Love of Magic update

5 years ago by droid productions (@DroidDroidson)

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Overview

After finishing up Making Movies, I decided to start a new project, called Love of Magic. Since I wanted to make a slightly longer initial release, I thought I'd set up a thread about development thoughts and updates, just to document things for myself and anyone interested. When I get closer to the actual first release, I'd love to hear from people interested in testing.

Love of Magic can best be described as Persona 5 meets Harry Potter (or at least Harry Dresden); it combines a sandbox /VN game (similar to Making Movies) with turn-based magical combat in a dungeon environment, inspired by an old mobile game, Sword & Poker.

Visually, I changed a bunch of things. I'm now using DAZ (and getting used to rendering times).

Here's some VN gameplay from the first day of University. Mostly just introducing the characters, and the world of Magic. I'm still tuning the facial animations, trying to get the right emotions for their state. Often that means going back and rendering/rigging/animating new ones. But I like the general effect; the characters feel a lot less static, though obviously with fewer options. It still takes a while to set up a full animation.

The combat is done through Poker (well, it's done by sorting through the infinite possibilities of unreality to collapse the best effect you can achieve in the current situation, but poker's easier on the mortal mind, so you visualize it like that). Here's an early preview of poker combat. Note that I captured the video before the animating heads came in, so heads are still static.. might be an interesting comparison for some.

The last big chunk of the game, which has been on hold as I build out the VN part, is the randomly dungeon. Similarly to Persona5, people can go dungeon-raiding with a party, encountering random enemies, bosses and special events. As your power increases, the rings will grow bigger, and some events will also add unique persistent locations to the world based on you finding them in the underworld (essentially reproducing the idea of a 'stronghold' from the old Bioware games). This part of the game is still very early, but here's a first look at how I generate the random world structure.

Art

I had a specific style in Making Movies, driven partially by choice of tools and partially by style. Since I'm building Love of Magic from a similar foundation, some of the choices remain the same. Environments remain as 2D photos (licensed from Shutterstock), rendered on a 3D quad. On top of that I render the characters, animated using Spine.

Making Movies used Honey Select for rendering the models, and as such there was no option for a Patreon or an itch tipjar. For Love of Magic I've switched to DAZ, and thought I might try setting up a Tip jar at some point. Unlike Making Movies I also decided to make the portraits animating, because obviously this wasn't enough work on its ow

Here's one of the main love-interests (anyone who played Making Movies probably guessed I have a thing for shy dark-haired girls).

Here's another of the Companions, Dylan Faye, who takes the role as the Healer in the squad.

Hope that looks interesting; I'm trying to get an early build out soon, but before that I want to test it properly. If you fancy testing, just PM me on itch.