In The Middle Of The Night is a first-person shooter with some visual novel elements, starring a magical girl and set in the tense days of 2020. It is the first game in the series that would later become known as Outliers and Outsiders, and introduces magical girls Gina and Sakura. It features gun+magic gameplay in the vein of a retro-style shooter, and a story that can be silly or more serious depending on how you play it.
Gina was pretty much your basic, edgy, low-key geeky, slightly gothy teenager. Now she’s graduated high school and is totally not ready to face the world, which is more or less on fire. Suddenly, in the middle of the night a ridiculously cheerful girl in a ridiculously cheerful outfit wakes her up, tells her she’s a “maho sho-jo” whatever that means, and drags her off to fight evil. Well, it’s not like she had anything better to do…
This game was created for Magical Girl Game Jam 2, but it started out as a much different project. I started making an epic magical-girls-in-space shooter, but realized halfway through the jam that the scope was much too big. I scrapped that idea and salvaged what I’d already made into this game. I was happy that I was able to make something and reuse almost everything I’d already created, although there are some seemingly odd design decisions and I wasn’t happy with how short the game ended up. You can read more about that story in the postmortem.