Era's Time Delivery Service (prototype)

Era's Time Delivery Service is a turn-based battle game made for Magical Girl Game Jam 6 on the theme "Service".

Era is a time magical girl who works in a delivery service, boasting she can bring any package to its destination in due time. Today, she must deliver comic pages to a publisher before the deadline, but it is pretty far. Will she be able to make it in time?

Beat the clock!

In this game, you go through a series of classic-JRPG-style turn-based battles with a party of up to 3 members. Era plays the role of pivot as she can use time skills to advance, delay or swap fighters' turns. She can even rewind a character's state to several turns in the past!

Development status

The game has been roughly balanced for the first 2 quests, for a total of 4 battles with 2 party members: Era with time-related skills and Rosemary with magic gun-related skills. The 3rd quest is just made of one battle to demonstrate the 3rd party member, Maria with insect-tank-related skills, and enemy art (the molemen), but has not been balanced so it is very easy to win.

There are no dialogues / narration between battles either, so I will let you imagine the story!

How to play

Download from the channel corresponding to for your platform (Windows, macOS / OSX, Linux), with the correct suffix:

• For the latest version containing updates done after the jam voting phase, download from the channel suffixed with "-postjam" (recommended)
• For the intermediate containing updates done after the submission deadline, until the end of the voting phase, download from the channel suffixed with "-jam-voting-phase"
• For the original jam version submitted right before the deadline, download from the channel suffixed with "-jam-release" (pretty rough, but kept for historical reasons)

Then, if you are downloading directly from a browser, extract the zip archive and play the executable. If you are running itch.io app, just Launch the game.

Main menu

You can navigate with the mouse, keyboard or gamepad.

Battle

Battle is done with a traditional command box interface, that you can navigate with the keyboard, gamepad or mouse. To select targets for an action, you can also use the mouse (click once to select target, click a second time on selected target to confirm it).

Once you defeat an enemy squad, the next one will arrive and you start the next fight fully restored.

Controls

Keyboard	Gamepad	Mouse	Action
Directional arrows or WASD/ZQSD	D-pad or left stick	Hover in menus, click once on target	Navigate in menus, select target
Space / Enter	South button	Click in menus, click on selected target	Confirm
Escape	East button		Cancel selection / Back
Alt + Enter / F11 / Ctrl + Meta + F			Toggle fullscreen

Changelog

v0.3.0

Big overhaul on gameplay and visual/HUD improvements. Hero sprites are all colored, there are fewer battles with fewer skills for more compact experience. The last battle is still not balanced, but you can play around with Maria's skills.

The big new features are action effect previewing and enemy turn action prediction. Player can hover icons to see more info.

See full changelog

v0.2.1 (latest voting phase patch)

The first version with actual battles: there are several hero skills to use and proper enemy squads to fight. The first 2 quests = 6 battles (where you play 1 and 2 characters resp.) are roughly balanced, while the last battle is not (all the Molemen have 5 HP).

v0.2.0

Fixes many usability issues from v0.1.1, and actually show the 3 main characters. Still a sandbox where you can test various skills esp. with Era. Flee to proceed to next fight, but the enemies are still all the same.

v0.1.1 (jam release)

A sandbox where you can test various skills with the test character (magenta stickman). Flee to proceed to next fight, but the enemies are all the same. Has many issues like fighter status being hard to read.

Tools

• Engine: Unity 2022 + custom RPG Framework by komehara
• Audio: Cubase, Serum
• Art: Adobe Photoshop, Krita, Affinity Designer, Inkscape
• Code: Jetbrains Rider

Free assets used

Fonts

Fonts downloaded on Google Fonts:

• Title text: Dancing Script by Pablo Impallari
• Common text: Manrope by Mikhail Sharanda

Sprites

• Additional enemies: Ækashics Librarium Bundle by Ækashics

Credits

• komehara: Game design, Writing, Programming, Character art (heroes), UI design
• Cicero: Game design, Writing
• Milchtüte: Character art (heroes)
• An Angelineer: Character art (enemies except free assets)
• SquaredUnicycle: Environment art
• Everett Fischer: Music, Sound design
• highintheautumnsky: Music