Droid Productions

Progress Update

Quick development update, and some forward looking thoughts.

Morningstar just updated to 0.4.20 (Day 92), and Act V is happily chugging along. Apart from the Act end (Day 93), I've also got the remaining double-date (Path of Light / Path of Fire) on Day 87 to complete. I'd guess another couple of weeks until it's all done.

Apart from the regular calendar-based content this update's also including new updates to Snowdrop, Saoe, Lin and Mu Lau / Saffron.

2024-06-30 08:23:36 +0000 UTC View Post

Steam keys and updates

So. Steam Keys for Love of Magic / Morningstar. I often get asked this, so I guess it's good to clarify things. I give steam keys to any Patreon that wants one, regardless of tier. Yes, even at $1 tier. Yes, I'm aware that this is a terrible business decision; it doesn't matter, because these games would never have been made without the support of my Patreons in the first place.

All builds are rolled out on Steam's Development branch as soon as they're complete; when you check out the ...

Dev Update. Act V: Kingdom Come

I know I'm supposed to be doing adult games, but so far Morningstar has more lewd handholding than porn. I set out to fix that.

 The new update includes a big new chunk for Snowdrop, starring in her first ever adult movie. I honestly had a lot of fun writing it, with Snowdrop completely hijacking it from me.

I also added a new scene to Saoe's questline, with our Goth Sidhe princess fin...

Development Update

So, after posting the last update (literally from Airport) I took a quick holiday with the family. I didn't get as much writing done as I had hoped, but I did get a lot of thinking and designing done. Now that I'm back on

The two big systems that still need love in Morningstar is the gem based combat and the optional replayable paths (the Maze). I spent a fair bit of time fleshing those out, and looking at how to improve them.

The gem combat is getting a reasonably large overhaul...

Morningstar Act IV Complete

With version 0.4.0, Act IV of Morningstar's complete, and the march towards Early Access continues. This version contains days 54-74, and advances a number of questlines. It also marks the clear split between the Path of Light and the Path of Fire.

There will be a total of 4 endings for Morningstar; The Path of Light (Emily), The Path of Fire (Katie), The Path of Submission (Lin) and the...

Quick test renders (4K)

I wanted to do a few test-renders, and liked some of them enough that I redid them in 4K, and tinkered with them a little in Photoshop.

 This little image was inspired by a Carbidis (Eternum) render; I liked the composition enough to try to recreate the feeling. This is Ciara Kennedy from Morningstar.

2024-04-26 03:21:08 +0000 UTC View Post

Progress update: Morningstar

I'm currently hard at work on Act IV's ending sequence (I'm on day 72; the act ends day 74). While rendering out the day I was messing around in Photoshop, and decided I liked this enough that I should share it.

Once I'm done with the last 3 days, I've got some side content to do, and cleanup (mainly in the match3 combat system), before I slap it on the ass and call it done. Hopefully it'll be out and playable in 2 weeks time (or less, if I get inspired) :)

After that I'll be d...

Ultrawide wallpaper (5120x1440)

One of the Discord regulars was showing off his new Ultrawide monitor; it inspired me to test how a wallpaper explicitly designed for 32:9 ultrawide aspect ratio from the ground up would look.

I don't know how many of you have monster monitors like this, but if nothing else it's a pretty image of Emily :)

This is of course Love of Magic's Emily (she's got Fae ears), with an outfit that may make an appearance in Book 2 NG+, once I get to it. I think it looks beautifully on her....

Happy Easter

I haven't made a wallpaper in a while, so I figured Lin could get a chance to star. Happy Easter everyone, and hope you're having a great time with your families!

I did 1920x1080, 2560x1080 and 3440x1440 versions, for those of you with big monitors :)

On the development side, I'm back on Morningstar after finishing up Book 1 NG+. Yesterday marked Day 61 of the game rolling out to the Development Branch on Steam, though I took today to do a little Lin side-event. Thus the inspira...

Book 1 : New Game+ Complete

I've often talked about how Persona 4/5 inspired Love of Magic, from it's basic structure (mixing sandbox and fixed events) to some of the character archetypes. For those curious, here's Laura Loveshanks, an early streamer, talking about Persona in Book 1.

One of the things I love about Persona is the idea of a New Game+. This is where, after completing the game, you can go back to the beginning, create a New Game+ pl...

Text 2 Speech and AI Voices

I'm now putting the final touches on Love of Magic Book 1's New Game+ mode. What remains now is basically just bug-fixing, with all the content completed.

One of the things I decided to add back in was the Text-2-Speech module; I don't know how commonly it's used, but I do know I got a lot of requests to put it in for Book 2. Since this is the final engine that will be used for all 3 games, I figured I'd best set it up now.

The problem of course is that the current Text2speech s...

Morningstar Act III complete

Finally done with Act III of Morningstar. It's a bit of a monster, tracking from day 35 to day 54, including 30+ calendar events, new updates for the Questlines for Lin, Snowdrop and Katja, and featuring new dates for both Katie and Emily.

It also advances past Katie's fight, introduces a new MMA fight with MC, and expands on the Match3 combat, introduces new repeatable events, and helps strea...

Morningstar Act III update

I picked up a Steam Deck (for research, honest!) this week, and have spent some time playing Love of Magic / Morningstar (and Sinners Landing /  Paradise Lust) on it.

By and large it plays okay; there's a couple of small things that need touching up, like the input systems, but those are solvable. It did, however, become clear that the game would play a lot nicer if it was tweaked to be entirely playable using the gamepad.

I'm about 80% through that task (except the handph...

Morningstar enters Steam NextFest

The two annual NextFest events are the big time for people to discover upcoming Steam games, and play demos. This time I'm trying it out with Morningstar;  You can check out the free demo here.

Morningstar: Book of the Fallen is an Adult Urban Fantasy, set in the dark, magical underbelly of New York. A young MMA fighter gets dragged into the fight of his life the nigh...

Morningstar Steam Demo

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2396740/Morningstar_Book_of_the_Fallen/

With Steam's Nextfest fast approaching (5th Feb), I finally got around to releasing the free Steam Demo of Morningstar: Book of the Fallen. The demo takes you up to the end of Act II, so Day 35 (basically last public build).

Meanwhile I'm happily churning forward, and have reached day 45 of t...

Katie's Epic Theme

This is the final of 3 theme songs, sharing a single theme. You can check out the other two here:

Katie's Rock Theme
Katie's Romance Theme
Katie's Epic Theme

All three tunes were commissioned from amazing musician and composer 2023-12-16 07:25:16 +0000 UTC View Post

Love of Magic New Game+

With Act II of Morningstar complete, I figured I'd switch my attention over on New Game+.

One of the key inspirations of Love of Magic is of course Persona 4/5, and a key aspect of those games is the New Game+ Mode. Basically, upon completing the game you can start a new game, with increased stats and some new content that only unlocks from a second run.

For Love of Magic, that splits into a few different tasks: code, new events, NG events and updated art where it makes sense. 2023-12-16 05:11:20 +0000 UTC View Post

Morningstar: Act II complete

With 0.2.0b I think Morningstar Act II is complete; I'll let people test it a little more before I do the itch.io version, but it's up on Steam to test now.

So what's involved? Act II (Spread Your Wings) extends the main story from day 16 to day 35, leading up to Katie's fight-night. It introduces a number of characters that will become key through the next couple of acts, and advance a number of the key quest-lines in the game.

Snowdrop and Lin's personal questlines also continu...

Janet

Katie's poster was originally inspired by a Rolling Stones photoshoot by Janet Jackson, taken with her husband (who gets rather less screen space).

The picture was then later cropped down and used for her self-titled album, Janet.

I was originally going to do Katie's version in Sepia tones as wel...

Katie's Romance Theme

This is the second of the three theme songs created for Katie in Morningstar; this one speaks to her more sensitive or emotional side.

Like the previous one, it was created by Alexander Nakarada, whose music also had a lot of impact on Love of Magic.

The inspiration for this cover came from Janet Jackson's c...

Katie's Theme (Rock)

2 weeks ago I asked the amazing Alexander Nakarade to create some custom music for Morningstar: Book of the Fallen.  Specifically I wanted three songs around a central theme (so they are all clearly related) custom-made for Katie.

The first one out is her Rock Theme, which I think is the central part of the triptych. I mentioned I wanted elements of Celtic rock, and passed him some songs (like 2023-12-03 03:37:51 +0000 UTC View Post

RIP Video Account

I've been using Vimeo to host my videos here for the last couple of years; mostly work in progress / workflow / behind the scenes footage. Since it was mostly for Patreons, I don't have mirrors for most of them... in retrospect that proved unwise.

Yesterday they nuked it for nudity, deleting it immediately and failing to inform me (despite being a paying customer, which... stings). Anyway, such is life.

If you notice any dead links on videos posted here, now you know why.

...

Music for Morningstar: Book of the Fallen

I obviously love trying to find the perfect music for my games, and for Love of Magic one composer stood out as providing 2/3 of the tracks. Alexander Nakarade's been making absolutely awesome music tracks that are free for use in games and videos (CCBY4.0, basically free to use as long as you mention who made them, and the...

Morningstar Progress

With the Love of Magic trilogy wrapped up I'm back to work on Morningstar. Act 2's reached day 27, adding another 11 days worth of new content (Act I ended day 16). I've got some new optional content (with Lin) to go, then I'll return to do day 28.  The Act is planned to end Day 35 (Katie's fight night), so it's humming along nicely.

I've been rendering a lot of Emily recently; day 28 is very much her day, and I figured I'd do a little wallpaper for her. Less cutesy and more majes...

Morningstar Progress Update

I had a productive weekend, and pushed the End of Content on Morningstar to Day 27 (the first release ends midway through day 16). 2nd Act's always going to be a special one; Act 1 defines the world and the setting, Act 2 gets to set up some of the central themes and plots.  It'll end on Day 35, so progress is going well.

The video's for an optional Day 24 event; it's what I'd call a scene setting shot. I wanted to establish where Katie lived, and the mood in the city.

I h...

Achievements

I've written before about my experiments with AI (across various generative fields). I've tested out Voice Generation with Elevenlabs and Molly's JOI, redone the paths with Midjourney and AE, and experimented with music, SFX and video generation (though never getting anything that amused me enough to showcase it).

For Book 3 Achievements I had the bright idea of using AI to generate the icons.

...

Collectibles & Prepping for launch

Love of Magic is now on it's final sprint, and I'm hoping to have an official launch on Steam by the end of the month. With day 288 finally complete, I've got one final story event (Day 287) to write, and achievements to implement; neither of those are needed to send the game for Steam approval, though, so that's up next.

As part of that, I'll be removing Morningstar from Book 3's beta branch; if you've been playing it there, and want a separate Steam key for 2023-09-09 08:26:33 +0000 UTC View Post

Epilogue

I'm working my way through the various Epilogue shots now, giving the GPU something to do as I clean up the final events. I've got 3 more daily events to do, and then some optional side content, and... it's done. Hope to have the final release out in September.

I started Love of Magic almost exactly 4 years ago, as a little free game that I was putting out to recharge creatively and use as an excuse to learn Daz3D.

It's gotten a little bigger than that since.

So... what's...

The cast of Love of Magic

I got curious at how many characters with speaking roles there are in Love of Magic; I briefly considered putting it together in AfterEffects, but the amount of manual work was too much.

So let's cheat.

I wrote a quick snippet of code in Unity that grabs every character in the game, sorts them based on how many lines of dialog they have in the game, and lines them up (with Emily and MC in the front, followed by Katie and the Chosen, Chloe and then the rest.

All bills in ...

Act XVI Progress

I'm back at working on Act XVI, the final Act of Love of Magic. Let's have a look at how the progress breaks down.

Calendar Events

Act XVI is 22 days long (stretching from day 266 to 288). It's an extremely busy act, with at least one event every day. By the end of the weekend it should be done up to day 275, so almost half-way.

breakdown:
Writing: 50%
Rendering: 60%

Optional Events
In addition to the calendar...