What's next?

With Making Movies done (bar any bug-fixes, and possibly an OSX port), I have started looking at the next game. I really enjoyed working on MM, so I figured I'd enhance the engine, come up with a new setting and build another game. I can't start a new itch.io page until I've got a build  to share with you  (which is hopefully soon), but I thought I'd post a couple of articles here about the development process.

With Making Movies I reused assets from Honey Select (Illusion games). They look great, but obviously that's not a great idea for a commercial project (even if it's just a patreon attached, or a tip-jar on Itch).  So the first thing I decided was to go with DAZ for this game. I guess I could have gone 2D, but I'm no artist :)

Secondly, I liked how the slight idle animations on characters made them come to life.  So I decided to see if I could extend that to the mugshots (the head profile in the bottom screen). So  that's what I spent the weekend doing.

The basic process looks like this:

1. I pose and render the character in DAZ. In this case, it's Emily Pendragon, one of the leading ladies.

2. I then bring the assets into Spine2D, an animation package (this is the same as what I did for Making Movies). Here's Emily getting ready for her first date

3. For Mugshots it's actually a little more complex; they're composited with multiple different chunks, so I can get blinks, emotions, etc. Here's a first pass character test for Emily

The animation is exported out as a sprite sheet + keyframes (sorry, she doesn't look as cute here). This means that several minutes of animation is still only 1.5MB (the bulk of which is the sprite sheet)

Finally the character is loaded into Unity, and hooked up to the character and dialog system, so her emotions on-screen match the dialog.

Love of Magic is currently in early testing; the first 45 minutes or so of gameplay are in, and there's a working magic system. If you want to be an early beta tested, let me know!

Droid.