thanks so much for the kind words!!! I was really afraid this story might not hit home the way I was hoping so I’m beyond happy to see your kind words about this work!!!
To tell you the truth, I meant for this to be in the typical VN style (textbox on bottom, visuals the main focus above all else) but I scrapped that idea halfway through and settled on this current format (which is a format I’m currently using to tell the stories of my other projects, albeit I’m still undecided if I go the Disco Elysium narrative style route or something close to this).
i worried the design style might not work out for the story I wanted to tell so hearing that you enjoyed that design is actually really reassuring (especially since now that I’m thinking about making use of it for my other, bigger projects in the future!!!)
And same! I love magical girl stories and miss their whimsy. I was reading the recent Shugo Chara manga a bit ago and got starstruck by how much I missed their whimsy era of kindly heroes draped in cutesy outfits learning to grow up in a world where they’ve gotta beat up negative sentiments to save the day and grow as people.
Here, I took that whimsy and mixed it in with a bit of eldritch horror lore since I liked the idea of monsters masquerading as magical girls and the irony of that idea. And yes! I like studying hero type characters and understanding the kindness behind them (especially if that kindness is paradoxically selfish and magical girls foil the monsters they seek to defeat). It sounds like you’ve got a lot of cool magical girl things going on for you too (that campaign sounds like fun lol and your profile pic is so cute!)
I do plan to do at the very least a devlog talking more about the world-building ideas I couldn’t fit in here! I’m actually pretty big on exploring the worlds I make and presuming there is a lot more depth to them than what you see on the page haha.
And while I can’t promise I’ll pick up writing for this world again (my project backlog is huge atm between my fangame and OC projects), if I did continue this I’d probably explore more of Morning Sunshine (she’s so cool to me can you tell) and the relationship between magical girls/boys/knights and the monsters they fight (since imo the lore behind them would be fun to explore and it’d be a good excuse to give me practice for figuring out how to import my puppet rigs into Ren’py!!!)
(And waaah I’m glad you like this story so much to let me know you’re still thinking about it hours later!!! Hearing that feels like the highest of praises to me who wants to make the kind of stories that stay on the brain even if you’re done playing through them :Dc)