Droid Productions

Molly's Prophecy

I had a bit of fun with this one last night. As usual, the renders are Daz, the composition is in Adobe AfterEffects. It contains visual spoilers for the end of Act III.

Molly's prophecy isn't particularly deep, but it plays on the Knights of the Lake scene, and Akane/Kitsune's integration into the gang. The video also contains the first part of the first scene in Act IV (MC waking up, resting on Emily's lap, her bared sword lying in the grass next to her).

During the prophecy,...

New public build: 0.3.16

A big thanks to the testers that have hammered on this new release. It's mostly focused on the poker-game, and cleanup, with no new story added.

Builds: PC- OSX - Linux - 2020-03-08 05:44:07 +0000 UTC View Post

Poker fixes

I've been spending the bulk of my time since the last release (0.3.9b) doing improvements on the poker game.

The most obvious one for a player is the addition of Visual and Sound Effects to the poker mechanic. Visual Effects is obviously a very deep hole; there's always more work that I could do there, but I'm hoping the new effects at least make things a little clearer to players (and make combat feel more exciting).

I also rewrote the card dragging mechanic;  I'm suspic...

Elsewhere and poker

Since the Crowley upgrade project is all about  bringing resources from Elsewhere, I'm spending some time hunting for bugs and fixing them in Elsewhere. I'm also spending some time documenting things, both for more hardcore players and for testers.

This is the master page for the documentation: 

https://gitlab.com/droidproductions/love-of-magic/-/wikis/Poker...

March Patreon poll : Crowley Encounter

In the sprint for Act III's release I forgot that I'm supposed to do a poll each 1st of the month. Sorry :)

I'm in the start of the Crowley Upgrade project, a sequence of non-timeline bound events (so they can be played from the portal opens in Act 1 to the end of Book 1), involved in the upgrade of the Crowley pub. As you get special ingredients in Elsewhere and give them to Chloe,...

Launch trailer

Had a bit of fun with the launch trailer. The music is Thorman's Theme, a track called Legend of the King, by Whitesands, There's another 4 songs by him on the track, he's a fantastic musician that insists on licensing everything under Creative Commons.

There's a little bit of a spoiler in it, but hopefully nothing too drastic :)

Act III Release

And it's out.  Act III's complete build is now live, you can get it directly from here:

PC: https://mega.nz/#!nmZiHYQb!EwWt_t2WfAzloOcOEgsRZAXmwVz4qM65Z1pBF1i8mHY 

OSX:https://mega.nz/#!O2QACKLa!OcXaSfGQ8udVVNCb0AbKCEvV-xPtSjfDzHEBxqjLvWE 

Act III Release Candidate (0.3.8)

And finally, Act III's ready for public (I think). A huge thanks to the discord team that's been playing, balancing, spell-checking and poking holes in the story over the last month.

Act III's a big chunk of story; Act I & II mostly focused on setting up the world. With Act III the characters and the world is settled, and I can focus more on the character development. It's ~3 weeks worth of content from the end of Act II.

So; what's next? Hopefully make this public tonight...

Memory Moments

The final feature of Act III was a long requested 'memory' mode, where you can go back and look at events from the past. It unfortunately hasn't recorded anything you've seen so far (I wasn't tracking it), but anything you see from now on, across any game on this PC, will get correctly unlocked.

0.3.8 is uploading now; unless something goes critically wrong that'll be the official Act III release. I'll link it in a post as soon as it's up for any patreons that aren't on Discord.
2020-02-28 02:06:10 +0000 UTC View Post

Once you pop, you can't stop

As often, once I start playing with something I tend to get shiny-objected. The first render of this sequence ended up being over-bright, but the second pass turned out okay.

Now to chill with a cold sake to celebrate the first release candidate for Act III 

Act III content complete

And with 0.3.6, we're officially content complete. Now testing and bug-squashing can begin.  I hope to have the final version out by Friday night, so you guys can start playing. As always, the latest version is available on discord: https://discord.gg/NQrQrht

I've gotten into the habit of doing little AfterEffects educational clips when I hit a milestone; today I decided to try to use AE for a signature.

This...

Content complete T-2

We're down to two scenes before Act III is officially content complete; I'm halfway through the swimsuit scene, and finished rendering some photos Emily sends you with her new swimsuit. I enjoyed them (perhaps especially the one where she's kneeling), so I thought you guys might like it as well. I did a version with / without the icon (the ones without the icon are what Emily will be sending MC). With any luck we should be content complete today, and I can get back to fixing bugs. As always, ...

0.3.1

And with today's beta build the counter ticked over from 0.2.xx to 0.3.1, with the final event in the main story of Act III completed. This doesn't mean the whole ACT is done (I've still got Lakeside Tales to do, and lots of bugs to clean up). But it means the central story arc is complete. To celebrate I decided to put together some wallpapers (with/without the logo) using one of the test renders I made for checking out reflection. Act III's all about the Girl and the Sword, so it's a fittin...

Have a Magical Valentine

Since Love of Magic has a strong romance theme, I figured I'd make some 4K wallpapers to celebrate Valentine.  Apart from that, remember to vote for your dreams on the Black Rose 2 event, poll closes on the 14th!  

If you have problems downloading, here are the alternative links:
Cover picture
Cover (no logo)
2020-02-13 06:28:38 +0000 UTC View Post

Progress, Act III

If you're in discord you might have seen that we're almost at the end of the core story for Act III. With the end of Date 6, there's just on more event left on the main timeline before the end of the Act begins. I'm about to upload the latest version, 0.2.20 now.

After I'm done with the ending, next step is to complete the side-quests; these are optional adventures that expand on the story and the world; as such they'...

Character bio, Molly

I was a little hesitant about this poster; it's obviously got some Act II spoilers. But then I think everyone here has played the game that far, so I'd put up her current role, rather than her initial one. Your relationship with Molly starts out a little rough, but she's got a heart of gold under the front of a streetwalker. Eventually she'll win you over.

Molly's an Aries:

 

Aries people tend to be energetic, forceful and  outgoing. They are good at ge...

2020-02-08 23:41:02 +0000 UTC View Post

Character Bio, Katie

Katie's your new best friend, advisor, and person voted most likely to get you into trouble by all the other characters.

She's a Leo, so let's see what that implies for her.

 

Leos are likely to express themselves in  dramatic, creative and assertive ways. They are also likely to enjoy the  warmth of the physical Sun. Leos have great energy, courage and  honesty. They are likely to be self-confident and maybe even a bit  self-indulgent a...

2020-02-08 08:50:26 +0000 UTC View Post

Bio posts

I've always loved little biography posts, so I figured I'd do one for each of the main characters. Emily is, of course, the first.

 She's a Capricorn, so let's see what the Capricorn horoscope says:

Capricorn people are ambitious and practical, and are likely to have an  excellent sense of social responsibility. They also tend to be conscious  of social mores, perhaps to the point of over-concern. Their natural  caution allows them to advance slowl...

2020-02-08 03:28:20 +0000 UTC View Post

Making of Timelapse video

One of the key lessons from teaching has always been that you should do it once to learn, then again to teach. So of course I started recording myself doing the After Effects composition of timelapse video while having no idea how to do timelapse in After Effects. Thankfully the PC took pity on me, and decided to crash in mid-composition. 

So I redid it from scratch, but this time having some actual idea how to do the tasks involved. I'm very much a newbie at After Effects, but I l...

Character Creation Timelapse

I get a lot of questions about how my asset creation works; since I'm doing animating characters, and develop in Unity, it looks quite unlike most Visual Novel type games, which are typically created in RenPy.

I decided to do a timelapse video showing how I go from a DAZ scene with Emily getting ready for Date 5, all the way to seeing her ingame at the date. It was a bit of a pain getting everything to work, but I find the end result interesting. I still have all the normal speed video...

Love of Magic logo teaser

I did a quick tutorial on how to do a logo reveal trailer (I should really have done a video of making off video... next time). It was a quick 10 minute job, but I liked the final outcome.. hopefully it's interesting for you guys as well. It's not patreon exclusive content or anything, so feel free to do what you want with it. 

Monthly poll #1

I'll be doing this polls on the first of each month, running it for 2 weeks (that's the plan, at least.. let's see how it goes). The first poll deals with the Black Rose optional quest line. When we present the second rose, there's a choice to be made; how do we want to shape her future?

I have three paths it can take; I could see either of them being fun, so I'm asking you which one you'd rather see.

2020-02-01 04:00:59 +0000 UTC View Post

Issue and Progress tracker

One of the things I added to the Patreon list was access to an issue and bug tracker. Since it's just me working on this project task-tracking has largely been notepad, but it's time to be a little more organized about it. I'll be filing non-trivial bugs (typos I usually fix as I encounter them), and some of the non-spoiler tasks (some of them contain plot twists, and I'll keep those in the secrecy of my notepad).

Anyone with a GitLab account can file bug reports, so don't be shy if th...

New Update: 0.2.14

And I'm finally done with the big 'mid way' build. In the same way as the Act I midway build focused on Slice of Life events, Act II focuses on Elsewhere. I'm finally getting enough 'meat' on it that you can see the direction I wanted to go; characters have discussions with each other, optional events trigger based on who you bring in with you (there is for example one event that only triggers if you rest, talk to Dylan, and have Emily in the party). I've added a bunch of new enemies, of vari...

Credits post

Now that I have patreons, I should really get them into build. Finished setting up the credits page (from settings -> Credits). I'm still playing with the visuals, but the basic functionality is there. The animating mugshots represents the character (so Enchanter, Evoker, etc). The Sorcerer and Power tiers can also provide their own icons.

Right now they're all using the same expression, but there's no real reason why I couldn't customize that if anyone would rather have Emily look...

Act III work

I'm deep in work on Act III, but I'll likely do a mid-term build halfway between Act II and Act III. Apart from various bug-fixes, it's all about tuning Elsewhere (more monsters, more loot, more events, and improving smaller stuff like drop rates and probabilities.

Since I want to provide some additional content I also ended up adding a new friend game (Light of my Life, by Naughty Road: https://www.patreon.com/...

Act II release

Finally, after 2 months, Act II is complete. It adds another ~1+ hour of core storyline, several new side-quests, and a replayable RPG dungeon where you can train your poker skills, unlock conversations and background stories, and level up. Hope you enjoy it!

TGIF

Some fun wallpapers. And remember to drink responsibly!

With some luck, and the blessing of the beta testers, Act II should be done by the weekend.

Bella

While the bulk of the work right now goes into Elsewhere, I figured I'd take a break to introduce a new character. Moibeal 'Bella' Hume is a Hunter, basically supernatural SpecOps. While not a mage, she IS supernatural, and quite capable of bench-pressing a truck. And of course she knows Katie, because the Clan is everywhere in the Scottish supernatural community.

Act I ending

The main menu will change in subtle ways, each time an act is completed it'll morph gradually, trying to stay alive.

Completing Act I will give you a new character on the team. Other changes will affect other parts of the menu, but each one will do something.  I enjoy giving little touches like that, I find it a sign of a healthy game development process that you still love the game enough to spend time on frivolous items.