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 co...
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 gam...
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...
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 ba...
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) rend...
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 cle...
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 ...
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 ba...
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, talk...
2024-03-15 04:08:20 +0000 UTC View PostI'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...
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 ...
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 fre...
2024-02-06 04:24:26 +0000 UTC View Post
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 D...
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<...
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 increas...
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 in...
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 ...
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 a...
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) cust...
2023-12-03 03:37:51 +0000 UTC View Post
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, deleti...
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 fo...
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 ...
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...
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 enoug...
2023-09-16 02:10:56 +0000 UTC View Post
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, ...
2023-09-09 08:26:33 +0000 UTC View Post
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 almo...
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...
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 o...
2023-07-29 09:03:29 +0000 UTC View Post