What's next?

With Making Movies done (bar any bug-fixes, and possibly an OSX port), I have started looking at the next game. I really enjoyed working on MM, so I figured I'd enhance the engine, come up with a new setting and build another game. I can't start a new itch.io page until I've got a build  to share with you  (which is hopefully soon), but I thought I'd post a couple of articles here about the development process.

With Making Movies I reused assets from Honey Select (Illusion games). They look great, but obviously that's not a great idea for a commercial project (even if it's just a patreon attached, or a tip-jar on Itch).  So the first thing I decided was to go with DAZ for this game. I guess I could have gone 2D, but I'm no artist :)

Secondly, I liked how the slight idle animations on characters made them come to life.  So I decided to see if I could extend that to the mugshots (the head profile in the bottom screen). So  that's what I spent the weekend doing.

The basic process looks like this:

1. I pose and render the character in DAZ. In this case, it's Emily Pendragon, one of the leading ladies.

2. I then bring the assets into Spine2D, an animation package (this is the same as what I did for Making Movies). Here's Emily getting ready for her first date

3. For Mugshots it's actually a little more complex; they're composited with multiple different chunks, so I can get blinks, emotions, etc. Here's a first pass character test for Emily

Finally the character is loaded into Unity, and hooked up to the character and dialog system, so her emotions on-screen match the dialog.

Love of Magic is currently in early testing; the first 45 minutes or so of gameplay are in, and there's a working magic system. If you want to be an early beta tested, let me know!

Droid.