Morningstar: Book of the Fallen News

1.1.0D is just a quick hotfix to deal with achievements not triggering on the Steam page even though you cleared it in-game.

This is a tiny update, that sadly ended up being rather over-sized on disk :(

So. What happened?
Traditionally Unity sets all imported images as DXTC1 or DXTC5 compressed textures. These have a lot of advantages in terms of loading speed and in-memory size, but they are rather heavily compressed. That's a tradeoff we're usually fine in with Textures used for 3D images, but it can be an issue with 2D images (which is the way I'm using it).

I made a test-case changing it all to lossless compression (so the images don't get any 'jpeg' style artifacts), and I decided it was worth doing that across all the platforms once and for all. I hadn't fully appreciated just how much work was involved in that :)

So far, Love of Magic, Morningstar and Wings of Empire have all gotten the decompression treatment. Across 3 platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux), At 10-16 GB/platform/game (~200-250GB in total), my poor PC's gotten a real workout. But it's done.

TL;DR: sorry it's such a big download, though hopefully it should improve image quality a bit, and remove unwanted compression artifacts.

I'm hoping no further issues show up with Morningstar or Love of Magic, letting me focus fully down on Wings of Empire. Ad Astra per Aspera.

I had dreams of a little Game+ mode. It would let you play past the end of the game, Initially inspired by Snowdrop's Movie Shoot (which spawned a couple of social media posts and a Demonfox article if you completed it), I ended up adding a bunch of post-game content more or less by accident.



Snowdrop, Lin and Ciara all chime in on titter, and some different Demonfox articles trigger, depending on what ending and sidequests you picked. Most of them aren't related to the Path of Light (where New York ceases to be your problem), so I'd mostly recommend playing them with a save that's finished the Path of Fire + Lin and Snowdrop's side-content.

Load the End of Game save, and you'll find yourself teleported back to the Last Drop and Day 115. You can complete various side-quests, test your match three abilities in the maze, and check out the new content.

I had initally written a goodbye to Lin on Day 113, but ended up cutting it. Instead I added it back on day 115+. The Path of Light farewell is a little melancholy, but there's not really space for her in the life he intends to live.

I WAS going to write something similar for Path of Fire, but I'd forgotten that Lin is a master of breaking lose from whatever narrative restrictions I place on her. Originally envisioned as an extra without any speaking lines she ended up charming her way into one of the four endings. It makes sense that she'd turn her farewell into a steaming threesome with Katie instead. Utterly unplanned but I had a blast making it.


I also wanted to do a little with Sophia; again a Path of Fire questline (cheating on one Arch Angel with another seems like a bad idea) you get to meet up with Sophia and renew your... friendship.


(The bottle is of course a callout to Love of Magic's Book 2, where Katie Maclachlan, the Duchess of Lancaster, serves her brand new moonshine at MC's wedding).


Speaking of Love of Magic, Book 2 got it's NG+ update today. Adds in several new events with Kath, Bella, Molly, Akane and Emily, updates the engine to the final Book 3 engine, and adds in a big new NG+ only questline called What was Promised.



Which gets me to what I'm working on next. Wings of Empire is a space opera set in a world where the Roman Empire never fell, but clawed its way to the stars.


You were a Centurion in the Legion Special Forces before a plasma bolt ended your career. Unwilling to quit you signed up as a Fighter Pilot, and as a fresh Lieutenant you board the Fast Attack Carrier Aquila as it prepares to head into the Dark.



Wings of Empire is inspired by my love for epic space opera, like the Honorverse, The Lost Fleet, The Alliance-Union Universe and many others. It also draws inspiration from SciFi and anime movies and series, from Space Battleship Yamato to Starship Troopers.



Would you like to know more? The first 13 days of Wings of Empire is available on the Development Beta Branch of Morningstar. You can activate it like this:

https://morningstarvn.fandom.com/wiki/Technical

When you now start the game you will be prompted to start either Morningstar or Wings of Empire.
It will sit on the Development Branch until it's enters Early Access, sometime in 2025.

Sounds interesting? PLEASE give it a wishlist, so it can have the best chance of succeeding at launch. Wishlists are a sign to Steam's algorithm that this is a real game, and in return the Algorithm shows it to more people at launch.

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

Want to know more? Come join us on Discord for fun discussions about History, Redheads and theorycrafting. Come for the pretty girls, stay for the story and the awesome community!

Tiny fix, but since it resolves a potential soft-lock I decided to promote it to the default branch. Basically you could get the game into a situation where you couldn't leave the room (NO_EXIT flag set), if you told Katie you wanted to do PT (which sets the flag, and places MC in the room), then clicked on Lin afterwards (which starts her sequence, not the intended PT converation).

Small thing, but it solves the issue some people had with getting stuck.
I also restored the ability to edit your fight-name in the Stats app, which had been accidentally removed.

1.0.5
- Fixed a bug that could leave the NO_EXIT flag on after a gym event
- Fixed a bug where the fight name wasn't available to reset on the Stats app

You can't create community items (collectible cards, badges, wallpapers, etc) until you pass a certain threshold in sales. I think it's Valves way of ensuring people don't launch junk games purely for the collectibles.

It's always fun to finally get a chance to make them; a sign that the game has cleared its first hurdle, and is now considered a "real game" :)



The full set includes a badge, emoticons, 5 backgrounds and 11 collectible cards.

Hopefully I've caught most of the issues people have found since launch; thanks to everyone who's helped report bugs, give balancing feedback and played the game. I still need to follow up on the Eternal Flame achievement, since that seems to not trigger for some people.

Hope you've all enjoyed playing the game; I've certainly enjoyed making it.