Droid Productions

Home for the Chosen: Dojo

Each of the rooms of the expanded Kings Dragon will have a few events with the Chosen (and occasionally other guest characters). For the Dojo I needed at least one with Bella.

This is obviously a very long video, so I thought I'd do a breakdown.

The first part is animation; it's actually using video motion capture; this is 5 different martial arts combinations blended together to form the final 640 frame clip. And 640 frames of the final image would destroy my poor PC. So let's c...

A Home for the Chosen

One of the big tasks for Act VII (and the whole of Book 2) is the Home for the Chosen Questline. It starts on the last day of Book 1, when the Chosen ask you what expansion building you want to build first for the King's Dragon. It doesn't really matter that much which one you selected on Hogmonay, since you'll have time to build them all throughout book 2.

Each of the areas will have recu...

Happy Lunar New Year

Tonight marks the end of the Year of the Rat; let's hope the Year of the Ox will bring us all prosperity, health and happiness. As well as a lot of hard work :)

Wallpaper Engine

I obviously really enjoy making wallpaper, sigs and other small side-projects; I feel it let's me practice getting better, I like how it lets me be creative in a different way, and I love seeing people using the results.

Someone was asking why there wasn't any Wallpaper Engine versions. Which of course ended up with me asking "wth is Wallpaper Engine". After a bit of browsing, it lead me to this:  2021-02-10 04:34:42 +0000 UTC View Post

Character Creation Timelapse

I got a question in the Dakimakura thread on how characters are set up in Daz. I needed a couple of new character anyways for the end of Act VII, so I decided to record myself creating him and timelapse it at 5x.

Character creation is definitely the easiest part of DAZ; posing, lighting, dForce and composition will take a new creator a lot longer to get to grips with.

Hopefully you enjoyed that small look into the development process.

Dakimakura Mk II

The winners of the Dakimakura poll last month was Emily and Bella. Bella's still rendering (you wouldn't believe how long 4k x 8k takes to render), but Emily's done.

I think this is my favorite outfit of Emily's; it also looks nice and soft and cuddlable.

If anyone actually makes one, don't forget to share pictures!

4K Wallpaper

I've been too immersed in tech for a while, and as such haven't done any wallpapers recently. This one just popped out at me; it's a scene from the big Act VII cutscene that I thought looked good enough in isolation that it was worth re-rendering it at 4k.

Someone's made Emily... most unhappy. Payback is about to arrive. 

edit: Added a 3440x1440 widescreen version, as well.

And since I was tinkering with the post... here's one of Katie from the same sequen...

Testing out WebGL

At the very start of Love of Magic I set it up to run on WebGL (so, playing embedded in the browser). I quickly abandoned that idea as I spent every free hour building more content. With Book 1 complete, and after chatting with a bunch of other devs, I decided to return to that idea.

WebGL has some advantages, and a lot of disadvantages. Obviously the full Book 1 is ~3.2GB worth. Not something you'll want in a browser game. I chopped it down to 2 acts (ending on the date where Emily l...

Elsewhere World Map

The biggest technical task for Book 2 is putting together the Elsewhere World map. It's a place that will have encounters, serve as the joint between the various locations, host hunting grounds which replace the basement in the Crowley and in general grow over the next 5-6 acts. I wanted to do it first, since it was the part I was most uncertain about.

With today's beta on steam it's in and working; lots of content left to be added. Much like Edinburgh itself, Elsewhere will keep growin...

Steam Community Assets

I really enjoy making little community assets as I go, and a month ago I decided to spend a lazy Saturday morning (which is usually my "go do something new" time) to create what's called Steam Community assets.

There's multiple different types of these: It starts with trading cards
2021-01-18 06:04:17 +0000 UTC View Post

4K wallpaper: The Redheads of the Clan

I set the PC to do some over-night rendering; this time for the 4 redheads of the Clan. Kathy on the left. Fia, who you meet in Act VII. Katie, and finally Bella.

The background is a stock photo from the Quirang coastline, on the Isle of Skye, about 4 hours drive from Bellanoch.

T-shirts

One of the discord regulars was talking about wanting Emily's t-shirt for his girlfriend, and another user asked if he could get a copy if it was being made. As these things do, things escalated.

So I made a print on demand shirt shop as a fun Saturday morning task.
https://loveofmagic.myshopify.com/

I'll add a few more t-shirt designs as I go (#Jenny4Chosen seems a popular one). If this is something p...

Book 1 : 1.0.7b (Final)

With the Steam release has come a bunch of "final" fixes, all the little things that needed fixing once you can no longer kick the can down the road. It's not the most glamorous part of game development, but it needed doing.

With 1.0.7b, I'm hopefully able to turn my energies towards Love of Magic: Book 2. First 2 days are in Alpha right now (playable off Steam), though lots of things are broken as I transition to a new project, removed unused content and add in new systems.

2020-12-31 09:58:15 +0000 UTC View Post

Dakimakura

A while ago I put together a Dakimakura template for fun. These are Japanese style giant 'body pillows'; you can provide your own prints to 2020-12-29 08:42:38 +0000 UTC View Post

Merry Xmas

And a joyful New Year to everyone!

Book 2 Teaser

With writing for Book 2 now going on, I wanted to do a little teaser video. I sat down last night, cracked open a bottle of wine and spent a little time setting it up.

It touches on some of the themes of the next book, and some of the systems I need to build.

First of all, the Kingdom management system. I'm drawing inspiration from Pathfinder: Kingmaker here, both in...

Faces of Emily

I often get asked about the facial animation for characters; I thought I'd go through and show how it's set up. Emily's by far the most expressive character; side-characters usually have 3, major characters 5-8; Emily has 14.

Each expression is made up of 4 images; the base layer, blink and eye movement, and a mouth movement. These are blended in on top of the base-layer to give the feeling of movement. Each animation is ~10 seconds long (300 frames), to avoid it looping/blinking too ...

Live on Steam

And we're live on Steam!

If you've got a Steam key, and have played the game there, one thing that's hugely helpful is to leave a review... people playing and enjoying the game has a massive impact on Valve displaying the game to other players, and everyone's much more likely to try out a game that's got a good review / rating.

It's strange that after 20 yea...

Book 1 : The Crown

And the final release candidate is here. Thanks to the Discord team that's been bug-fixing, looking for typos, balance testing the updated gems, and finding continuity bugs. This market the (hopefully) final build submitted to Steam.

So... what's new?

Well, first of all the Achievements.  Steam has 55, the non-steam version has one for playing all the Game of Friends snippets (they were removed from the Steam build, as they're considered ingame advertisement).

I adde...

Book 2

While we're waiting for Steam to do it's thing, I've started forking the codebase and looking at the coding tasks that goes into that. As systems come online I'll talk more about what is involved, and maybe even letting you guys have fun with helping add kingdom events, name regions on the world map, etc.

The attached image was an idea I had for the new Book 2 main menu background; I'm not 100% certain on it yet, but it'll do as a placeholder for now.

Approved for Steam Release

And after a quick bit of neutering the Steam build is ready for release. The Game of Friends had to go for the Steam build, unfortunately; Steam considered them ingame advertising. With that went one of the achievements (Gamer : play all games on the PC).

That leaves us with 55 achievements in the steam build, a mix of story events, grind event and a couple of in-jokes.

I'll do one more build sequence with various bug-fixes, then off it goes. With that out, it'll be time to st...

Last Game of Friends of Book 1 : Heavy Five

I've been a scifi nerd since I first stumbled across an old copy of the Foundation saga in my mother's bookshelf at 10. Since then I read everything scifi I could, exhausting first the bookshelf, then the local library, and eventually even the local gamer bookstore.

I've really enjoyed talking to Not Travis, who's a humble and smart creator with a real passion for her project; not just in terms of improving ...

0.6.22b

It wouldn't be a public release without the odd warts. There's one specific one (Overwriting Savegame causes the UI to become unresponsive) that's bad enough I'm rolling out a patched version. I took the opportunity to make a bunch of other small fixes in the process... hopefully not breaking anything:)

Changelog:

• Fixed a bug where using the Overwrite save caused the Yes/No popup to remain in the background.
• Added guard for battles that shouldn't be winnable 2020-11-20 07:47:05 +0000 UTC View Post

Onwards... to War

This little video was inspired by PandaMan's spirited #jenny4chosen campaign. While Jenny ultimately lost, I wanted to revisit the moment with Jenny in the Arena, recruiting for MC. Pandaman was kind enough to lend me the assets, so here we are. 

Today marks the final build of the main storyline of Book 1. I'll do another Book 1+ build, centered on Steam functionality, but also adding a story sequence of the Kath house kafe (centered on Kath, Chloe and Mom running the Crowley).
...

Act VI Story complete

And with 0.6.20 we're *finally* at the end of Day 115, or December 31st 2019, in-game.

I've got bugs to fix, typos to rewrite, quests to clean up clean up, and a cleaner end-of-content transition to do before it hits public, but the story of Love of Magic, Book 1 : The Crown is now playable from beginning to end for the first time.

It's been one hell of a journey; with some luck the final Act VI release will be in a week or so, putting it almost exactly a year after the first p...

New Game of Friends: Lucky Paradox

I've been chatting with Stawer from Lucky Paradox for a while, and decided to do a fun little shout-out to him. It started with a plan to do another game-within-the-game, but as we chatted it kinda grew. Stawer's a huge fan over the top anime, so we decided to have two of our martial arts redheads try to re-create a pose from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure; the final result it makes for a fun little GIF.

Lucky Paradox is a feel-good sandbox VN set in a rich and often hilarious world; I enjoy...

Welcome to Camelot

With my small detour to Camelot complete, we're back to Edinburgh for the finale of Book 1. I wanted to give you guys a quick look into what the setup for Camelot itself is, and some of my plans for Book 2.

The King's Dragon

The big task of Act VI is having to build Camelot. I needed to do that for Book 2 *anyways*, but I decided to frontload it so the players can see some of the surrounding areas as well.

This is a shot-breakdown of the background for one of Camelot's key locations, The King's Dragon. It serves as an inn, and as a central location for several of the key characters.

Playing with Fire

As I continue to write Act VI (it's on day 104 now, with 11 days left of the main timeline), I decided to play with VFX a little. This is Katie hitting the Power threshold; I actually really love the colors of her hair here.

So when's the next public release? I've got 5 more events for the main timeline of Act VI to do (though a few of them are pretty big). Tentatively aiming for end of the month, but... things are busy :)

When life gives you lemons

I was going to set up an over-night render of a cutscene for Day 104. However, I forgot to change the resolution on the camera (the last thing I used it for was a 4k hero shot), and so it was trying to do 60 frames of animation at 4k. Needless to say, 7 hours later, when I woke up, it had gotten to frame 3.

I aborted to run, reset the camera to 1k, and will render it tonight, but... that left me with this gorgeous 4k texture. So I decided to make a small non-canon ani-image of it. If yo...