Monster Girl Manager
v1.03 Patch Notes
Disabled controller users being able to move when they shouldn't
Fixed a crash caused by audio emitters on dragonflies
v1.02 Patch Notes
Fixed some floor errors
Fixed the fainting tutorial showing up after a girl was revived via angel passive or divine equipment
Balance:
Thorns, Static Shield, and Slime Shield now give armor based on max health, instead of based on strength
Build hive now gives more armor
Species abilities like the angel's revive will no longer trigger multiple times thanks to the hourglass
v1.01 Patch Notes
Fixed a crash triggered when a werewolf used howl to summon other wolves
Monster Girl Manager leaves Early Access
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
v0.99 Patch Notes
- Added final cutscene and post game rewards
Bugs:
- Fixed some floors in the final dungeon
- Fixed energy drain showing incorrect damage numbers
- Energy drain will no longer drain all of a girl's energy
- Fixed a crash triggered by charmed enemies using energy drain
- Fixed a typo in the zombie personality text
- Fixed the fanny pack not working
- Fixed an issue where beggars hat was not applying the bonus gold when returning from a campfire
- Skills with no damage will no longer show damage numbers if you critical hit
- Item Insurance will now protect against Erase
- Crack in the wall text updated to avoid confusion on who performs the event
- Fixed a typo in the angel boss text
- Fixed earplugs not triggering unless you have a black donut
- Fixed some Eraser skill animations
Balance:
- Meditation bowl will now give the focus buff if you were at full energy
- Moan will now trigger ally targeting artifacts if used with zombie allies
- Blood Moon will now generate two red orbs whenever you defeat an enemy
Developer Comments:
The next patch will be 1.0, or Release. I plan on spending this next week playing Monster Girl Manager and checking everything. I'll give a more detailed discussion in the 1.0 patch notes
0.98 Patch Notes
Added the final dungeon
Bugs:
Cleansing Spores animation no longer draws the enemy team
Skills that give 100% hit chance like eyedrops will now properly show this when hovering an enemy that has avoid
Dead Mans switch no longer triggers if the holder is fainted
Fixed crash caused by the birds of paradise event
Fixed a crash caused by a skeleton event
Fixed a few floors that you could get stuck in.
Added missing hurt sounds to some enemies
Enemy brown overflow will no longer show enemy white overflow animation
QoL:
Updated Giant Rat sprites
Updated Bat Sprites
Balance:
Acid Spray now removes enemy armor but is only single target
Bat swarm inflicts more blind
The legendary bottles will now trigger when you take damage instead of when you receive broken.
Updated some events so they properly check the team for the girl with the best stats
Developer Comments:
This patch has the last dungeon, but it does not have the post game rewards or credit scenes. I wanted to release this dungeon early to make sure it was stable and balanced before adding final content.
The final dungeon is a bit tricky to balance because the enemies are difficult. I went for a bit of a boss rush design. Also some enemies can remove your team's artifacts so you may want to beat them quickly. Looking forward to feedback.
If there are any issues with the game, no matter how small, this is the time to let me know. Overlapping text, weird animations, typos, balance issues, anything. I plan on fixing bugs post 1.0, but otherwise we are looking at the final product.
∇
0.97 Patch Notes
- Added the cemetery dungeon
Bugs:
- Discharge will now use all yellow orbs, rather than just 1.
- Enemy move failure due to charmed will no longer remove avoid. Players can still remove enemy avoid by failing to use an orb spending move on an enemy
- Beast Claw applies hunted again
- Updated Hunted Tooltip
- Impale no longer hits the front slot twice if you kill the target and is no longer considered a multi attack.
- Camping trip achievement will now trigger if you have less than full hp when you give the trail mix
- Hypnotize no longer shows damage
- Vampire Girl's bat swarm skill damage numbers have been fixed
- Bat cavern event result text updated for vampires
- Golems are now immune to bleed
- Rapidly clicking one of the artifact choices will no longer give you multiple artifacts
- Mousetrap can no longer deal 0 damage
- Volcano enemies now have hurt sounds
- Lullaby properly animates the enemy team
- Fixed the build hive animation
- Enemy tail lash now has an animation
- Fixed some multi attacks showing all the status effects over one target
- Blood drain animation positioning has been adjusted so the particles aren't behind the user
- Enemies with multiple resistances will now show all of them when hovered
- Fluff wool now has a normal animation time
- You can no longer open the info box during boss dialogue
- Fixed an issue where skills that use multiple orbs were not properly moving down orbs in the orb bar
Balance:
- Lightning will no longer stun on crit
- Multi hit attacks will no longer ignore avoid. Note that multi attacks that also hit your teammates will now remove their avoid.
- Mousetrap base damage has been increased by 3
- A number of events will no longer revive or restore energy of fainted girls
- Meditation bowl and healing sword will now apply to event effects
- Elf Bread can now be used on any ally
- Bosses will no longer create the select artifact menu, as the run is already over.
- Mimics have an increased chance to drop better artifacts and more gold
QoL:
- Updated White Overflow sound so it is faster and has less delay
- Robot girls will no longer show healing numbers in battle, and instead show armor gains
- Tier 4 Bosses now have new music
Modding:
- Dialogue can now go up to 50 boxes.
v0.96 Patch Notes
Bugs:
- Fixed alternate font spacing in a few menus
- Fixed a crash caused by angel revive, orb overflows, and werewolf transform trying to calculate hitchance
- Angel revive no longer skips the back slot's turn when activated by statuses
- Angel will now revive itself once if it is the only surviving monster girl
- Angel will now properly revive herself
- Fixed a crash caused by angel using revive when in the front position and they have not unlocked their 2nd front slot move
- Web spray will no longer show incorrect damage and miss numbers
- Hurricane, smite, comet, and other orb spending moves will no longer show animations if they fail. (Hopefully this fix sticks this time)
- Mushroom girl cap spots will now show up in idle attack animations
- Monkey paws and house cards will now only revive girls when their artifact bags is closed, to prevent the infinite monkey paw exploit.
- Fixed a crash caused by using the housecard outside of battle
- Updated some angel dialogue
- Robot should now properly drill through the wall event instead of the faun
- Fixed a crash caused by red overflow checking for beast claws when you have less than 3 monster girls on the field
- Hunted stacks are no longer triggered by overflows and other irresistable damage
- Overflow damage can no longer be resisted
- Fixed bazooka text to properly indicate back and mid are damaged, not front and mid
- Presence of fear will now target anyone and stun everyone rather than just front and mid
- Ghost is now immune to the bear trap event
QoL:
- Updated some artifact descriptions to be more clear
Balance:
- Hunted stacks deal +25% damage, rather than +10% damage per stack
v0.95 Patch Notes
Bugs:
- Fixed robot event text for the pool
- Fixed a typo in the pool event
- Fixed a floor error in the cave
- Fixed a typo in the oujidere milestone response
- Crush now properly animates for the robot
- Swapping enemies will no longer ignore trapped if they swap backwards to an empty slot.
- Werewolf transform animation can no longer target and damage enemies. Fixed the related crash.
- Fixed a crash that can occur when you flee a bossfight while a monster girl was transformed
- Werewolf howl will now show affected enemies.
- Angel skills will now properly show the caster
- Prepared skill will now show the target in the animation
- Fainted alraunes will no longer heal the team
- Fainted neko will no longer apply hunted every turn
- Fixed the angel slice animation eye sprite
- Ghosts can now slip through the crack in the wall event
- Fixed the bat swarm animation for the bat queen
- Fixed golem crown port sprite to use basepink instead of basepurple
- Changed kitsune aiming ear sprite to use basepink instead of basepurple
- The map will not treat girls as fainted if they were revived by an angel
- All versions of "Stunned" have been homogenized to "Stun" in skill descriptions.
- Fixed some alternate font text issues
- Smite will no longer show the animation if it fails due to missing orb cost
- Fixed the pause menu buttons and backgrounds in the shrine, the shop, and other weekend menus
- Fixed missing apostrophes in some species dialogue
- Fixed a crash that could occur if you used haunt on an enemy in the back
QoL:
- Robots can now drill through the crack in the wall event
- Cleaned up broodmother idle and attack sprite
- Cleaned up bigorilla and minotaur sprites
- Added more font options
Balance:
- Reduced inflicted broken of all skills (Robot was often pulling out 200+ damage at level 1)
- Reduced inflicted bleed of all skills (Vampire still inflicts the most bleed)
- Increased event skill check difficulty to encourage making choices during events
- Multi-sized enemies can be stun locked if they have multiple stun stacks.
- Monkey paw and house card will now revive if the holder faints outside of battle
v0.94 Patch Notes
Bugs:
- Fixed a number of crashes that were triggered by overflows activating during status scripts
- Fixed ghost telekinesis not having a description
- Fixed angel revive causing revived girls to incorrectly load their skills.
- Fixed faun horn aim sprites
- Fixed crash caused when entering spacebar as a keybinding. Note that because gamemaker recognizes the spacebar value as 0, in order to use spacebar as a keybind I had to rebind it to another value. This means you will no longer be able to use the spacebar in the naming menus.
-
Mod Support:
Golem Crown portrait sprite will now check for all 3 colors
Balance:
- Blood Moon will now generate red orbs when you kill an enemy, rather than whenever you inflict bleed.
- Werewolf boss is more likely to summon wolves and checks it health before healing.