Love of Magic New Game+

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 increased stats and some new content that only unlocks from a second run.

For Love of Magic, that splits into a few different tasks: code, new events, NG events and updated art where it makes sense.

Code wise I'm porting the whole thing to Book 3's game engine. That's got some technical challenges, but also means that all the various quality of life updates comes along, including things like rollback, the updated Elsewhere events, additional music, additional card backgrounds, etc.

The first part was parsing the end of game save from Book 3 (Act16.sav3) and starting a new game, having copied the things I need (all your gems, all your nicknames and a selection of flags that I'll use later).  I also start you out with more cash than you had before; NG+ should be for discovering the world, not grinding mercilessly.

I'm also adding events where they make sense, with some fan favorites getting an additional side event.  This is mostly just fan-service, but... I love my fans, so that's okay. These will play in New Game+ mode or if you start a normal game from day 1.

Unlike those, the New Game+ specific events do have story and lore impact, and will deal with some of the more mysterious characters you dealt with across the trilogy, including the Morrigan, the Musician, the Salesman, and of course Hel.

Finally I'm going through and pumping up the graphics in small ways where it makes sense. Small things like more intro animations and closeups for characters, to making fake book-covers for some of the books you buy. 

So. There's that. It'll be something I tinker with in the background for the next month or so, while at the same time writing and rendering out Morningstar's Act III. You can test out the opening of it on a new  Love of Magic Book 1 beta branch called ngplus. Beware, it's still very early :)

Finally I'm working on the last video for Katie's soundtrack, this time the Epic theme. Hopefully that'll be out today or tomorrow.