Quick development update, and some forward looking thoughts.
Morningstar just updated to 0.4.20 (Day 92), and Act V is happily chugging along. Apart from the Act end (Day 93), I've also got the remaining double-date (Path of Light / Path of Fire) on Day 87 to complete. I'd guess another couple of weeks until it's all d...
So. Steam Keys for Love of Magic / Morningstar. I often get asked this, so I guess it's good to clarify things. I give steam keys to any Patreon that wants one, regardless of tier. Yes, even at $1 tier. Yes, I'm aware that this is a terrible business decision; it doesn't matter, because these games would never have been made ...
2024-06-07 04:15:37 +0000 UTC View Post
I know I'm supposed to be doing adult games, but so far Morningstar has more lewd handholding than porn. I set out to fix that.
The new update includes a big new chunk for Snowdrop, starring in her first ever adult movie. I hon...
So, after posting the last update (literally from Airport) I took a quick holiday with the family. I didn't get as much writing done as I had hoped, but I did get a lot of thinking and designing done. Now that I'm back on
The two big systems that still need love in Morningstar is the gem based combat and the optional re...
2024-05-17 05:34:26 +0000 UTC View Post
With version 0.4.0, Act IV of Morningstar's complete, and the march towards Early Access continues. This version contains days 54-74, and advances a number of questlines. It also marks the clear split between the Path of Light and the Path of Fire. 2024-05-07 13:28:54 +0000 UTC
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I wanted to do a few test-renders, and liked some of them enough that I redid them in 4K, and tinkered with them a little in Photoshop. 
This little image was inspired by a Carbidis (Eternum) render; I liked the composition en...
I'm currently hard at work on Act IV's ending sequence (I'm on day 72; the act ends day 74). While rendering out the day I was messing around in Photoshop, and decided I liked this enough that I should share it.
Once I'm done with the last 3 days, I've got some side content to do, and cleanup (mainly in the match3 com...
One of the Discord regulars was showing off his new Ultrawide monitor; it inspired me to test how a wallpaper explicitly designed for 32:9 ultrawide aspect ratio from the ground up would look.
I don't know how many of you have monster monitors like this, but if nothing else it's a pretty image of Emily :)
This...
I haven't made a wallpaper in a while, so I figured Lin could get a chance to star. Happy Easter everyone, and hope you're having a great time with your families!
I did 1920x1080, 2560x1080 and 3440x1440 versions, for those of you with big monitors :)
On the development side, I'm back on Morningstar after finish...
I've often talked about how Persona 4/5 inspired Love of Magic, from it's basic structure (mixing sandbox and fixed events) to some of the character archetypes. For those curious, here's Laura Loveshanks, an early streamer, talking about Persona in Book 1.
I'm now putting the final touches on Love of Magic Book 1's New Game+ mode. What remains now is basically just bug-fixing, with all the content completed.
One of the things I decided to add back in was the Text-2-Speech module; I don't know how commonly it's used, but I do know I got a lot of requests to put it in for ...
Finally done with Act III of Morningstar. It's a bit of a monster, tracking from day 35 to day 54, including 30+ calendar events, new updates for the Questlines for Lin, Snowdrop and Katja, and featuring new dates for both Katie and Emily.
2024-02-25 09:07:56 +0000 UTC
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I picked up a Steam Deck (for research, honest!) this week, and have spent some time playing Love of Magic / Morningstar (and Sinners Landing / Paradise Lust) on it.
By and large it plays okay; there's a couple of small things that need touching up, like the input systems, but those are solvable. It did, however,...
The two annual NextFest events are the big time for people to discover upcoming Steam games, and play demos. This time I'm trying it out with Morningstar; You can check out the free demo here.
Mornin...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2396740/Morningstar_Book_of_the_Fallen/
With Steam's Nextfest fast approaching (5th Feb), I finally got around to releasing the free Steam Demo of Morningstar: Book of th...
This is the final of 3 theme songs, sharing a single theme. You can check out the other two here:
Katie's Rock Theme
Katie's Romance Theme
2023-12-16 07:25:16 +0000 UTC
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With Act II of Morningstar complete, I figured I'd switch my attention over on New Game+.
One of the key inspirations of Love of Magic is of course Persona 4/5, and a key aspect of those games is the New Game+ Mode. Basically, upon completing the game you can start a new game, with increased stats and some new content ...
With 0.2.0b I think Morningstar Act II is complete; I'll let people test it a little more before I do the itch.io version, but it's up on Steam to test now.
So what's involved? Act II (Spread Your Wings) extends the main story from day 16 to day 35, leading up to Katie's fight-night. It introduces a number of character...
Katie's poster was originally inspired by a Rolling Stones photoshoot by Janet Jackson, taken with her husband (who gets rather less screen space).
The picture was then later cropped down and used for her self-titled album, Jan...
2023-12-09 07:04:45 +0000 UTC View Post
This is the second of the three theme songs created for Katie in Morningstar; this one speaks to her more sensitive or emotional side.
Like the previous one, it was created by Alexander Nakarada, whose music also had a lot of impact on Lov...
2 weeks ago I asked the amazing Alexander Nakarade to create some custom music for Morningstar: Book of the Fallen. Specifically I wanted three songs around a central theme (so they are all clearly related) custom-made for Katie.
The ...
I've been using Vimeo to host my videos here for the last couple of years; mostly work in progress / workflow / behind the scenes footage. Since it was mostly for Patreons, I don't have mirrors for most of them... in retrospect that proved unwise.
Yesterday they nuked it for nudity, deleting it immediately and failing ...
I obviously love trying to find the perfect music for my games, and for Love of Magic one composer stood out as providing 2/3 of the tracks. Alexander Nakarade's been making absolutely awesome music tracks that are free for use in games and videos ( 2023-11-16 03:11:16 +0000 UTC View Post
With the Love of Magic trilogy wrapped up I'm back to work on Morningstar. Act 2's reached day 27, adding another 11 days worth of new content (Act I ended day 16). I've got some new optional content (with Lin) to go, then I'll return to do day 28. The Act is planned to end Day 35 (Katie's fight night), so it's humming ...
2023-11-04 12:16:59 +0000 UTC View Post
I had a productive weekend, and pushed the End of Content on Morningstar to Day 27 (the first release ends midway through day 16). 2nd Act's always going to be a special one; Act 1 defines the world and the setting, Act 2 gets to set up some of the central themes and plots. It'll end on Day 35, so progress is going well...
2023-10-23 00:01:48 +0000 UTC View Post
I've written before about my experiments with AI (across various generative fields). I've tested out Voice Generation with Elevenlabs and Molly's JOI, redone the paths with Midjourney and AE, and experimented with music, SFX and video generation (though never getting anything that amused me enough to showcase it).
For ...
Love of Magic is now on it's final sprint, and I'm hoping to have an official launch on Steam by the end of the month. With day 288 finally complete, I've got one final story event (Day 287) to write, and achievements to implement; neither of those are needed to send the game for Steam approval, though, so that's up next.
I'm working my way through the various Epilogue shots now, giving the GPU something to do as I clean up the final events. I've got 3 more daily events to do, and then some optional side content, and... it's done. Hope to have the final release out in September.
I started Love of Magic almost exactly 4 years ago, as a l...
I got curious at how many characters with speaking roles there are in Love of Magic; I briefly considered putting it together in AfterEffects, but the amount of manual work was too much.
So let's cheat.
I wrote a quick snippet of code in Unity that grabs every character in the game, sorts them based on how many...
I'm back at working on Act XVI, the final Act of Love of Magic. Let's have a look at how the progress breaks down.
Calendar Events
Act XVI is 22 days long (stretching from day 266 to 288). It's an extremely busy act, with at least one event every day. By the end of the weekend it should be don...
2023-07-29 09:03:29 +0000 UTC View Post
