Morningstar Act I complete

Morningstar's what I'll be working on once Love of Magic is done, but as I got into the characters and the world, I decided to plough forward and finish the first Act. With that done, I'll return to Love of Magic, and finish up Act XVI: Eternal Sunshine, the final act of Love of Magic.

Morningstar's a darker, grittier world; a young MMA fighter encounters an Angel on day, and his life goes sideways afterwards, fast. Some of the same souls return, and they're joined by a cast of new characters in this Adult Urban Fantasy VN/RPG.

The final update (hopefully) is 0.1.0d; and a huge thanks to the testers on Discord who dealt with a flurry of updates over the weekend (14 builds from the 1st to the 4th of July).  It's available as a Steam key on its own, and I give out keys to any Patreons that want one.

Towards the end of the week I'll do a public build and let the rest of the world see it, but I wanted to share it with you guys first, since I couldn't have made this without you.

At this point I've been making these AVN games for a while, and between my own hobby projects (Love of Magic, Morningstar) and the work I do with Flexible Media (Paradise Lust, Sinners Landing) I've gotten a fair bit of experience of what works, and what doesn't. I wanted to share some of those thoughts with you.

Lessons from Love of Magic.

I actually really liked having a central combat mechanic; that's definitely one thing I'm bringing back. A lot of people were put off by Love of Magic's Poker mechanic (and a lot of people loved it), so this time I took inspiration from games like Gems of War and Puzzle Quest, designing an RPG/Match3 combat mechanic.

Match gems to power up your abilities, use the abilities to destroy your opponent.

To power that, I set up a new level up system; as you progress through the game you gain skill points (from levelling up), and unlock new teachers (from storyline events). Each teacher can teach you certain sets of skills. You can also upgrade the skills, making them more powerful.

Similar to Love of Magic, you can then configure 'decks' (skill sets), that work together. Up to 4 skills can be configured as one set, and you can switch between sets at any time in combat.

I would say that this kind of combat system, with light deck-building and unlocking skills (gems, in LoM) was something I really enjoyed in Love of Magic, and something I'm happy to be bringing along to Morningstar.

Love of Magic could be a little opaque sometimes, and a lot of players played it with a walkthrough open. I'm trying to reduce the dependency on walkthroughs, and make a cleaner quest and navigation interface to guide people.

In Love of Magic it's not always clear when there's *new* things to explore; Chloe's face looks the same whether she has a new unique action for you or not. In Morningstar I differentiate between characters that have recurring events (like Coach and Katie here) and ones that have unique new events (Chloe and Gabby, in this scenario).

It also handles areas cleaner; in Love of Magic you could access all the rooms directly, leading to a number of empty rooms. In Morningstar it just shows you the hub room. For example, the Last Drop, which consists of 4-5 rooms, is represented just by the top level object, and all characters that can be found inside the hub are shown on the main page.

I also simplified the Quest system to make it clearer to the player, and easier to set up for me. 

One of the lessons I learned from Paradise Lust is how useful a cellphone can be; I went ahead and implemented one for Morningstar, and the Facial conversations (think Whatsapp or Telegram) end up powering a lot of quests.

Since I had a phone, I figured I'd also add a social media platform (Titter), which lets me tell little backstories and give hints to what the characters are thinking and doing.

You can interact with every Titt, check out the images they attach, like it and give a comment (yes, this all seemed a good idea when I came up with it). Obviously Snowdrop and Emily has very different approaches on how to use it. 

All the characters (both new and returning) have gotten a full re-rendering, with bigger sprites, more animations, and better lighting. I also added rollback to the dialog, which I know has been a common request.

Act I takes place over 16 days, and from play-testing a normal playthrough appears to take ~90-120 minutes. There's another 1-2 hours worth of additional sandbox content, and it's so far not possible to complete any of the primary side-quests before day 16 (you can as always load the end of Act save, and continue on into the future).

Hope you all enjoy it; if you'd like a key, let me know in the comments, or drop me a DM.

For anyone who's played it, let me know here or in Discord how you're finding it!