One of my Discord regulars shared this little picture, mentioning it was almost identical to Molly. Plugging it into Google Reverse image gets us this lady; Yanochka Kuzmina, a Russian model and dancer. And yeah, she looks good.
It's an interesting test; I've never gotten Volumetric lighting to look good before, so...
This was an interesting update; it's very detail focused, with a full typo-pass through a 294 page google document, lots of little bug fixes and polish steps. Videos got a major overhaul, after I noticed how they were being used in Act IV, cleaning up how they're played and fixing audio issues. I also added a Jukebox, because every pub needs a jukebox.
The biggest new element is a big scene for Katie, going into to the second half of Act IV. It can be played from that point -&g...
As I do the rendering for Divine Coffee (going into Act IV+'s content, though probably not into 0.4.10, which I'm hoping to get out today), this month's poll asks about an optional side-event in Act V (likely V+).
Our options:
Chloe Cosplay. I enjoyed writing the cat-girl scene, and I found a delightful Catwoman outfit that would look awesome on Chloe.
Snowdrop's Return. Snowdrop's always a fun character to write, and she's totally found her voice. This is a sex event th...
I'm now more or less happy with the actual animation workflow; now i just need to experiment and get better at using and integrating it.
Part of that test is improving the animations I use. Daz has multiple animation systems; you can animate entirely out of keyframes (which is what I did for Katie), you can preload a bunch of key-frames (which is what I did for an animation that is rendering right now), or you can use a new system, called AniBlocks, which is what I'm testing here.
<...
Okay, I learned a lot from the first example. The first thing I learned was not to move the camera around like that ;) At least not in a clip meant for looping.
This test-case tries something different; using camera-pans to hide looping. I start off with 3 base clips. Each uses the same basic workflow I set up last time: here's an example ,going from low iteration input -> into the denoiser -> into DAIN -> Int...
I'm not a big fan of looping 5 second animations, but since everyone else is doing them I figured I'd see if it was workflow I could work within. I started with creating a 5 second animation and rendering it out at 15 FPS. I also used a very low iteration count (so the number of times it gets to try before the image is considered 'done'. My normal renders use 3000 iterations; this animation clip uses 120).
https://vimeo.co...
Sarah was one of the first characters I did, and as I continue to re-touch Act I, to bring it up quality wise, she got a fresh coat of paint. I'd already done her dancer uniform earlier, so this time I went back and fixed her office uniform; the keys were bring in better lighting, remove some clipping, remove that constricting shirt and then to a touch-up in Photoshop to remove the weird s...
2020-05-04 10:03:19 +0000 UTC View Post
I had some people ask about the video work, so I decided to put together a shot breakdown of the transformation.
The final shot contains a couple of key elements:
- All the layers are 3D, so I can use a custom camera. It's something I'm still learning/experimenting with. In retrospect, putting more Z-distance between the characters and the background would have given me more parallax movement, and made things more dynamic. The camera also could have done with a speed...
2020-05-03 07:49:03 +0000 UTC View Post
After a rather hectic week of testing, editing, bug fixing and a last minute emergency surgery that rewrote the video engine and downsized the Android build from 2.02gb to 1.1gb, Act IV is finally done. Version 0.4.5b is our final version.
I had the end scene of this one in my head back when I started writing Chloe's first encounter, and also know I didn't have any of the skills I needed to actually make it happen. Which led me down a path of experimenting with AfterEffects, hopefully ...
I'm going through and improving the golden minutes of Act I; these are the minutes where initial impressions are formed, and those are hard to shift.
“How people see you first is what they hold hardest in their minds. It is the way of the world. You can step down from a throne, and even if you behave like a farmer in a pigsty, some part in each of them will remember that you did descend from a throne. But if they see only a ...
And with last night's build, the counter ticks from 0.3.39 to 0.4.1, with Act IV's timeline complete.
So what's left before the public build?
- I've got 3 more 'floating' events to do (not tied to the timeline)
- I'm using quite a lot of video in the final day; I need to improve how timing for those get set up, so it's a smoother transition
- I've been ignoring bug-fixing while in story-writing mode; there's a bunch of small-ish tasks to do
- And finally g...
2020-04-27 04:28:24 +0000 UTC View Post
This little animation was orginally supposed to be a static image for the ending of Act IV. But the recent work I've been doing on AE inspired me to go further. As usual the workflow for this was DAZ -> Spine -> AfterEffects. For effects, the big element here is Saber (a free plugin from Video Copilot), which I love to abuse.
Today's build brings us to Thursday afternoon, of week 3 and ...
(If you haven't completed Act III yet, you probably want to avoid playing this).
I'm marching on towards Act IV ending, and one of the things I'm doing is adding videos at the beginning and end of the act. This sequence from the beginning of Act IV is meant to set the mood of the scene.
One of the primary pains of this one is that, with the video being 1920x1080 (1080p), and a lot of the individual images being designed to pan and zoom, the files had to be rendered out at 4K.
With Molly's big date complete, I'm approaching the end of Act IV. I've got another 4 timeline events, and then the final act ending, after which the build counter ticks over from 0.3.xx to 0.4.xx. It doesn't mean the build is going public just yet, since I still want to add in the various side-events. But it means the central story would be complete from beginning to end.
Molly's date was a fun one to write, mixing fun, sexuality and prophecy. I ended up testing out my new video back...
With the work done to integrate videos cleanly in the game now hopefully over, 0.3.34 gets an overhaul with some new videos.
I'm still tweaking this opening video; some of you may recognize Emily's first appearance in Act I. In my mind the portal should really be blue-ish, and I think it all needs to flow a bit faster. There's also a point where Emily pops over that I need to sort out.
One of the Patrons also made me a video of a portal into Elsewhere, so I decided to integrat...
Someone in Discord requested an Easter themed wallpaper. Enjoy the bunnies :D
2020-04-12 16:35:44 +0000 UTC View Post
With Date 7 now complete I'm now ~ halfway through Act IV's central arc. I'm packing the first week reasonably tightly, setting up the tasks and the premise that will carry the rest of the act forward, but once that's done the goal is to let the player tackle the various lessons in any order.
Act IV is quite a long one, I'm looking at around 4 weeks (Act I was 3 weeks, Act II was a rather packed 2 weeks, and Act III was 3 weeks). At the end of the act I'll gather the various thr...
I'm late. Again. I've been deep in Act IV's story, and that's taken all my focus. So far I'm almost done with the first week of content. One more story-based event, and I'll finally have some time for with Emily on the first date of the Act.
Most of the erotic events in Act IV are already planned out, but I've got space for one more 'free floating' erotic event (so not tied to the timeline). I'll leave it up to you which one I should do.
The three options:
I like to support people doing good work in the adult games industry, and I've enjoyed NSFI's work . It's nice to have someone working to highlight the devs behind the games. When he asked if I wanted to do an interview back when Act III launched I was more than happy to; it's finally out now. Hope you like it!
2020-04-01 04:30:25 +0000 UTC View Post
It's not pretty, but I thought I'd share it for those of you who are interested.
I've traditionally looked at the external builds as the main milestones of the project. I've mentioned before that I do the big story pushes (Act I, II, III, IV, etc), interspersed by 'content updates', most of which can be played at any point across the the book, or beyond.
The Books form the greater story-arcs; each tells a chunk of the story, with a concrete beginning and end, and with ...
Love of Magic's finally approved for Steam. I'm myself primarily a Steam gamer, so that's a fun milestone to hit. What does that mean for the current platforms, patreon, or those of you who discovered the game in the 'wild'?
Absolutely nothing. The game will be 100% free on Steam, and will continue to be released like now on itch.io, gamejolt.com and I'll continue to manage and participate in my thread on F95zone. So nothing changes, in that respect. This is more of an experiment, insp...
I often get asked about various tracks. They're all listed and credited in-game (and I subscribe as a Patreon to several of them myself), but I figured I might as well take it a step further and hook it up as juke box. You can now use the Credits/Audio screen to play the various tunes, as well as go to the creator website. Enjoy.
2020-03-25 03:18:52 +0000 UTC View Post
So, with Act IV writing started, I've got a little time to start building a new system. First on the stack is finishing up the Memories section (making sure all the data is set up correctly, tie in the Scene replay functionality and fix any bugs associated with it.
The second new functionality I'm looking at is achievements. I like achievements, they're a good way to inject whimsy in the game. I also like crowdsourcing them, so here's the document I'm working off. You've got writ...
And we're finally up. It's been a busy few days, and huge thanks to the Discord team for testing, streaming and finding bugs.
The Changelog's attached, but the basic overview:
A long-standing request has been to set up a proper "end of content, but I want to keep exploring". I was puzzling with how to do it without breaking the world; I think this is likely the cleanest solution. Emily keeps hanging out after end of Act III's savegame; just load it up and she'll point you in the right direction.
When I release Act IV, I'll just catch anyone who's played past this point, and reset location, time and date, then kick off the opening cinematic.
In othe...
MC was one of the first characters I rendered for Love of Magic, and it kinda shows. When placed next to newer characters he looks quite flat. So, without taking away his tacky leather pants or basic T-shirt he'll be getting a lighting pass done, maybe some more emotions.
2020-03-19 03:01:05 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm going to see if I can turn this poll around a little faster than last time :)
Lady Aoife is a Fae Power, visiting Edinburgh on official business she decides to slum it for a night at this new pub someone at the Embassy mentioned. She provides some lore, interacts with some of the other characters, and may flirt a little outrageously with the help.
You'll meet her again, I like where she's going.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/34532123
Poll closing tomorrow, so just a reminder to go vote for your favourite option. The Crowley Upgrade project is now under full steam, with the first night time encounters included in yesterday's Beta build.
Fun little side-project. I've done a few wallpapers over the months of development. One of the guys on Discord (JLucci) asked if I could allow the user to set it up as wallpapers ingame as well.
I figured I'd try to go a little further; you also have the option to set it as desktop for your PC (and possibly android). I've got no idea how I'd extend that to OSX/Linux, and no way to test it easily, but I'll dig around a little.
If you just want the wallpapers directly, I collected...
I've gotten a lot of feedback that nights are under-utilized.
I'm working on fixing that; some things are already in the latest public build, others are being rolled out now:
- Use the shower at night for a possible CHR bonus (30% prob)
- Call mom on the new Facial video-conferencing app. If your cash is <50, she'll offer to top you up
- Visit the Grassmarket at night; 10 pounds gets you a pound, and a possible CHR or STR bonus
- Once you've completed the first Bl...
2020-03-12 09:38:17 +0000 UTC View Post