Love of Magic News

I recently upgraded my PC, including getting a new 3090 gfx card (yeah, I know, the 4090's out, but sadly I still need the other kidney). I started developing Love of Magic with a lonely 1080 graphics card, so it's certainly been a boost to productivity.

The early days of Love of Magic didn't have much in the way of animations, since they were mostly a full day thing to set up and render, but now things are a bit faster. Book 3's getting a lot of animations, obviously, but I decided I might as well go back and spice up Book 1 a little; especially the opening act.

This update adds 5 new animations (1 for day 2 introduction, 1 for first homework, 2 for second homework, and 1 for the first date). It also cleans up the localization interface, adds support for voice-overs (one of my fans is working on doing a full set of VOs), and adds various little bug-fixes and typos corrected.

Apart from that, work continues on Book 3. I'm a bit more than halfway done, right now working on a sandbox expansion for Edinburgh. Once that's done, in a couple of weeks, I'll get started on the penultimate act of the game, The Return, then the last full act of the game, Eternal Summer.

If you haven't wishlisted it yet, it's an awesome way to help it (Steam considers wishlists a way to judge if a game is real, or just a lazy asset flip... at around 6,000 wishlists you're considered a "real" game and, you get a boost at launch).

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1992770/Love_of_Magic_Book_3_The_Return/



Full changelog:

1.3.0a
- Fixed missing addressables

1.3.0
- Cleaned up the localization UI
- Typo pass
- Added new animations to Act I

1.2.10
- Updated localization files and interface.

1.2.9
- Support for Voice Over

1.2.8
- Typo fixes

1.2.7
- Fixed an incorrect image
- Added guards for avoiding two additional combats that doesn't have an early out
- typos fixed up
- Fixed an issue where some characters were incorrectly dressed

1.2.6
- Fixed a bug that could derail the dialog if you used a character before the story-dialog triggered
- Fixed a bug where the Minotaur card background could fail to trigger
- Fixed a bug where people who continued play from a non-steam build could fail to trigger some achievements

What's new?
- Purely book 2 changes, getting it up to the final release build
- Various typos and spellchecking pass (thanks to all the testers on Discord for those!)
- Fixed an issue where loading a Game+ from Book 1 would give an incorrect save dialog
- You can now use the Keypad keys for controlling dialog, allies and cards.

This build contains various small bug-fix issues:

1.2.6
- Fixed a bug that could derail the dialog if you used a character before the story-dialog triggered
- Fixed a bug where the Minotaur card background could fail to trigger
- Fixed a bug where people who continued play from a non-steam build could fail to trigger some achievements

1.2.5b
- Adds a hard guard to Dragon fight for people who somehow miss it

1.2.5
- Streamer mode now gets an image/background
- Streamer mode now handles censoring attachments and emails
- Fixed a couple of small typos / bugs

Book 2 of the Love of Magic is complete, and is going up for sale tomorrow (31st May) at a 20% launch discount. As such I'm putting Book 1 on sale, since they two of them are designed to be played back to back.

Book 1 (The Crown) takes the player from day 1 of the game to Day 115 (New Year's Eve). Book 2 (The War) continues with the player waking up on Day 116, and plays onwards from there.



Where Book 1 starts as a slice of life romance, gradually building towards an epic Urban Fantasy, book 2 incorporates elements of military scifi/fantasy, kingdom building, being able to upgrade the King's Dragon, and a large number of optional side quests. It's also darker and more moody; the days of being innocent and young are over... the war has begun.



Like with Book 1's development branch I'll be developing and sharing Book 3 on Book 2's development and Beta branch. Beta branch will have latest (stable) act, so it's suitable for people who just wants to play the latest content and see how it works. Development branch is what I test on (and what the Discord test gang uses), so it'll have the very latest content... but it's not yet content complete, and I may decide to edit events, add flags or logic I missed out on, or add content out of sequence. Don't play it with a savegame you treasure.

Book 3's right now at day 202 on the Development Branch of Book 2, so once you grab it you can see what I'm up to. Hopefully you've enjoyed the journey through Love of Magic, and will stick with me until Book 3 (The Return) completes the trilogy.

This is a small update that's primarily fixing possible bugs.

- I finally tracked down the bug that could cause some of the scripted battles to not trigger cleanly. It has (I hope) been eradicated for good.
- One of the card backgrounds (The Minotaur one triggering when you save Katie) didn't trigger correctly. Fixed.
- Fixed a bug where people playing a non-steam build, then switching to Steam, could end up with Achievements not triggering.
- Improved Streaming mode.

In other news, Book 2 has been submitted for Steam Review, and is on track for a release on May 31st. It's been almost 18 months since I started it... I hope you all enjoy it.