So Emily was shortlisted to a Top Cuties in Adult Gaming feature Spicygaming is putting together. To celebrate that they're doing a little compilation featuring 30sec each of all the shortlists.
I put together two (one that's safe for YouTube, one that's not). This is the safe for youtube version :)
I'll let you guys know once the full trailer is out!
I was rendering a bunch of stills for a cinematic for day 151, when I came across one that I really felt deserved animation.
Process:
- Staff, Body and Wings were rendered as separate layers in DAZ
- Taken in Spine, animated and exported as a .MOV with alpha
- Brought into AfterEffects
- Added a stock background for the sky/stars, and panned/zoomed it
- Added a foreground Saber Mask for the eyes and the spear head
- Traced the outline of the character, and used that m...
I should totally have made a timeline for this, so it was clear "this competition will run until XX/XX". Live and learn; it was fun, so I'll totally do it again.
Surfing Eagle was really close (32/47), but as MC might say "close only counts in hand grenades and nuclear weapons". Better luck next time, everyone.
Apart from that, I'm now writing and rendering day 151. It's the last day of Act VIII, though I have one other big event to do before I'm done (day 144)....
I tried out this high res photo of Molly, and for fun I also decided to volunteer her for Battlenips. Can you guess where they're hiding?
As an aside, looking at her skin at 4K is actually really impressively intricate and almost believable.
On Twitter I promised one of the...
I had a very straightforward plan for writing today; it was day 142, the grand alliance meetup, and for a change I decided Emily (for valid reasons) had delegated the job of scheduling MC's day to Molly.
Except halfway through writing, MC referred to Molly as his 'private secretary', and in my mind I could just see the giant lightbulb going off over Molly's head.
So... unplanned sex scene, totally couldn't stop myself. It's all Molly's fault.
With day 142 now out on Steam...
As Love of Magic keeps growing (book 2 is already almost 2GB), I need to start doing some house-cleaning to keep the memory footprint down.
The biggest part of this is the character sheets; there are 66 characters in-game, all of them have at least one set of outfits, and each outfit is a 2MB-16MB texture. That worked fine when then game had 10 characters, but as it keeps climbing in Book 2 it's starting to make the game sluggish on medium end computers, and unplayable on lower end com...
So I had this idea. In my head it was super cool, of someone capturing Katie cutting loose at the big central even in Act VIII. This is one of the clips from the video:
To do so I started with a phone in Daz, and animated it being lifted up. In retrospect 30 frames was not anywhere near enough, but.. animation/rendering is a bit of a pain in daz, so I hoped it could work out.
Working on the central cutscene for Act VIII. Since the act is called Red Devil there's no surprise that Katie's taking main stage here.
I had a very distinct image in my head of the scene I wanted... but actually making it took a couple of false starts (and 4 test runs of animation). The first walking animation was a wash. The second had a perspective that made it very hard to get the feeling I wanted.
Finally I ended up setting up two animations; the basic looping walk, and ...
Today was a good day. I managed to do most of the writeup for a pivotal new sequence, did 20+ renders for it, and still felt like spending some time rendering on a mission to learn. I try to use these little side-journeys to learn more, and expand my own reach... here I started with the famous scene from Flashdance.
After a few false starts in DAZ (water sims are not DAZ's best friend),...
With the latest version of Android making moving files even harder, I finally bit the bullet and set up a web-backend to move files around. You can now move save files (I've hardcoded auto/quick save and end of book saves for now) between devices, platforms and between books, without needing any account or login.
Hope that's useful to you guys!
I picked up Mass Effect Legendary Edition; mostly for my daughter that never had a chance to play the originals, but I spent some time playing with it myself. It as interesting to be reminded that one of the original inspiration for LoM was Mass Effect 2, and speech at the end of the game. I tried to channel part of that for Act VI's opening (after Emily's unwanted vacation), but I wanted to take another stab at it.
MC will never go grim-dark; that's the wrong game, and the wrong char...
And with the work around updating Act VII+ finally done, and my new PC (hopefully) broken in, it's time to settle down and make the new characters of Act VIII. A lot of them have already been made, and teased, but I needed two new characters for a key scene. One of them is shown here, Kitsune no Ainu, a relative of Kitsune no Hakone, or Foxy, as MC usually calls her.
Here I wanted to experiment with night-time rendering; the obvious solution is to lower the light intensity... but that d...
2021-05-16 13:04:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Win32: MEGA - MIXDROP - NOPY - PIXELDRAIN - RACATY
Win64:...
I made some 4K and 8K wallpapers to celebrate Star Wars day.
I also spent some more time working on the game; I was hoping to finish it last weekend, but I got side-tracked by an idea. Just pushed 0.1.16 of Book 2 live on the beta branch, hopefully you guys like it. I've got some typos and known issues to fix tomorrow, but hopefully the next public build is this weekend. I'll try to get a build up for everyone here tomorrow to test.
As always, if you're not on Steam (and would l...
I had a request for an accessibility feature, similar to RenPy's control+V voice over. It just uses the built in TTS (Text To Speech synthesizer), so it's not a replacement for having an actual voice actor, it's just a a way for people who for various reasons struggle with reading to still enjoy the game.
It's also kinda neat to see every speaking character in the game lined up together like that; it reminds me how much work went into this.
In other news, my day-job launched P...
We passed a magical milestone last night, with 500 patreons. It's hard to over-emphasize how touching that is, especially in these troubling times. It's only a little over a year since the first patreon arrived; I only set up the patreon account after a number of people told me I was being an idiot.
Originally the game was supposed to be completely free, but as the year went on and the pandemic bit my day-job pretty hard, it's become pretty much my primary ways of paying the mortgage an...
2021-04-13 13:04:41 +0000 UTC View Post
This came from a Discord suggestion that I liked enough to implement it; as a Seer, you'd assume Akane knows a thing or two about what futures to pick. I decided to implement a reference to it into the Elsewhere Hunting grounds, letting you 'see' into the future.
Still some issues to iron out, but I enjoy watching it. Thanks to Seki for the suggestion.
One of the interesting aspects of a public release is that you get lots of people telling pointing out things that it might be easy to overlook as a developer / QA team that's too close to the product. One of them was that Map navigation evidently sucks. Especially on Mobile, but also on PC (lack of scrolling).
I'd avoided it before, since it's potentially a bit of a bug-mine, but I decided to go and do it today. So 0.1.8b comes along with quick update to fix up the map.
Since I...
And with that, the first release of Book 2 is complete. Act VII is now out on Steam, Itch.io and elsewhere.
All patreons have access to the game 2021-04-01 10:45:38 +0000 UTC
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So a while ago I did a poll on which wallpapers you guys wanted to make. The winners was this one, and Emily with the sword. I'm still tinkering with the sword, but i think the godrays and interactive particles (you can push them around with your mouth) turned out nicely.
You can grab the wallpaper here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2441336566
I'm on-track for a public release on Thursday. For now, here's the latest Release Candidate. I'm still searching for bugs, but this one has all known issues fixed. It makes a good release candidate for anyone wanting to test it out:
Win32: MEGA - NOPY - 2021-03-29 10:14:26 +0000 UTC
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Laura's been my favorite streamer, since she first started playing Love of Magic over a year ago on the now defunct Gooshi network. She brings a love for the story and the characters (and a gorgeous English accent just perfect for Emily, Sarah and Chloe) to the task. She's also prone to hilarious detours, so listening to her is a real joy.
I'm still talking to her about getting her to do the first pass of VOs; the reason I even thought of trying out VOs was because I wanted to feature ...
One persistent question I've had was for repeating cutscenes.
I try to avoid them, since I feel re-telling a story cheapens it... but when Rendering Intern extraordinaire Pandaman (who's now got his own game, the gorgeous Price of Power) wanted to make some renders of Emily and MC having sex, I wanted to see if I could make something cool with it. It's not quite done, but hopefully it'll get bug-fixed this w...
My naming convention for game builds is Release.Act.Build.Emergency.
So 0.4.24 would be the 24th build of Act 4, and 0.4.24d would be a really bad day, since it's the fourth emergency build of 0.4.24 that just fixes emergency bugs.
With today's build I finally ticked Book 2 over to 0.1.0, meaning the core story for Act I (or Book 2, so Act VII of the game) is now done. I've still got bugs to fix, a couple of side-events to complete and some sexy times to add, but the main story ...
One of the many literary inspirations for Love of Magic is Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I just finished the latest book (Battle Grounds), and like Love of Magic he's gradually taking a darker turn. To celebrate, I wanted to recreate a sequence from Dead Beats.
Needing a necromantic source of energy to protect him from a necromantic ritual Harry Dresden decides to resurrect the biggest, oldest and meanest undead he could get his hands on. A T-Rex from the nearby Field Museum of Natural...
With Act VII's ending finally in view (I'm writing and rendering the last 'timeline' event now), I thought I'd share something else I've been working on.
There were a couple of big new systems I needed for Act VII; the Map was probably the biggest one of them. The military industrial complex is another, and finally the Kingdom Events. I wanted to borrow an idea I liked from Pathfinder: Kingmaker; as you proceed through the game, new kingdom events unlock. Some of them are story based, ...
The other winner of the Dakimakura vote was Bella, here in glorious 8K resolution.
I was inspired by the old Light in the Darkness wallpaper I did, and wanted to do the same concept but on a pillow-size.
It's longtime discord regular and patreon JackTheJackal's birthday, and he asked if I could do a render with Emily and the girls on the bed. So far I've got Emily, now I only need the girls ;)
This is their normal bed in Camelot; the first thing I did was rig it for dForce (DAZ's built in physics engine). I'm slowly and surely learning how to use the darned thing, and this was a valuable opportunity to test out new skills, and make an asset that I'm sure I'll find some use for...
I finally finished Act VII's primary cutscene (no, this isn't it... this was a side-render I liked enough to spend some time doing VFX work on). It's the biggest one I've done since the Call of the Chosen (MC goes to rescue Emily), and I had a lot of fun setting it up. Huge thanks to rendering intern Pandaman (who recently kicked off his own game, so I guess he's no longer qualified as an intern), for he...
2021-02-28 13:08:05 +0000 UTC View Post
I was looking through the itch.io store, when I realized I could actually hook it up to Patreon. For anyone who would prefer to download the game from itch.io instead of the mirrors, you can get your Patreon version here:
https://droid-productions.itch.io/love-of-magic/patreon-access
I also finally realized that I could automate itch.io purchases giving Steam access, rather tha...