Love of Magic [DROID]- Development Thread [Build Available]

[Droid Productions]

Official F95 thread is here:
https://f95zone.to/threads/love-of-magic-v0-1-24a-droid-productions.41188/


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,

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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

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

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Signatures
For fun I decided to create some signatures, using Krull's

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. I'll update this as I add more

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I'll keep updating this page as I work on the game, feel free to ask any questions about tech, design, or bounce ideas off me

Droid.

 

[Droid Productions]

I got quite a lot of feedback that the Poker game was initially complicated, and not intuitive. I added a new animating tutorial as part of the onboarding to try to fix that. Also shows the combat with animating portraits.

 

[Droid Productions]

Daz does have the ability to screw things up in new and exciting ways. Here DForce (the build in physics system driving stuff like drapeable cloth) completely blew up on me. Not the effect I was LOOKING for. But still kinda neat






This was how she was actually supposed to look, for reference.

 

[Droid Productions]

Finished writing the core story for Act 1. I've still got one more "story event" to complete, and then some recurring events (another trader, study in the library to increase INT, etc). To keep myself fresh I sat down and taught myself Adobe After Effects so I could do some simple trailers and intro/extro animations.


Teaser trailer.
This one's actually more or less done as is. I'm happy with it, though it doesn't say much about WHAT the game is.


WIP Act 1 ending:
This one is a significantly harder work. It plays as Act 1 ends, and wraps up the main characters you've been interacting with. I learned a few things putting Emily (the girl that's animated in 3D turning) in; I need about 3x the number of frames to keep things smooth, and I need it at higher resolution... so back to the rendering board for higher resolution versions.

 

[Droid Productions]

Working on the component pieces for the extro-video. Each of these damn 60 frame headshots takes my poor PC ~20 hrs to render. I should probably look into denoiser and a lower convergence rate to speed things up.


Katie Machlachlan is the first Companion to the player. She's an Evoker battlemage, with a love for Fire Magic, and a temper to match.


Molly Irvine is another of the potential love interests. She's a Ceremonial Magician, or what Katie refers to as a Magic Camwhore. There is little love lost between Evokers and Ceremonial Magicians.

 

[Droid Productions]

Added 3 new thumbnails, based on the busts I was rendering anyway. Fun to learn a bit more about GIF animation

 

[Droid Productions]

This weekend was all about getting the Web version playable. Itch.io has a 500 MB / application + 100MB/individual file limit on browser playable. While that sounds like a lot, these games can get quite heavy quite fast, and I've got a lot of character animation. I needed to start by breaking down all the assets into Addressables (so they can be loaded on demand, and from files other than the primary file). It's a big change, but hopefully worth it. Spent the day squashing bugs and fixing typos.


This is a full Act 1 story build. There's still some bugs that I'm sorting out, mostly to do with the poker game mechanics. I'm also looking to add a few more re-playable actions (study in the library, etc), and proper end-of-chapter animation. After that; testing. Final release will add Windows, OSX and Android downloadable versions as well. PM me if you're interested in volunteering to test for any of the platforms, and I'll set you up with an early build. I'll do a proper F95 version when it's done and tested, I'm hoping ~2 weeks or so away.

 

[Droid Productions]

The game is getting close enough to release that I'd love to see more people poking holes in it. It took me about 2 hrs to play to the end of Act 1 in this release; let me know if that's wastly out of synch with what you're seeing.

The plan is to make an official F95 page/release once my fellow perverts have kicked this thing around; for Making Magic I just released whatever I had and... as a result, it had bugs There's a

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if you want to chat with me, or you can just PM me. I'm about to check into a Muay Thai camp for R&R, so... I'll try to respond

PC/OSX/Android download (at the bottom). WebGL playable

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Password: F95Zone

(of the lot, the WebGL is the weakest platforms... there's some bugs I still need to sort in terms of fullscreen images, and I've seen lag there really shouldn't be. If you can, I recommend the downloadable platforms). I'm testing the Android platform now, the goal is to have that by the time I push out the official F95 page.

Edit: Added android build to download as well

 

[Droid Productions]

Some people reported issues downloading from itch.io (project is just in preview there, might be a problem for non-users).
Added a

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as well

 

[Phoeniix]

Daz does have the ability to screw things up in new and exciting ways. Here DForce (the build in physics system driving stuff like drapeable cloth) completely blew up on me. Not the effect I was LOOKING for. But still kinda neat




View attachment 426290 View attachment 426292

This was how she was actually supposed to look, for reference.

been there....usually caused by intersection of Dynamic object(s) with collision object(s), but I guess you know that...

 

[Droid Productions]

been there....usually caused by intersection of Dynamic object(s) with collision object(s), but I guess you know that...

Yeah; the solution was to reduce the stiffness of the material; it's cloth, so dropping stiffness down to 50% doesn't harm the look.

 

[Droid Productions]

I wanted to do a small intro video, but I got sidetracked. It's still quite fun to do, I'm hardly a viz at AfterEffects, but it's a neat skill to learn.

I also did a quick walkthrough of how the effect is assembled, showing how I'm using different layers to time and set up things. If you're just getting started in Aftereffects it might be interesting.


The animation of Emily started out as a flat image in DAZ, then got taken into Spine to get animated into a loop, and exported as an animation. I then combined that with an existing VFX (

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) to get the magical effect.

Finally this was assembled together, and set to music. I reuse the same royalty free music that I use ingame for Combat sequences (

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). I really should have faded that cleaner out at the end... something for next time, I guess.

 

[Droid Productions]

One of the challenges of working with Daz is that getting stuff 90% of the way is actually quite easy. But the final stuff is hard; things like making sure the cloth doesn't clip (if you look at the Demon fox's ribcage in picture 3), that the eyes and expression match what you're trying to make the character say, that lights match the world. Picture 3 I had this idea of having her stare into space, as she's currently unaware of you (this is before you break the glamour). Didn't really work, so the second iteration changes her expression a little and puts focus back on the player

For example, not much separates picture 1 and 2 (apart from an hour of rendering). I didn't really like what the tail did; since Kitsune is a body's guard I liked the idea of her tail kinda curling up protectively around Akane when she felt threatened. Form-fitting clothing also doesn't play nice with larger busts; the top on looks a bit like it's been applied through vacuum packing, and kinda clings to the underside of her breasts. I used Fit Control to take control of the underside of the breast, and make it feel like material under tension, not painted up. Similarly I'll be doing the same to the rib-cage to sop it from poking out.

 

[Droid Productions]

Added some new fan icons.

 

[Droid Productions]

I'm finally trying to get around to doing a patreon. For the intro trailer I did two versions; here's the optimistically named "final trailer":


I got a lot of good feedback on it from various devs, which led to a second version (which is what's live right now).


So what changed?

Well, first of all this screen:



Despite being deeply PG12 (It's more Hotel Transylvania than 50 shades), several devs pinged me, telling me it's likely to get rejected as "implied nudity".


The 90s called, they want their morality back. I mean the 1890s. Anyway. So I changed it to a bunch of people ready to kill things. Morality problem fixed.



The other stuff was more cosmetic; I changed the various taglines to highlight (what I felt) was important.. romance the girls, find your destiny. That kind of stuff. I also discovered you could fade out the music at the end of the vide, which was nice. I'm a reasonably newb person at AfterEffects, so each minor victory feels important

 

[Droid Productions]

For the final scene of Act 2, I wanted to have a lewd scene where MC asks Emily to give him her panties in public. An innocent girl going commando sounded like a fun scenario (and kinda fit with where their relationship has gotten to by the end of Act II).

There's a minor problem; there are no "crumpled up panties" asset in Daz. Or rather, I suspect there must be, but I don't have one. Not to fear; Daz supports a Dynamic Simulation system, called dForce; basically you can treat things like hair or cloth as a simulation problem to solve.

Our fix to the minor problem births two new ones. Remember, the

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. Just because a solution creates more problems doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Firstly, I don't have any dForce panties neither. And secondly, dForce is about as stable as a hooker on 6 inch heels at 4am.


Turns out you can actually turn anything into a working dForce object. For a given definition of working.



First simulation:
View attachment 2020-01-08 09-59-04.mp4
















Yeah. That didn't work as planned. Several frustrating experiments later (mostly dealing with different surface parameters) we finally have something that doesn't blow up like a handgrenade when we simulate it.


Final simulation:
View attachment 2020-01-08 10-30-55.mp4
















Final Image:

Finally! Works!

Except by the time this render completes I'm about 2/3 through the scene, and... yeah, it ain't going to be happy time. I usually go into a scene with an idea of what I wanted to accomplish, but this date didn't really have a goal. So I was just going to have some flirty fun, and then finish the chapter next morning. But the vagaries of Sandbox RNG got to me, and when playing the game to get up to this scene, it ended up setting a very different scene.


So. All of that was for nothing, I don't know if I'll ever use that scene (though... perhaps we can work it into Act III; Emily hesitatingly handing you her panties and going commando remains a tempting thought). But at least I learned what to do about custom dForce objects. Run away from them. Fast.

 

[Droid Productions]

With Act II ramping up, I'm starting to look at characters for Act III. First in is Moibeal 'Bella' Hume, a lycanthrope from the border region. I remember reading an old book review (of all things) by Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex), called

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. It talks about how the four waves of immigration from the UK ended up shaping various parts of America in different ways.

Specifically I was drawn to his description of the Borderers, the group of people whose towns clustered on one part or another of the English/Scottish border.

the Scottish-English border was terrible. Every couple of years the King of England would invade Scotland or vice versa; “from the year 1040 to 1745, every English monarch but three suffered a Scottish invasion, or became an invader in his turn”. These “invasions” generally involved burning down all the border towns and killing a bunch of people there. Eventually the two sides started getting pissed with each other and would also torture-murder all of the enemy’s citizens they could get their hands on, ie any who were close enough to the border to reach before the enemy could send in their armies. As if this weren’t bad enough, outlaws quickly learned they could plunder one side of the border, then escape to the other before anyone brought them to justice, so the whole area basically became one giant cesspool of robbery and murder.


In response to these pressures, the border people militarized and stayed feudal long past the point where the rest of the island had started modernizing. Life consisted of farming the lands of whichever brutal warlord had the top hand today, followed by being called to fight for him on short notice, followed by a grisly death. The border people dealt with it as best they could, and developed a culture marked by extreme levels of clannishness, xenophobia, drunkenness, stubbornness, and violence.

I figured that sounds like a good description for a Werewolf. Belle is a remote cousin of Katie, so maybe you'll convince them to let you party with them.




View attachment 2020-01-10 16-11-11.mp4

 

[Droid Productions]

So. I finished animating Bella, and added her in. To get the size right I placed her next to Katie to make sure they were the same height.




Well. Goddamnit. Katie was the first girl I completed (Chloe preceded her, but got redone later). You can kinda see the evolution in me a Daz artist in the last 6 months.

Now, part of me just wants to close my eyes and forget it. But...


Leftmost is Katie as she is in-game today. I then did 3 quick render-passes looking for a better lighting model. Rightmost is Bella, which started this problem.

So if I DO decide to fix this.. (let's stop kidding myself, I can't unsee this). How much work is it? Well, I just recorded myself doing an Animation for Bella, so.. about 5 mins per pose. And another 5-10 mins to pose/render the image. So it'll be a focused hour's worth of work. Probably worth it to avoid Katie staring accusatorily at me each time I see her on screen.

 

[tripod321]

just my 2 cents but katies hair looks more like a natural red and bella looks like dyed red so the difference in shine is perfectly fine. the repasses that you have done do kinda make her hair look a bit more metallic

 

[Droid Productions]

Yeah, I think the rightmost Katie will be where I go in the end. It'll be 2 hrs or so to redo her base animation set for casual, but without it I'll always be noticing it when I use her in a scene