Love of Magic Book 2: The War News

The development of Love of Magic advances at two speeds; the story updates (I, II, III, etc) and the world expansion updates (I+, II+, III+, etc). These flesh out the sandbox, add additional side-content, improve the combat system and move the game from a linear to a non-linear experience.



The star of this update is of course Molly; I'd completely forgotten her birthday back on day 210 (thankfully she handled that better than my wife would have done), and I went back to add it in. Molly remains the great enabler, and her character weaves in and out through pretty much every story in the game.



While rendering Molly I came across this old poster from the movie Showgirls and I couldn't *not* attempt to recreate it. I liked it enough that it became the motif for this update's images.

Apart from that, this is an update with a lot of focus on Elsewhere; new Kingdom events, new gems, new enemies and two 'epic' enemies that should provide a challenge for the most hardened poker player. It also adds character development arcs for two of the companions that were under-appreciated in Book 3, and both Katie and Dylan have fun new events.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

All in all, this is probably the largest world+ update in the game, which is fitting, since it's the last one. I'm now starting Act XVI: Eternal Sunshine, the final act of Love of Magic. I hope you've enjoyed the journey.

Act XV (The Return) is now complete, and out on the Beta Branch. The story of Love of Magic is nearing it's final chapter, after almost four years of development.



With Act XV done, I'm moving on to XV+, which will focus on Kingdom Events and Elsewhere events across Book 3, before starting work on the final Act XVI: Eternal Summer.



Once the whole Book 3 is complete, I'm hoping to do a pass to update all the three books to use the same engine, and making sure I port over stuff from Book 1 (like TTS support, and localization support) to the shared Book 3 engine. I'll also be looking into making a New Game+ feature.

As many of you know, Persona 4/5 were two of the biggest inspirations for Love of Magic, and I always loved the ability to start a new game, using the "end of game" save, with enhanced stats, enemies and some new encounters along the way.


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

Apart from that, I've started work on my next series, called Morningstar. It's another Urban Fantasy story, featuring many of the same 'souls' in a very different universe. I'm hoping to start Early Access of that sometime in late fall 2023, and develop it in a similar way to Love of Magic (with periodic act releases). If it looks interesting, do give it a wishlist; it's super helpful in giving it a good launch.

I alternate story sequences and world expansion events (Act+ updates); this update to Book 3 is a World Expansion event, focused on Edinburgh.



I didn't actually *intend* to make this a super sexy update, but it seems to have accidentally happened anyways. Molly shows a fascination for shoes, triggering her Shoe Fetish sequence after Jenny's Shibari sequence.


Buying Emily's lingerie also opens up a new questline with Chloe, and a sexy scene to go with that. I've got to say, Kath is rocking that outfit.


Nobody's more surprised than me that I got inspired to make a new Sarah scene; there's no sexual content, but a little more backstory on everyone's favorite sex-ed teacher.


The capstone of this update is a big new replayable sex scene with Akane (again, triggered by buying her an outfit). Originally planned to be a short sex scene, I got inspired by how she looks in that outfit, and it... escalated from there. It also spilled over into a small update to her dining room scene (when you order sushi from her, you can now also request she wear the lingerie for you).

There's also a new book to read, and old friends to meet up with in the Crowley at night.

Hope you like it.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1992770/Love_of_Magic_Book_3_The_Return/

As always; if you're enjoying my work, please help make it a success by giving it a wishlist before launch. I've now got only 2 acts left, so... the day of it being complete are coming :)

For those of you who have Book 1 on Steam, I also updated it this weekend with new animations. Molly's Chosen ceremony got a big update, there's a new email sequence from her, and a new animation for Chloe on day 100.

Thanks for all the support, and let me know what you think of the new content in the comments :)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Book 3's progress continues, and Act XIV (Dead Man Walking) is now done. With that I've got 2 more Acts (The Return, and Endless Summer) before the epilogue, then the public release of Book 3.

Act XIV saw some changes. I finally managed to get my hands on a 3090 gfx card, and that's made a huge change to my ability to render animations and more complex scenes. I also made some small AI Art tests (most prominently seen in the new Paths of Elsewhere), and played with making movies a cleaner and more integrated part of the story.

Next up is Act XIV+, which will return to Edinburgh. See what your old instructors are up to, grab a drink in the Crowley and maybe enjoy a cup of coffee. But first I've got to see a girl about a pair of shoes.

Before diving head-first into Act XIV I decided to do a small update first.

Part one was an experiment with AI and motion. I suspect it's because my life's been immersed in game development for two decades now, but for the last week it's felt as if the entire world was talking about AI (in a mixture of rage and wonder, depending).

There's been a lot of progress over the last few years, but November saw two really impressive updates, and I diverted into a rabbit hole for a couple of days playing with it.

The first of these is ChatGTP, an AI camouflaged as a chatbot.


It's remarkably intelligent, knows how to respond to feedback, and is very much a child of the internet. It also knows how to hotwire cars, but it really doesn't want to tell you... that's what happens when you give an AI training net access to the internet and let it go.

The second (and far more controversial) one is MidJourney, a text-to-image generator. Where ChatGTP was given access to the internet at large, ChatGTP was essentially handed a very very large selection of images download from Art websites, like ArtStation.

You interact with the AI like a bot in Discord, "prompting" it with inputs to which it responds.

a fairytale princess marries a dark, handsome prince 2D game, volumetric light, dust in air, realistic, ar 1:1 --v 4 --q 2
(In case you're curious, the tags at the end set the aspect ratio to 1:1, uses version 4 of the AI, and bumps up the quality to max).

There's a number of things that are controversial here. The first one is *where* the data came from; like ChatGTP the MidJourney AI has been quietly ingesting information from the internet, in this case hundreds of thousands of art pieces made by thousands and thousands of artists, most of whom never thought their hard work would be fed to an AI.


Well. Damn. Part of the reason most people didn't worry too much was that as late as 6 months ago the results of AI generated art was pretty low-quality, fiddly and hard to access. With MidJourney all of that changed, and a number of artists (understandably) panicked.

While the results look really impressive (especially in terms of lighting and shading), it's not without it's issues.


it can't do text to save its life, it struggles with details (especially hands, feet, swords, etc), and it doesn't really know composition (here is "red ball on top of a green cube").

You can get it to make a really impressive stand-alone scene, but making a VN using it is (so far) impossible; you couldn't get the specific details and composition you need.

You can also prompt it to use an image as input. Here I gave it my background from the Dark Paths of Elsewhere, and asked it for some variations:


Wow... that ended up looking *really* good. It's abstract enough that you don't need to worry about 6-fingered hands or messed up text, it's primarily derived from my image (which makes me feel a little less guilty about the art that went into the training set), and it looks pretty.

Now a sensible person would have said "neat", and either just forgotten about this, or picked one of the images to replace the existing one, and moved on. Sadly I'm not that sensible. So I crank up AfterEffects and go to work.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

There's a couple of things happening here; I'm warping the image from one to the other, then adding special effects on top. I ended up loving it enough that I made two versions (one for the Dark paths, one for the Light paths). I then made 4 small clips (2 looping still images (A and B), and two transitions between them). When it plays, it goes something like: "Loop A 1-3 times, Play A->B, Loop B 1-3 times, Play B->A". It adds a nice bit of randomness, and captures the idea that the Paths are never quite static... they constantly change and morph.

I think AIs are at the cusp of revolutionizing a number of aspects of our society, and along the way we're going to run into various ethical challenges. I don't think it can be *stopped*, though, so at the very least we need to understand it, and know what it can and cannot do.

Apart from that, this update adds in an option for a replayable Chosen 4-some (at night in the KD Bedroom), and cleans up a number of little bugs and typos that snuck in. I've started writing and rendering Act XIV, so that's up next.

Was this kind of "behind the scenes" information useful? Should I do more of it, or less? Let me know in the comments.