Love of Magic News

This hotfix fixes a security issue in Unity, that made doing a new build recommended.

I also took the opportunity to clean up various localization issues, making new cards for Elsewhere and various little quality of life fixes. If you own Book 2 and Book 3 you'll see similar updates there, though they're far larger because they involve formally pushing NG+ mode to the default branch.

As always, thanks for playing, reporting and supporting the game!

[p]Love of Magic's a big game; the full trilogy has ~650k words (about the same as Lord of the Rings + Silmarillion). There's been several attempts at localizing it, but each fan-translation has crashed against the sheer amount of text.

It remains common requested feature, though; the English isn't always the easiest, and some people struggle with it.

Machine translation has come a long way, with LLMs like ChatGPT and Grok jumping generations ahead of old machine translation systems. I decided to have a go at it.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Several weeks later, and regretting my life choices, it's finally done. One of the things that made it more complex than expected was that I decided to localize all the UI and ingame (non-dialog) text. Stuff like events, card descriptions, kingdom events, etc. There's a LOT of text scattered around in little corners of the game, and hunting down (most of) it was a pain.[/p][p][/p][p]Now, the first thing I have to say is I don't know how good the translations are. I don't speak Chinese, Russian or Turkish. I'm making the raw txt files available to anyone who wants to fix it up, and will be posting updates as people help me smoothen things out.[/p][p][/p][p]The other thing I should probably say is that if you're happy reading English, I don't recommend switching to the machine translation. I wrote it in English and I don't know how well my jokes and language tone translates to Russian or Chinese. A classic example was an early attempt to translate "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" to Russian and back to English, where it showed up as "The Vodka's excellent, but the steak is bad." [/p][p]
[/p][p]Apart from that, the game has been recompressed to lossless compression, which should hopefully remove rendering artifacts some people were mentioning. I also revisited the Elsewhere path cards, fixed some achievement issues people have reported, and did a typo pass.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]With that I return to Wings of Empire, where the third Act has begun. It's a Space Opera set in a world where the Roman Empire never fell, and now faces interstellar was against the Commonwealth. Inspired by books like David Weber's Honorverse, Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet, CJ Cherryh's Merchanteer Universe, and movies and anime from Battlestar Galactica to Legends of the Galactic hero, it aims to blend grand space opera with the stories of your character and the girls surrounding him.[/p][p]
Give it a wishlist if it looks interesting, those are super important for helping it have a good launch!
[dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]
Hope you've enjoyed Love of Magic, and that you'll join me as we head out into the Dark, finding glory, love and victory![/p]

This is a tiny bug-fix; the system will now recognize end of game saves generated both from the original game (which had an extension of .sav3) and the New Game+ version (which has an extension of .ng3). This means you can finish a normal game in Book 3 and use that save in Book 1 without any manual file renaming shenanigans.

Sorry it took a bit of time to finish, been AFK for a while. Enjoy :)

One of the key inspirations for Love of Magic was Persona 4 Golden, a timeless RPG from Atlus. You can even encounter MC and Dylan discussing it in the coffee-shop, the mix of a regular calendar with optional sandbox events, a 'normal' world and a magical world you can explore and hunt in, and even some early character inspirations.



One thing I wanted to play with was the idea of a New Game+ mode. Starting with a finished save from Book 3, bringing you back to book 1, and starting you anew in a world that changes in various small ways.



You'll begin a new game with all your Gems from the end of book 3, more cash and higher starting stats; more importantly a lot of dialog changes in little ways, and new events open up.



The *big* chunk of new content is related to defeating Hel in Book 3; that opens up a new Book 2 questline called What Was Promised, leading to the 'true' ending.

Apart from that a lot of little (and not so little) events were added across all three books; I finally caved to the Kult of Kath, and she got three romance events (one in book 1, called Huntress of the Highlands, two in Book 2, including a threesome with Bella).



It wouldn't be Love of Magic without Emily, and she gets several new events, both in Book 2 and Book 3. These explore her more playful side, and her love for roleplaying. Akane and Molly also join the fun, with events in both book 2 and book 3.



With that done... I say farewell to Emily, MC and the Chosen. It's been an amazing 6 years of my life working on this project; I hope you've all enjoyed the journey.



My next project has just begun; Wings of Empire is a space opera set in a world where the Roman Empire never fell, but instead clawed its way to the stars. Give it a wishlist if it looks interesting.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3203710/Wings_of_Empire/



If you'd like to know more, come join the Discord; come for the pretty girls, stay for the jokes, the community, and the theorycrafting.



Both Love of Magic and Morningstar: Book of the Fallen are participating in the VN Fest that started today, and they're both on sale. As a bonus, Wings of Empire is sitting on the Development Beta branch of Morningstar, where it'll sit until I enter Early Access with it.

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



As always, thank you for your support; I could not have made these games without you.

Droid.

A user reported that Steam Achievements weren't firing on Steam side, due to the Steam SDK being disabled. This update fixes that; if you have achievements that haven't yet triggered on Steam, entering the Achievements UI (from Settings) should flush any that are local only.

In other news; Morningstar: Book of the Fallen is now LIVE!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2396740/Morningstar_Book_of_the_Fallen/

Some of the same souls return in a very different universe, reborn together to once again fight for justice.