemies
- Talking with the green mushroom event now shows the correct response text
- Fixed cleansing spores drawing the caster twice
- Fixed a typo in the minotaur text
- Fixed a typo in the vine event
- Fixed a typo in the jungle chain cutscene
- Dead Man's Switch no longer damages big enemies multiple times
- Updated the text on equipment that gives status to indicate it gives more than 1
- If you have hourglasses on different girls they will still trigger the first turn effects of other girls. Use this method to trigger multiple battle start effects simultaneously.
- If you have several hourglasses on one girl, they will now trigger once every subsequent turn rather than all at once on turn 2. Use this method to trigger battle start effects over a longer period.
- Hourglass will now show when triggered
- Forest fire, lava wade, and other burn events will now show that ghosts are immune to burn
- Fixed a sprite issue on the healing sword
- Fixed a crash caused by a zombie rat using reanimate in the back slot
- Fixed a sprite issue on the plague rat idle
- Cursed artifacts will now show when triggered
- Moved back the hufungus sprite so it fits better in the battle slots
- If a charmed girl uses a helpful skill on an ally, it will no longer draw the target twice
Balance:
- Reduced damage scaling of status scaling moves including toxicute, fists of fury, engorge, blade dance, ambush, and punishment.
- Increased damage scaling of home run per trapped stack to align with other status scaling moves
- Increased damage scaling of void yoyo
- Increased gold multiplier of beggar's hat from 1.5 to 2
- Warning sign now gives a much larger bonus to skill checks.
- Items that reduce damage can no longer reduce damage to 0.
- Reduced golden armor damage reduction per gold scaling. (1000 gold now gives 20% damage reduction instead of 200% damage reduction)
- Reduced nickel sock strength bonus per gold scaling.
- Reduced Spaghetti's energy gain from 39 to 18.
- Reduced energy gain for grapes, juice box, snack bar, sandwhich, onigiri, and orange
- Increased energy gain for yogurt, carrot sticks, cake, taiyaki, dango, burger, burrito, and melon bread
- Buffed motivation gained from talking to girls. Now +2 without the bath house upgrade, and +7 with the upgrade.
- Reduced trail mix cost
- Possession can now miss
- Reduced energy and motivation of supplements to give a trade-off for the stat boosts
- Slightly reduced the stat boost given by protein shake
- Stairmaster now adds temporary Strength to damage calculations rather than adding base damage to skills. It adds 5 strength per floor for a max of 200 at floor 40.
- Reduced Queen Hornet and Beezlebub Dodge scaling
- Robots will now gain armor from healing even at full health
- Reduced Bigorilla strength scaling
- Reduced Lava golem strength scaling
- 2 of hearts inflicts more weak
- Adjusted zombie animal resistances so they are consistent
- Lava rock gives more damage per burn stack
- Reduced hag dodge scaling
