With Day 100 arriving ingame there's 15 days left of Book 1. The end is extremely feckin' neigh, as Katie might say.
It didn't feel right to let such a milestone go past without Emily and MC getting some time together, so I set out to render a small sequence. The only problem is that Daz/IRay is *slow*. So I finished r...
Back at the very beginning I used to make trailers for the various acts. Looking back through the archive I realized I missed it, so I set out to make a new one.
The music is an old Scottish traditional song, The Parting Glass, tra...
I was working on various improvements to the Poker game, things like a new hint mouse/over, and the ability to keep multiple sets of gems, swapping them at the start of combat depending on who you're fighting.
2020-09-12 04:33:20 +0000 UTC
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I'm working my way through Act VI, and one of the things I'm reminded of is that I'd forgotten to add in theme songs for the two new Chosen.
Bella's theme is called "The Foreign Tale"; once again from the fantastic Alexander Nakarada; I loved ho...
Perhaps the most common request I get is some kind of Quest Tracker / Task Tracker. I've been very resistant, because I feel it really easily ends up as a 'laundry list' of tasks to complete, making the players miss the fun in exploring the world and encountering organic events.
Having said that, I'm encountering ...
2020-09-02 14:59:19 +0000 UTC View Post
New public build just finished, aimed at expanding life in Edinburgh. I usually mix 'story' sequences with these world building updates.
So what's new in this build? Well, it turned out a very sex-centric update, with new events for Molly, Bella and Diana. It also includes the new Card rendering and Collection system I...
I'm actually a programmer, though it's easy to forgot on a project like Love of Magic, where 90% of the tasks are writing/art. I implemented a card rendering system for another project I worked on, and decided with my new experience, to revisit how cards are rendered and moved in Love of Magic.
The first step was writin...
2020-08-29 01:03:49 +0000 UTC View Post
I had this idea for an animating poster I wanted to do, inspired by this old Poster from Star Wars : A New Hope.
It's only about halfway done, but it's the kind of thing I like tinkering with in the background.
...
2020-08-24 13:41:21 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm doing a bug-fix release; thanks to the awesome testing team for helping me find a bunch of these. The full changelog is attached, but to sum it up
- Lots of little card and continuity fixes
- Cleaned up the messaging system
- New Valery events
- A new book, found in Elsewhere
The next update (Act V...
And we're live. The final release ended up being 0.5.4b, with lots of bug-fixes contributed by the discord community over the last few days. Steam has been forwarded to default, the various sites have been notified... next stop (barring game-breaking bugs) is V+.
This was a strange act to do; I wandered pretty deep int...
And with that, 0.5.1 beta is complete, taking us from day 76 -> 97. I totally chewed over too much with the epic video "Call to Action", which has taken something like 150 hrs worth of rendering, 25 unique DAZ movies, tons of special-effects, all synchronized to music. I'm still not *totally* happy, MC's armor has so...
2020-07-28 05:00:59 +0000 UTC View Post
The video didn't properly embed, and it's honestly much too cool to leave as a link people might miss. I'm really impressed with the work Panda made here.
2020-07-19 06:26:57 +0000 UTC View Post A Civil war has broken out in the discord; only you, dear voters, can save us. Jenny's been everyone's favorite sub barista... but is she more?
The arguments for and against, as presented by their Champions.
In the YES corner; lead by Lead Renderer Intern, PandaMan. Panda's ...
I thought build 0.4.34 was going to be the last build before 0.5.1 (which would signify the main storyline of the act was complete). Sadly Molly had other ideas, and I'm making one more update. Hopefully 0.4.35 is out tomorrow, and I can get back to finishing up the act. Most of the animations have been done (>100hrs worth...
2020-07-14 05:50:10 +0000 UTC View Post
I haven't done a progress update in a while; partially that's just me being swamped. If you're playing the Beta builds (either on Discord, or on Steam... as always, if you want a key, let me know), you'll notice we're on Day 92 (Act IV ends of day 76), and we've got some help setting up a date with Akane (they also got her a ...
2020-07-01 07:48:06 +0000 UTC View Post
A discord discussion about Akane and Kitsune sent me looking at Babymetal, and I came across this image here.
2020-06-19 06:53:31 +0000 UTC
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Since I was doing some improvements to the core engine anyway, I decided to fix up the Quick Movement. It was previously designed to only let you quick jump between 'local' places, but honestly that seems an unecessary restriction, so I let you jump anywhere in the over-world.
I also went back and checked to see where ...
Not being Renpy based, the savegame unrolling/rerolling system isn't built in. As such I've usually blocked the player from saving / loading in mid conversation. It's been a persistent feedback that people really hate that, so at some point I bit the bullet. It's been 5 hours of pretty intense coding, but iteration #1 i...
2020-06-16 06:06:48 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the first characters still in there is Molly, and as I redid the character mug animation, I also decided to relook the character itself.
She had a couple of issues; one of which was the lighting (as I continue to develop, I'm prefering a slightly more dramatic lighting model), one was the eyes (I liked the brig...
I'm finishing off Day 77, and as always I find wallpapers and sigs to be a good way to creatively recharge a little.
This time it's a little different, with 3 different wallpapers from 3 different people. The first one (Molly and Emily in bed together) was made by Patreon and Discord regular Pandaman.
There's a lot...
I haven't done a Game of Friends for a while, this one was Milky Touch. I was first attracted to it from the gorgeous signatures (I love those), then stayed for the amazing hand-drawn art. As someone who can't draw a straight line without a computer I've always been in awe of well done hand-painted art. The other thing I love...
2020-06-10 14:14:49 +0000 UTC View PostI ended up sneaking Chloe's Black Cat outfit into IV+, but I still have Diana to do for V.
V+ will be the final build of Book 1, and as such the last of the builds centered on Edinburgh. To celebrate that, I wanted to go back and spruce up one of the early Book 1 scenes with some of the new animation techniques I've be...
I decided to do a second public Act IV build before settling in for Act V proper. I've been spending time in the background doing prep-work; new characters, animations and cutscenes.
Here's the mega links :
...
After my epic failure with Katie's animation, I went back to re-evaluate my workflow. It's not as if this is the first time someone tries to make animations with multi-hour rendering times.
The solution is to use pre-vis and layout cuts to reduce time and manage complexity (2020-05-30 02:18:31 +0000 UTC
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I guess I got too cocky with the recent animation successes, and so I did what my mother always told me not to, and attempted to repeat an unexpected success. I've made a new gym for Katie, and with that in place I wanted to make an additional scene for her.
2020-05-27 05:34:33 +0000 UTC
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Emily's first appearance in the game is pivotal, and in my head I had a perfect image. Sadly I didn't have the skills to do anything about it :) I've been chewing on this one a couple of times. This is the third attempt, and at this point I'm actually quite happy.
Patreon won't let me link more than 1 video: here's an ...
One good suggestion someone added was letting each of the main characters have a 'home' where you can go and interact with them. Chloe's obviously got one, as does Katie. Molly and Emily don't. Emily will have to wait for Book 2 for her home base, but there's no reason Molly couldn't get one sooner. Like Katie, she's a bit of...
2020-05-21 12:11:32 +0000 UTC View Post
I really enjoy making these little Signature files for F95Zone. I've made a bunch over the lifetime of Love of Magic, but I was really quite pleased with this one I made last night, so I thought I'd show how it was put together.
2020-05-18 08:06:40 +0000 UTC
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The PC spent 18 hours solidly rendering yesterday, and we now have our 3 clips assembled and in-game.
There's a couple of different experiments happening here.
I wanted to continue playing with parallax; I really enjoyed the effect when it worked in Emily's Day 75 scene, so time to test it again. The 3 clips use...
I always loved watching the blooper reels from Pixar, and after running my computer non-stop overnight creating this magnificent trainwreck, I figured I'd share it with you in the same spirit. Likely the first of many such.
2020-05-16 07:41:29 +0000 UTC
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