And the testers have had their say; hopefully we caught most of the issues... any bugs remaining are all mine :)
Win64: GOFILE - MIXDROP - RACATY - 2022-04-19 04:11:30 +0000 UTC
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Okay, Act X's done... I'm uploading a Windows only beta download here for anyone that prefer to avoid Steam:
GOFILE - MEGA - MIXDROP - <...
For those of you celebrating easter or passover, have a great weekend.
On Love of Magic's side, I'm almost done with the Act. The last couple of images have been rendered, now I just need to put it all together and test it... tentatively it'll be on the Beta branch by the end of the day.
With yesterday's update I'm closing up on Act X complete. I've got the final event left (Day 182), and it's done. The Discord game are testing it at the moment, throwing up bugs (especially related to the three paths that weave its way through the event), but I have dreams of having it done this weekend.
Looking at the Calendar, I'm also closing up on the end of Book 2. Once day 182 is do...
2022-04-14 03:44:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Act X's getting closer to done, and the two big cutscenes anchoring it (Dresden and Corpus Christi, respectively) are mostly done. I've got another video I need to build (which will be contingent on finishing the flying pig questline), but at that point it's time to start assembling everything.
I had this vision in my head, of the eagle's flight being used to set the stage for...
2022-04-07 03:26:29 +0000 UTC View Post
For the opening sequence of Act X I needed a bunch of clouds. In theory I've got pre-existing stock photos, but those don't animate, and if you have a thousand clouds it's going to be really obvious that there's really only 3 of them.
To fix that I'm experimenting with fractals in After Effects and scripting to quickly place the new animating clouds into the world.
Should I do mo...
I started doing little VFX scenes as replacements for still images in Act VIII (the first sequence I used it in was the attack on the garage on the first day of Act VIII). I enjoyed it enough that I went back and redid a bunch of sequences using the technique, both in Book 1 and Book 2.
The rule of thumb on these guys is that they don't contain a lot of DAZ animation (or any, if possibl...
I always knew Act X was going to have a heavy Katie influence; I spent a fair amount of time looking at how to weave her story into the game.
One idea I briefly played with was to make a small stand-alone game (loading the same savegames to retain player names, etc), played from Katie's point of view (complete with Match 3 combat). It could have been fun, but in the end I shelved it as b...
I spent some time optimizing and setting up the Android build for 0.5.24b. The first version is now available here for testing:
FILESFM - GOFILE - ...
Act IX+ revolves around the King's Dragon, the people who live, party and love inside it. It lets me provide some additional Chosen Stories, to visit the backstories of characters like Aoife, Val, Xochi and Draco.
I think the Natural Born Killer questline may be my favorite here, but there's...
2022-01-30 01:19:59 +0000 UTC View Post
I didn't plan for this thing to become a big thing. But it did. And now I don't really have any choice but to put it in the game :)
It's content for Act X, so still a bit into the future, but I thought I'd share it with you.
I'm a big fan of SexPositiveGaming 's reviews; Annie works hard at playing, reviewing and recommending games, and she puts a LOT of effort into her videos. As such it's super fun for her to pick Love of Magic as the GoTY for Best Soundtrack.
I love trying to work with the music in the game, sometimes ...
I have this weird sense of discipline to my work; while I know completely the end of the story, and many of the key moments along, the day to day minutiae is often open to inspiration.
I found this little bodysuit while making a Year of the Tiger post for fun, and I really loved how Emily looked in it. As a result my mind went off on a 180 degree tangent, and ended up cooking u...
I was doing some quick test-renders for a year of the tiger promotion, and decided I liked them enough to make a couple of wallpapers from them. Once I got started, of course, I couldn't quite unsee the similarities for a certain 80s cartoon series, which is how this SFW sequence suddenly turned into R16 territory.
I really like the look of Emily in that body-suit, so that's totally comi...
Everyone on LoM's Discord surely know Pandaman, "rendering intern" extraordinaire. Before starting work on his own game he occasionally helped me render animations on his (superior) computer, starting with Molly's mirror scene in The Call of the Chosen.
Panda's also helped contribute several an...
I got a request from one of the Discord regulars about a wallpaper of the Wedding scene.
Setting something like this up doesn't actually take much time, and since the player was curious about the process I decided to put together a quick tutorial on how it's configured.
You can catch the fi...
2022-01-07 09:35:38 +0000 UTC View Post
It's almost Christmas time in this part of the world; 2 more hours until Christmas is rung in. I put together a little Xmas wish, from the girls of Love of Magic to all of you; thanks for the support, and for cheering me on and motivating me. 2021's been a better year than 2020, and here's hoping that 2022 will be even better, seeing us return to some normalcy in our lives.
2021-12-24 07:11:36 +0000 UTC
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Annie from Sexpositivegaming has become one of my favorite adult youtubers this year, bringing a love for adult gaming, warm humor and an intense work-ethic into making game reviews and posts about adult games.
Steam's famously hard to get actual data out of, but Annie's been crunching numbers, looking at revie...
2021-12-23 01:08:31 +0000 UTC View PostSpicyGaming has Love of Magic as their Game of the Month, and I did an interview with them. I talk about development processes, inspirations and future plans... might be interesting to some of you.
On Act IX+, I'm around ~1/2 through. I've got Xmas -> New Years off (yay), and in our weird pandemic world there's not going to be much time spent with outside friends and family. I'm ho...
I was playing around with this model, and decided I liked the way the light hit her enough to make a little 4K wallpaper. I'm also attaching the slightly NSFW version, which is why this isn't a public post :)
Apart from that, Beta just updated with the third event of Act IX+. A...
So, Act IX+ is the Hot Springs Episode. In an anime that's usually the chance when the characters get to kick back from their epic fighting, get drunk together, and have fan-service events in the public baths.
Since I had Akane build an Onsen with the specific dream of doing this se...
2021-12-12 06:28:52 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm finally done with Act IX, and it's publicly available (as well as on the Steam branch). If you'd like to download it directly, you can get the build from mirrors here:
Win32: FILESFM - GOFILE - 2021-12-06 01:26:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, I've chewed through every reported bug (I think), fixed up a bunch of little annoyances with the Strategy Battle, and completed the last few events. Building a full set of Steam builds today, then spending the weekend testing. As always, if you don't have it on Steam, and you'd like a Steam key, just DM me and I'll sort you out.
The attached image is from a new event (plays after A...
And with that, the main storyline of Act IX is done. You can find it on Steam's Beta branch; as always, if you don't have a key and would like one, just PM me.
I usually try to avoid cliffhangers, but I wrote myself into this one by accident, and the cliffhanger was the best solution to how to resolve that. Act X will be starting with a boom.
So what's left before the next public ...
I wanted to try out a light-study, and ended up doing a bit of post effects on it. The goal was to do an effect where only Katie's character has light and color, and the rest of the world is black and white. To get there I made a greyscale version of the image. and blended that back on, before adding vignettes.
2021-11-26 06:22:46 +0000 UTC
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It's Love of Magic's first chance to get nominated for the Steam Awards, and I'm suggesting it for the Story Rich Game category.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1270210/eventcomments/3198114775600725085
If you like it, do give it a thumbs up... it's a small indie game, b...
I grew up playing grim-dark table-top games involving aliens chasing through the hulls of abandoned space ships, and space marines swearing allegiance to the dread Emperor. Inquisitor Trainer's a gorgeously hand-drawn game set in a world that may have been inspired by stories like that, but which manages to build on it and create something both sexy and new.
Here's the ga...
2021-11-18 01:13:46 +0000 UTC View Post
I realized I had forgotten to do a Bio for Akane, so I decided to make one. Akane is of course a libra, and actually the bustiest of the core group.
Her quote means 花: “Flower” 鳥: “Bird” 風: “Wind” 月: *Moon”, taken together it's a Yojijukugo, a four-character saying, translated to "the beauty of the natural world", or "seeing the beauty of the world".
Fo...
2021-11-09 04:02:53 +0000 UTC View Post
And with that I'm finally done with the Wedding Sequence, day 160. It's not the end of Act IX (I have another ~week of content to build), but it is the single largest and most difficult sequence. I ended up really quite happy with it, and hope you guys like it as well.
Like any sequence that involves a group of people, it quickly went off script, with various charac...
2021-10-31 11:01:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Steam's Digital Tabletop Fest is live, and this year they're celebrating RPGs. Nobody was more surprised than me that they reached out to invite me to participate; usually us adult games are stuck in a silo somewhere where god-fearing people won't accidentally encounter us.
But since they invited me, I decided to do it properly. There's a Steam sale, but more importantly I'm going to try...