Droid Productions

Day 100

With Day 100 arriving ingame there's 15 days left of Book 1. The end is extremely feckin' neigh, as Katie might say.

It didn't feel right to let such a milestone go past without Emily and MC getting some time together, so I set out to render a small sequence. The only problem is that Daz/IRay is *slow*. So I finished rendering this 50 frame clip of Emily, and it took 11 hrs. It's a very *nice* 50 frames, but... the looping is going to be super noticeable.

2020-09-26 10:25:37 +0000 UTC View Post

Trailer for Act VI

Back at the very beginning I used to make trailers for the various acts. Looking back through the archive I realized I missed it, so I set out to make a new one.

The music is an old Scottish traditional song, The Parting Glass, traditionally sung at the end of a gathering. It's also reused for the end of Act VI, as the group celebrates Hogmonay (the Scottish New Year) on Arthur's Seat. I wanted Act...

We've come a long way, baby.

I was working on various improvements to the Poker game, things like a new hint mouse/over, and the ability to keep multiple sets of gems, swapping them at the start of combat depending on who you're fighting.

Since the easiest fight to access is Emily's first encounter, it's been my tes...

Updated Themes

I'm working my way through Act VI, and one of the things I'm reminded of is that I'd forgotten to add in theme songs for the two new Chosen.

Bella's theme is called "The Foreign Tale"; once again from the fantastic Alexander Nakarada; I loved how it combined an initial softness and peace, then gradually getting more aggressive with time.

For Akane I wanted something more Japanese; I initially went lookin...

Quest System

Perhaps the most common request I get is some kind of Quest Tracker / Task Tracker. I've been very resistant, because I feel it really easily ends up as a 'laundry list' of tasks to complete, making the players miss the fun in exploring the world and encountering organic events. 

Having said that, I'm encountering enough people who're playing from Walkthroughs because they're lost, or want to make sure they catch them all. At that point you're already getting spoilers, so from the ...

New public build: Act V+ (0.5.14b)

New public build just finished, aimed at expanding life in Edinburgh. I usually mix 'story' sequences with these world building updates.

So what's new in this build? Well, it turned out a very sex-centric update, with new events for Molly, Bella and Diana. It also includes the new Card rendering and Collection system I talked about in the previous post, and lots of bug fixes and tweaks.  Steam has already updated, for those of you using that (as always, DM me if you'd like a key),...

Card rendering

I'm actually a programmer, though it's easy to forgot on a project like Love of Magic, where 90% of the tasks are writing/art. I implemented a card rendering system for another project I worked on, and decided with my new experience, to revisit how cards are rendered and moved in Love of Magic.

The first step was writing a normal map shader; this basically stores final geometric details 'bumps' as pixels on an image; for cards in Love of Magic the end result is subtle but quite pretty.<...

Act V+ and a bit of poster design

I had this idea for an animating poster I wanted to do, inspired by this old Poster from Star Wars : A New Hope. 

It's only about halfway done, but it's the kind of thing I like tinkering with in the background.

I also added a few more animating GIF signatures; do let me know if any of you wants a different branding on it (for a different forum, or personalized). 

2020-08-24 13:41:21 +0000 UTC View Post

New Public build (0.5.7b)

I'm doing a bug-fix release; thanks to the awesome testing team for helping me find a bunch of these. The full changelog is attached, but to sum it up

- Lots of little card and continuity fixes
- Cleaned up the messaging system
- New Valery events
- A new book, found in Elsewhere

The next update (Act V+) will get smut-heavy, with a Bella event at the Gym, an event with Molly at the Studio and the Kama Sutra event from May's patreon poll.

Aside from that, I made ...

Act V public release

And we're live. The final release ended up being 0.5.4b, with lots of bug-fixes contributed by the discord community over the last few days. Steam has been forwarded to default, the various sites have been notified... next stop (barring game-breaking bugs) is V+.

This was a strange act to do; I wandered pretty deep into the rabbit hole of animation, and spend an inordinate amount of time re-learning the lesson of diminishing return. As a programmer I'm *proud* of the work I ended up do...

0.5.1 beta

And with that, 0.5.1 beta is complete, taking us from day 76 -> 97. I totally chewed over too much with the epic video "Call to Action", which has taken something like 150 hrs worth of rendering, 25 unique DAZ movies, tons of special-effects, all synchronized to music.  I'm still not *totally* happy, MC's armor has some clipping issues that I'll try to fix with another overnight render, but mostly it feels a lot like what I had in my head, and 2020-07-28 05:00:59 +0000 UTC View Post

#Jenny4Chosen

The video didn't properly embed, and it's honestly much too cool to leave as a link people might miss. I'm really impressed with the work Panda made here.

July Poll: #Jenny4Chosen

 A Civil war has broken out in the discord; only you, dear voters, can save us.   Jenny's been everyone's favorite sub barista... but is she more?   

The arguments for and against, as presented by their Champions.  

In the YES corner; lead by Lead Renderer Intern, PandaMan. Panda's been working on Love of Magic fan-art for several months now; I've shared his wallpaper previously, and he's even got a couple of animation clips he helped do for the gam...

Closing up on 0.5.1

I thought build 0.4.34 was going to be the last build before 0.5.1 (which would signify the main storyline of the act was complete). Sadly Molly had other ideas, and I'm making one more update. Hopefully 0.4.35 is out tomorrow, and I can get back to finishing up the act. Most of the animations have been done (>100hrs worth of rendering across multiple clips), now I need to assemble the videos and write the text :)

As always, you can get the latest Beta on Discord, or let me know if ...

Progress Update

I haven't done a progress update in a while; partially that's just me being swamped. If you're playing the Beta builds (either on Discord, or on Steam... as always, if you want a key, let me know), you'll notice we're on Day 92 (Act IV ends of day 76), and we've got some help setting up a date with Akane (they also got her a nice dress).

I've said before that I planned Book 1 to be 5 acts, covering  115 days (last day is Dec 31st); Act I-IV was ~20 days each, with Act IV ending o...

Akane Wallpapers

A discord discussion about Akane and Kitsune sent me looking at Babymetal, and I came across this image here.

Akane takes on a greater role in Act V, and I...

Additional Quality of Life upgrade: Improved movement

Since I was doing some improvements to the core engine anyway, I decided to fix up the Quick Movement. It was previously designed to only let you quick jump between 'local' places, but honestly that seems an unecessary restriction, so I let you jump anywhere in the over-world.

I also went back and checked to see where there were available characters, and added their face there if present. This will hopefully make it less frustrating for players starting out, who keep wandering into the...

Rewriting savegame system

Not being Renpy based, the savegame unrolling/rerolling system isn't built in. As such I've usually blocked the player from saving  / loading in mid conversation. It's been a persistent feedback that people really hate that, so at some point I bit the bullet. It's been 5 hours of pretty intense coding, but iteration #1 is in.

The basic savegame system for dialogs took most of the time; I needed a better way of tracking progression than I'd used up to now. I also had to beat my agi...

Updating character art

One of the first characters still in there is Molly, and as I redid the character mug animation, I also decided to relook the character itself.

She had a couple of issues; one of which was the lighting (as I continue to develop, I'm prefering a slightly more dramatic lighting model), one was the eyes (I liked the brighter green eyes better), and one was her legs, which in some poses were bent backwards a bit too much, or occasionally clipped with the underlying world.

A day of wallpapers

I'm finishing off Day 77, and as always I find wallpapers and sigs to be a good way to creatively recharge a little.

This time it's a little different, with 3 different wallpapers from 3 different people. The first one (Molly and Emily in bed together) was made by Patreon and Discord regular Pandaman.
There's a lot of little neat technical touches in this one, check out the sheets deforming, for example. 

The second one is from fellow dev 2020-06-11 15:55:30 +0000 UTC View Post

New game of friends: Milky Touch by Studio Kuma

I haven't done a Game of Friends for a while, this one was Milky Touch. I was first attracted to it from the gorgeous signatures (I love those), then stayed for the amazing hand-drawn art. As someone who can't draw a straight line without a computer I've always been in awe of well done hand-painted art. The other thing I loved about this was the Voice Overs; it's something I've been looking at doing for Love of Magic, and in setting up the Milky Touch game of friends I went and did the core e...

June poll

I ended up sneaking Chloe's Black Cat outfit into IV+, but I still have Diana to do for V.

V+ will be the final build of Book 1, and as such the last of the builds centered on Edinburgh. To celebrate that, I wanted to go back and spruce up one of the early Book 1 scenes with some of the new animation techniques I've been playing with. You guys get to help tell me which one  it should be.

<...

New public build (0.4.18)

I decided to do a second public Act IV build before settling in for Act V proper. I've been spending time in the background doing prep-work; new characters, animations and cutscenes.

Here's the mega links :
Win32
Win64
2020-06-01 09:56:26 +0000 UTC View Post

Improving animation workflow

After my epic failure with Katie's animation, I went back to re-evaluate my workflow. It's not as if this is the first time someone tries to make animations with multi-hour rendering times.

The solution is to use pre-vis and layout cuts to reduce time and manage complexity (here's Pixar's Brave, showing a rather more ambitious scene). 

The basic animation for Chloe is a 30 frame sequence (1 s...

Blooper Reel #2 : Katie Edition

I guess I got too cocky with the recent animation successes, and so I did what my mother always told me not to, and attempted to repeat an unexpected success. I've made a new gym for Katie, and with that in place I wanted to make an additional scene for her.

Of course, life had other plans. All 3 clips have quite significant issues; some of them I could fix, but the solution will require anothe...

Emily appears

Emily's first appearance in the game is pivotal, and in my head I had a perfect image. Sadly I didn't have the skills to do anything about it :) I've been chewing on this one a couple of times. This is the third attempt, and at this point I'm actually quite happy.

Patreon won't let me link more than 1 video: here's an overview of the 3 attempts
https://vimeo.com/421388897

This video was more talking about doi...

Welcome to the Studio

One good suggestion someone added was letting each of the main characters have a 'home' where you can go and interact with them. Chloe's obviously got one, as does Katie. Molly and Emily don't. Emily will have to wait for Book 2 for her home base, but there's no reason Molly couldn't get one sooner. Like Katie, she's a bit of a Gym Rat, but unlike Katie her gym has  stripper poles.

Mos...

Making of a sig file

I really enjoy making these little Signature files for F95Zone. I've made a bunch over the lifetime of Love of Magic, but I was really quite pleased with this one I made last night, so I thought I'd show how it was put together.

Black Rose III animation (now with 90% less bloopers)

The PC spent 18 hours solidly rendering yesterday, and we now have our 3 clips assembled and in-game.

There's a couple of different experiments happening here.

I wanted to continue playing with parallax; I really enjoyed the effect when it worked in Emily's Day 75 scene, so time to test it again. The 3 clips use backgrounds in 3 different ways.

Clip 1 is using actual geometry in t...

Blooper Reel.

I always loved watching the blooper reels from Pixar, and after running my computer non-stop overnight creating this magnificent trainwreck, I figured I'd share it with you in the same spirit. Likely the first of many such.

https://vimeo.com/419129337  

Patreon is acting up, and refusing to link video posts from Vimeo d...