Book 2 Steam Launch

And Book 2 finally launches on Steam:

It took 18 months from the launch of Book 1 (Dec 12th 2020) to the launch of Book 2 (31st May 2022). It's been a big journey, hopefully the end product was worth the wait.

Book 2 involved a lot of experiments, some of the successful, others less so.

Kingdom Management

I had a lose idea of what I wanted the Pendragon Inc research system to feel like (similar to a tech tree from a 4X game). The problem was that once I started entering data it felt soul-less and uninteresting. Love of Magic is, at its heart, a game about characters and stories. As MC says in Book 3, he's interested in people, not systems. Left to his own devices he is far too likely to get frustrated and bring the weight of divine might down on the fragile systems of governance. So I stripped iteration 1 out of it, and went back to the drawing board.

Instead I took inspiration from Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and the idea of the Kingdom Events being lose character-centric timed quests. I think that worked a LOT better, and it's a system I'll be developing more in Book 3.

Strategy combat

I spent a lot of time on the strategy game, first writing it as fully real-time, then pausable real-time (Baldur's Gate style), then returning to rewrite it as a more classic turnbased game. About halfway through that last step I forced myself to step away and ask... is this what the game is about? It's possible another one or two months of focused development could have brought it around, made it a halfway competent turnbased strategy minigame. But it's also possible it would still suck, and more importantly, it's not the core of what Love of Magic does well.

Nobody likes to throw away work, and the strategy game had been a LOT of work. But in the end I bit down on the pill and stripped it out. I added the skeleton of a new point system, I actually quite liked it, and it's something I'm quite likely to revisit in Book 3.  Lesson learned, sunk cost is sunk cost.

Animating single-frames

This sounds like an oxymoron, I guess. What I'm referring to is where I started making short looping videos (usually 4-10 seconds long) that feature static renderings composited in After Effects with effects. I guess the *first* of these I made was the one of Emily crossing the Power threshold, back in Book 1, but I didn't think of them like that at the time and it was always meant to run as an interstitial fullscreen exclusive video.  

The animating single frames, on the other hand, were never meant to "stand alone", as it were. They serve the exact same purpose as a still image, just with effects and magic happening in them. The first one was actually me planning to do a static single-frame render from After Effects... except once I started playing with it I decided I could get it to loop easily.

That was during the fight in the garage, in the opening of Act VIII. I ended up loving the  result, and not only retrofitted Act VII with the same kind of videos, but also went back to spiff up Book 1 with the same workflow. Successful experiment :)

Working with Daz3D/Blender/AfterEffects

My original workflow was Daz3D and Spine (for character portraits and idle animations). I started playing with After Effects for compositing and effects by the end of Act IV, and by the time Act VI was done I was in love. 

Daz3D's great for 3D characters. Sadly it's absolutely terrible for environments. It bogs down really easily, is extremely memory hungry, it's physics simulation engine's about as stable as Satan's Kimichi... it's just terrible at it.

Blender's quite good at it. Both Cycles and Eevee are faster than IRay, and handle larger environments with more complex scenery on lower end systems (like my 3070). The end of Book 1 was the first time I experimented with Blender, but I returned to it several times in Book 2, slowly getting at least some degree of skill at it. It was used for small scenes (like Draco's egg cracking), and big ones (the assault on Texas, for example). I played with rigid body destruction, OSM , setting up hordes of creatures using particle systems and a lot more... it's definitely something I'll keep experimenting with, and something that's already showing up in the early days of Book 3.

Overworld map

This extension on the Edinburgh map worked well, and I'll definitely keep it. I added a travelling salesman at the very end of Book 2, and I liked the mechanic of having random characters show up on the map from time to time. I'll be expanding that mechanic, adding more bit-characters like that, telling little stories from non-human side of Elsewhere. I initially planned to open up Tír na nÓg as well, but in the end I decided to install Aoife in Camelot, and use her as the mirror into the Fae world instead.

The King's Dragon

I had vague dreams of an expandable 'castle' (in the gameplay sense, not in Emily's stone and mortar sense) stretching back all the way to Book 1 (it's what started off as the upgrade system for Crowley). With Book 2 I decided to give it a second stab, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. Initially I planned a lot more rooms, but as I played and wrote them I decided on fewer but more meaningful rooms. Mostly that was because the optional content that was tied to the various rooms meant keeping stuff inside the permitted timeline was getting dangerous; I didn't want someone to miss out on good content because they hadn't built the right room in time. 

The content of the King's Dragon (and the little king's dragon) both ended up being some of my favorite ingame sequences, and provide a more human view into the magical world of Elsewhere. Definitely something that went right.

Katie's Path

Love of Magic's always had a very intimate connection to MC's character, especially since he gets a chance to react to almost every line in the game. It was therefor with some trepidation that I decided to experimenting with a guest character view for Book 2. Katie takes over as narrator for part of Act X, and does really well. It wasn't without controversy, but I enjoy the result and had fun writing from Katie's point of view. She's darker than MC, whip smart and more introspective... all in all a good chance to refresh creatively.

So... there we have it. Some experiments that went well, and some that went poorly. I won't *stop* making experiments, because the whole reason I started doing adult games was to grow as a developer. As a storyteller, as a game designer, as an artist and a Effects / Technical artist. Sometimes those experiments work, sometimes they fail, but each time they teach me something useful.

Hope you've enjoyed the journey so far. It's time to get back to making the final book in the trilogy.

Droid