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For development news, you can also follow the Magical Diary Twitter account!

If you missed the kickstarter you can get in on the development of the game here!
Nestled in the woods of Vermont lies Iris Academy, a secret school for witches and wizards, where young people can learn to train their magical skills safely as they build personal connections for the future. Iris Academy splits students into six Halls based on their personalities and aptitudes: Horse, Butterfly, and Snake for the girls, and Wolf, Falcon, and Toad for the boys.
In this game, you will design your own character to attend school as a first-year wizard. Your protagonist hails from a wealthy, well-connected, ancient European wizarding family... and has chosen to travel to the United States to attend school as an exchange student at Iris Academy, where he can get the chance to be "just an ordinary guy" like the Americans he's seen in the movies.

In order to fit in, he has asked to be enrolled in Wolf Hall, commonly associated with athletic or adventure-seeking boys. Beyond that, his personality will depend on your choices. Does he love sports? Is he more of a schemer? Is he just here to have a good time? Your decisions will affect the way other characters see him, as well as locking and unlocking further options and changing some of the lines he speaks on his own. So even if you romance the same character in the future, you will get some different reactions based on your personality type.
Let's talk about romance! Who are our main datable characters?


Barbara Solmoro, a freshman in Snake Hall. She doesn't talk much, spends her free time in the school dungeons fighting monsters, and generally has a reputation for being slightly scary. What's hiding behind all those defenses?


Ellen Middleton, a freshman in Horse Hall. Seems shy at first, but can turn out to be surprisingly stubborn. Which, if she insists on trying to uncover the darkest secrets of magic, may put her in grave danger...


Minnie Cochran, a freshman in Butterfly Hall, and prospective Student Council President. She's extremely helpful and friendly, so much so that you wonder if she ever has time to sleep...


William Danson, a senior in Wolf Hall. Assigned to be your mentor, he's friendly and supportive and yet always careful to keep his distance. What would it take to really connect with him?


Damien Ramsey a senior in Falcon Hall. Trouble with a capital T. Rumored to be an incubus who seduces the young and leaves a trail of broken hearts in his wake. Can you beat him at his own game?

(Other options to be revealed later)
This is a very choice-heavy game! Along with all the character routes, there are dozens of spells to learn, dungeons to explore, subplots to investigate, etc. (I love putting in a lot of options!) It IS a stat-raiser, but the stats mostly tie directly into your RPG stats. Boosting your Strength at the gym gives you more HP in the dungeon, boosting your Smart by studying will give you a bigger mana pool, and of course, attending magic classes will unlock more spells. You will need those spells for the RPG sections!
Every so often, the students are assigned tests in the school dungeons. Every dungeon has multiple possible routes to success, so you don't have to know exactly the 'right' magic, but if you don't know any spells at all you will be doomed to failure... and possibly expulsion!
If you've been around a while, this may not be the first time you've heard of Magical Diary. The first game, Magical Diary: Horse Hall was released in 2011 (and on Steam in 2012) and featured a wildseed girl as the protagonist. You do not need to have played the first game to play this game. This is not a direct sequel, it's more of an alternate universe. If you HAVE played the first game, you will know some inside information and appreciate some extra insight into characters you've met before. But you don't have to! The Wolf Hall protagonist is new, he doesn't know these things either.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, ask away!

OH.MY.GOD. I absolutely LOVED the original Magical Diary, and am SO FREAKING EXCITED that there's another one!! Especially with BL??? My mind is going into overload!! Will definitely be backing this when it comes out!!

I'm also super hyped for this! Magical Diary was one of my first visual novels and it's still among my favourites. I especially liked the exam puzzles, so I'm excited to see that it looks like there will be more of those! I also love Barbara's character design.

This looks interesting.

Out of interest, is there any reason why the guys are both several years older than the protagonist, but the girls are all the same age?

It's more coincidental than intentional, though yeah, I'm aware it's there. It has a lot to do with these characters / this setting already existing, so characters are being picked that were already designed, rather than characters being designed from scratch to fill out a romance roster.

In Horse Hall, the two female romance options were your two roommates (both freshmen like you), and the three main male romances were one freshman, one senior, and one teacher. So a big range in age there on one side!

William appears in the first game as the older brother of two of your dating options (both your roommate and the freshman boy are his siblings) but was not datable, and a lot of people wanted to see more of him. It was logical to bring him in as a love interest for Wolf Hall. But he's already an existing character, so it was already known that he's a senior. Similarly, Damien is the senior male love interest from the first game. He's returning, partly because some players will want to have a go at him from a different angle, partly because his story and William's are connected.

As for the girls, Ellen is returning from the first game for reasons. Minnie appeared in the first game and you see only hints of her story there. She was intended to be datable in the next game so we can finally understand more of what was going on with her, and her plotline will connect with Wolf PC's in ways that haven't been revealed yet. So those two were definites, and definitely had to be freshmen because they already were. That left only one slot left for the 'main' romances. Barbara was only vaguely mentioned in the first game, but I like her and wanted to bring her out as a datable option as soon as possible, and she made a better match for the protagonist than any of the older female characters in the setting would, IMO.

Depending on how the kickstarter goes it's possible that a couple more romances might become available as side options rather than full routes. In which case there are several freshman boys and one senior girl who could maybe be added if people really wanted them. Plus many people to flirt with that won't really get to dating status. (There are juniors and sophomores in the setting as well, but we just don't have any reason to interact with them much, so they don't tend to show up as important characters.)

IF - and this is wild, far-future if - but IF we go on to make Butterfly Hall, I predict the romances there to include at least one senior girl.

Hope this makes sense.

That makes perfect sense, yeah.

Well, I'll just have to wait and see if there are any other boys added (maybe Toad Hall, since the other five are from each of the other houses?) But if not, William certainly seems pretty cute. (And I guess Damien looks cute, even if his character sounds a bit less fun.)

Either way, good luck with the game.

The most likely Toad Hall boy to get picked is Manuel here (who yes is a freshman):



But yes we'll have to see what happens

Well, he's just the most adorable thing ever. So, fingers crossed, I guess.

Aaaah, I recall having a lot of fun with Horse Hall a few years back, so it'll be great to revisit Iris Academy! Speaking of which, I'm already looking forward to the dungeons! Beta-testing those must be a pain but I've seen on Twitter that the bug reports sometimes turn out pretty funny ww Oh, also! The new art looks neat! (If it weren't for her fancy hair colors, I almost wouldn't have recognized Professor Potsdam...)

So I'll probably go after Damien again for old times' sake (and because I never learn), but William seems like a great guy too! Also hoping that the Kickstarter will be successful and we'll get a route for Manuel because he really is adorable~ <3

Reading the topic and comments, I wondered. Will the game and its world be clear to those who haven't played "Magical Diary" before? Much of what is said here looks complicated and confusing, but interesting and very non-linear. It reminds me of games like "Prince Maker" or "Princess Maker", and I can see that they are not easy. Will the game be too difficult for beginners?

In some ways the game is actually much clearer and more straightforward for beginners than the first one was, in terms of figuring out how to raise your stats. Wolf Hall will prompt you to take one class in each kind of magic at the very beginning, which guarantees that you've got an overview of all the types of magic and that you have some basic starting spells right away. Every spell now comes with an introductory scene where the professor explains how it works. Then, since the game now lets you go practice your magic every week, it's easier to try out your spells on harmless targets, so you're less likely to be at a loss when test time rolls around.

After that first week, you can choose to focus all-out on your favorite color of magic if you want to, and you'll probably be fine for the rest of the game. Or decide that you don't even like magic, and spend all your time in the gym. If you try that, it'll slowly become obvious that this wasn't a good idea because you'll fail tests if you don't learn any spells. But you have to fail lots of tests before you can actually lose the game, so really, anyone sensible should figure out "Well, THAT was a dumb idea!" and change their strategy.

This is not a LLTQ game. It's not full of dead ends. Mostly I want people to feel free to explore things at their own pace and in their own style. Like, there are lots and lots of ways to gain relationship points with the love interests, but you DEFINITELY don't have to do all of them. Doing just a couple of things with a love interest is usually enough to unlock their route. It's just that there are lots and lots of possibilities available so that if you miss one you might catch another.

Some specific achievements will be tricky to get to (that's why they're achievements). But just to date someone, or just to get through the year, it shouldn't be so hard. Be nice to the people you like, try to spend time with them. As for all the plot background stuff, you don't need to know it, the protagonist won't know it either, everything important to the story will be introduced as you encounter it. It's just that there's a lot of people here who've already played the first game so are interested in all the little secret details and interconnections - which you don't in any way need to know, playing this game. But for people who get the tiny references, they'll be happily going 'OH, and THIS is when THIS happens!!!' in the background.

There's a Steam Coming Soon page for the game here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/9749 ... Wolf_Hall/

Which has a few screenshots and such that haven't been posted in this thread yet

We are LIVE on Kickstarter!

Go to the project page to check out more information, watch the preview video, and see the reward tiers - including the first set of possible extra romance options.

There is also a free playable demo for the game covering your first week at Iris Academy. You can access the demo on itch.io or on Steam

There's going to be a lot of fun bonus art of the characters rolling in throughout this process, so stay tuned to the kickstarter page or the magical diary twitter account!

Wow! Luke and Manuel are expensive... Hopefully someone richer than I am will be able to fund one (or better yet, both) of them. I was a little sad not to find Manuel in the demo, but William and Luke are both cute (and Donald too ).

I got a bug while loading saved data:
(5, 'expect_dict_of_floats got non-dict', {}, <class 'renpy.python.RevertableDict'>, 'persistent _character_volume')
(0, u'Save was', u'1-1')
(0, u'Save was', u'1-1')
-end
(I think that was the error message; I tried saving it to the log file, but wasn't certain where that was, and this was the only thing I found.)

Anyway, good luck with the Kickstarter!

(EDITish: looks like someone's already snatched up Manuel!)

Actual edit: And you're already fully funded! Congratulations!

Character bios for Raven, Suki, Manuel, and Luke are now up on the kickstarter page.