Love of Magic News

It's Love of Magic's first chance to be nominated for a Steam Award, and while it's hard to think a little one man adult indie game making the cut, it's still fun to try. I originally clicked 'labor of love' (because it is), but the I realized that's more for games that are ten years old and still getting updated. So I went with Story rich games instead; hopefully you guys agree it fits :)



As the theme for this event I picked an image that's actually not in Book 1; the big wedding happens on the 14th February (St Valentine's day), and is part of the upcoming Act IX in Book 2. You can check it out on the Beta Branch now, if you want. It's one of my favorite sequences of Book 2 so far, and hopefully all of you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Act IX is hopefully done in a couple of weeks: I've got 4 more 'real' events to do, and a couple of smaller events to tidy up things and clarify timeline.

But for now... please vote for Love of Magic as a Story Rich game :)

The SteamAPI was disabled on some platforms, causing achievements to only trigger locally (and accidentally showing the game of friends, which should be disabled on Steam builds). This update fixes that. Thanks for letting me know!

It was a pleasant surprise to get asked to participate in the Steam Digital Tabletop Fest, and I'm looking forward to doing a (SFW) live-stream to celebrate it.

I figured a good place to start would be to talk a little about the poker game; how to play, inspirations that went into making the combat system and the paths of Elsewhere, and thoughts on future developments, builds and balancing issues.

I'll be leaving the chat open, and duplicating the voice chat to Discord, if anyone's wanting to ask questions, or let me know their thoughts and problems.



It'll be the first time I live stream, so this'll be interesting. Either in a fun and interactive exchange, or in a complete and utter train-wreck. Either outcome should be entertaining.

Apart from that, Book 2 progresses forward (after a detour to remaster Book 1 and the two first acts of Book 2), we're finally arriving at the biggest event of Act IX. As always the latest update is available on the Beta branch if you want to play-test. Last day of content right now is Day 159 (the Stag Party), next up comes the main event on Day 160.



Hope to see you all at the livestream; if you'd like to check out the Discord, here's an invite:
https://discord.gg/NQrQrht

This is a bunch of little fixes rolling out, with no new real content.

- OSX framework rebuild using latest Valve code. Hopefully fixes the issue some people have reported on OSX. If not, let me know, and I'll continue to chase it.
- Added a Streamer mode for people streaming on Twitch/Youtube; should now auto-blur any sequences considered as too lewd for the internet (let me know if I missed anything, it's sadly a manual process tagging what's lewd and what's not).
- Added the experimental localization feature. There are partially hand-translated versions, with machine translation picking up the slack, for French, German and Russian. It's still very much work in progress, and does not localize the UI (just the dialog), but might be interesting for some people.
- Does a final (?) localization pass.

Lots of small fixes, most of which don't affect most players, so I tag it as a small update. Let me know if there's any problems in the comments!

I know I told myself I'd leave Book 1 alone, but I was working on a sequence from Book 2, testing out a new technique. I was originally going to just render a static image, then bring it into After Effects to add effects, then take a single screenshot and use ingame. Except I managed to get it to loop cleanly into a 2 min video, and it looked pretty awesome running in the background instead of just a static image.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Having done that, I started thinking about doing it to the rest of Book 2. And I will; it's a reasonably cheap way to add impact to cool magic sequences, without spending days and days like I do on the big cutscenes. But I always wanted people to play the full game from beginning to end, and I started to worry that by the time I finally finish Book 3, Book 1 will look terribly, terribly dated.

So I had a bright idea; why not go back and add in this kind of animating effects to some of the key non-animated moments in Book 1? (Here an experienced project manager would go "oh no, you didn't....", but... well, yes I did). There's 30+ new animations of this kind, ranging from small throw-away scenes like this one:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

... to entirely new videos replacing what was previously static images for umpf, like here. My favorite, which I also used as the Book 1 Remaster branding, was Treason's Reward. It's a shot from Act V's End sequence, where Emily states "I pledge to reward loyalty with trust. Service with Honour. Treason with Death". She feels a little more scary in this little animating clip than she did in the original still image.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Part of doing that involved replaying the game, and that's where my carefully laid plans went awry. I have (at least in my own mind) grown and evolved as a developer over the years, especially in terms of art and special effects. In the 2 years since I started Love of Magic I've certainly learned a LOT about what works visually in this medium. And some of the early stuff really hadn't aged well.

I ended up re-rendering a couple of dozen images, mostly for the early scenes, especially the erotic ones. Chloe's day 1 event in the bathroom, Strip MMA with Katie and Strip poker with Katie and Bella. While doing that I also added longer action animations for all three of them as a capstone. I also did a pass through to standardize aspect ratios, improve framing, color correct where it made sense, and add a proper background rather than just using whatever happened to be in the room.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

All in all I ended up touching about 80% of the story-telling images in the game. and cleaned up a bunch of little annoying issues (Molly, for example, was originally blue-eyed, and some of her early images were still blue-eyed). I also did a typo-pass, fixed a card background that didn't unlock properly, and tested the various other achievements. Hopefully the update makes Book 1 feel visually more coherent, and raises the quality bar a little.

I'm also taking Book 2 off the main-line as of now; you can still opt into it on the Beta line of Book 1; if you like it don't forget to wishlist it over on the main page, which makes a big difference at launch.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1570980/Love_of_Magic_Book_2_The_War/

Hope you like it, and that it was worth the work involved. Let me know in the forum, or in the comments if anything's gone wrong (all too possible with the number of changes involved).