Game is DONE (and here's what I'm now working on).

v0.9.15 looks to be the final one. I guess I should have switched to 1.0.0 at this point :)

We're officially DONE, I think. I've been responding to various bug reports and fixes, and I *think* we've got them all (do tell me if I'm wrong). If nothing else comes up, I'll do an official 1.0.0 and kick out android, OSX and Linux (anyone want to volunteer to test it?).  I also approached Itch.io to see if they could help me bump up the max download size a little, so the HTML5 version works again. 

That gets us to the next step for me. I've been quietly working on Love of Magic for the last 2 months, and it's coming together pretty well. Right now there's about an hour of gameplay; I'm looking at ~2+ hrs for the first external release.  

So.. let's talk a bit about the background and story for it.

What is Love of Magic?

The elevator pitch : it's Persona meets Harry Potter. Or Harry Dresden, but one of those Harrys is a lot better known than the other. It's an urban fantasy game (with erotic undertones), using Persona 4/5's world system as a scaffold to tell the story. You've got an expanding Overworld (set in Edinburgh), with new locations and various optional tasks to accomplish, and the world of Magic (called Elsewhere), where you explore and fight turnbased battles as your Magic grows.

Love of Magic is a little more serious than Making Movies; hopefully it's still fun (and giving you a few laughs), but it also deals with loss, betrayal, conflicted loyalties and the masks we wear to protect ourselves. I'm also trying to build it more in organic chunks; each Act should have a clear ending, planned ahead of time (rather than just being "okay, I'm done for the weekend, let's put it out and see what people think", like Making Movies was). For Love of Magic I actually have the rough story outlines, and character arcs planned; to illustrate how that differs from Making Movies I should probably mention that Mia was originally planned as a tutorial character.

As a result, the first public build will take a while. I'm doing this on weekends, so it's happening when it's happening. I've got a developer discord set up; and will slowly add beta-testers to it, as the game gets closer to it's first release. If you're interested in playing early (and buggy) versions, feel free to PM me on itch.

I did a quick playthrough of an early sequence of the game (in Unity, so you also get to see how the development environment looks).  This is about 5-10 mins into the game, on the second day. The MC has just arrived in Edinburgh, and is about to start his Masters of Thaumaturgical Arts degree. Since it's early (and the MC himself is quite clueless about the world of Magic), the matriculation sequence allows me to explain the world, as well as introduce a bunch of the key characters that will be pivotal to the game.