itch.io

Yes. It's up on the Beta and Development branch there; I'm giving it a couple of days with a larger testing audience to make sure I didn't break anything obvious (since it's a large overhaul) then pushing it to default. 

Hoping to have early access (with the first 3 acts) ready in March or so.

Closer to Gems of War or Puzzle Quest than Bejewelled. Demo will come in time, working on Act II first.

okay, cool. Good to know

Try it now; the builds weren't tagged to a specific OS for some reason.

Hmmm... that's curious. Book 3 is uploaded using the itch.io app, so it should work fine. Let me see if there's anything I need to adjust to get it working.

That's curious; all 3 versions should be available. 
Unless this is an Android issue? Book 3 is 10GB, while Android APKs need to be <2GB. 

It'll certainly give you access to all of the final book. I'm unsure if I do a trilogy with this one; 4 years working on Love of Magic's been a long time :)

Yeah, Lin is a smarter, less head over heels Jenny :)

She wasn't actually meant to be a speaking character; like the other two gym girls she never got a talking head initially. But as I was rendering her I totally loved her look, and she convinced me to write her as a character of her own.

Snowdrop's quest-line's actually really good; it's probably my favorite so far. It starts off mindlessly enough, but it turns a little darker halfway through.

Yeah, I was considering scaling the price over time (so $5 when it's just Act 1, $10 when it's act 1 + 2, $15 when the game is complete), but it's hard to explain to the players.  The game will grown, with 5 acts planned for the book; those are of course included in the price.

There's a lot of optional content (far more than you can consume by day 16), so you can load the end of act save, and keep going. Both Lin and Snowdrop have quite long questlines.

Itch.io is about 5% of the size of Steam, so obviously getting tons of negative reviews there hurt more.  

One aspect of this is that itch.io has good Patreon integration; I offer Steam keys to Patreons for testing, but a lot of people don't want adult games in their steam library (in case friends or family can spot them being a perv). They usually don't have the same issues with itch.io, so giving them an itch.io key is an option.

Another aspect is that Steam treasures wishlists a lot; it uses them to determine if you're a "real game" at launch, and if you have sufficient (~5-10K) at launch, they give you a ton of visibility. Love of Magic Book 1 had 6K wishlists at launch, which translated into 2 million 'views' (times Steam showed the game to players that might be interested). As such, waiting until you're ready on Steam makes a lot of sense. 

The last aspect is... I always do itch.io releases first :) I started doing adult games as a hobby, and putting up an itch.io page was how I shared my game with the first players. That worked well, and I like to repeat things that work well :)

I view it as an aspect of the "Eternal Hero" theme. A set of souls destined to stand against the darkness in multiple universes. Story wise, it's a new world, a new magic system, new themes and a different combat system.

Yes. The plan is Early Access on Steam once I'm done with Love of Magic. I'm writing the final act now, hoping to be complete in September.

You can give it a wishlist here, if you want:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2396740/Morningstar_Book_of_the_Fallen/

That's weird; send me the auto-saves, I'll have a look.

You can send them to: droidproductions@protonmail.com

You can find the saves here. Best solution is to just zip up the entire folder and attach it to something like gofiles or mega

PC: %USERPROFILE%/AppData/LocalLow/Droid Productions/Love of Magic

Mac:

Saves:  ~/Library/Application Support/Droid Productions/Love of Magic

Player.log: ~/Library/Logs/Droid Productions/Love of Magic/Player.log

Linux: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/unity3d/Droid Productions/Love of Magic

That event will sort itself out in time; the short answer is that it was originally planned as an optional event, but I liked it enough that I made it mandatory and integrated it into the calendar based order. 

Android's gone above the 2GB limit, so they'd just crash on load. The last ones that were below 2GB are still available, but to get book 2 and 3 onto Android will take a major chunk of work.

There are some different solutions that might help fix it; some devs do multiple 'bootstrapping' apps (so download app 1.1, that copies its assets, download app 1.2, that copies its assets, then download the actual app, and it continues to use the data). That's... obviously confusing to the player and not ideal.

The industry wide solution is downloading assets from a server, but hosting ~10 GB worth of data for each player is obviously not cheap. On Itch.io they'll host my actual app, but they won't host raw data like that.

TL;DR: It's a work in progress... I'm hoping to get back to it when I'm done with Book 3. 

Hmm... Android's always going to be a fun platform to debug. What kind of device is it?

Glad you're enjoying it :)

I've genuinely been surprised how many people seem to love it... I've been a game programmer for a long time, but this is my first time really doing all the creative side of things.

Yeah, it was a snafu in the build pipeline that caused the wrong folder to be uploaded; got a report from another user, and it should already be fixed.
Let me know if there's any other issues!

All good; I had misconfigured Butler (the itch.io system I use to auto-update the files), and it ended uploading the wrong folders :D

Okay, uploaded new versions of everything. Thanks for the heads up!

Okay, something funny happened with the push. Repushing and now it says it's uploading 4GB :|

Should be up in a couple of minutes.

Ouch? Which platform is that?

Well, good to know it's not a problem on the build side. 

Have you tried using Itch.io's app? https://itch.io/app 
It might help fix the issues you're having, and again it supports auto-updating, so only what's changed gets affected.

Print screen would be better than nothing :) Without a hint at what's going wrong, google is not my friend :)

I don't actually generate the ZIP file on Itch.io side; I use something called the itch.io Butler (https://itch.io/docs/butler/) which then does the upload in a delta-patch manner, similar to Steam's contentuploader.

It IS strange that it's only a problem on Itch.io, though.  Let me poke the itch.io team, and see if they've got any suggestions. What's the error message?

Quick note; I'm pushing a new Linux update; it should be up in 30 mins or so. Let me know if that fixes the problem. Thx for letting me know!

Thanks, I'll have a look. The upload process for Itch.io is different (the app is > 5GB, and itch.io won't let me upload files larger than 4GB through their regular uploading mechanisms. 

Sadly I don't have a linux machine, but if you're willing to test I'll turn it around and see what I can do. 

Steam (development branch) is where I test, so... that's always got the very latest.

Itch.io has several downloads; book 1, 2, and 3 are different downloads.  You can download them straight from here.  

These are the compete versions of Book 1 and 2, and the first Act and Act+ of Book 3 (the rest of Book 3 will be uploaded here as it's getting done). I wouldn't worry TOO much about the version number on Book 1; the steam build got some steam specific fixes after release (dealing with steam specific issues, like achievements); it was content complete at 1.0, and if anything was actually broken I'd upload another build here. 

The three books on Steam will eventually be three different products. Because I like to share as I develop, I put Book 2 on the Beta branch of Book 1, so everyone who has a Book 1 steam key  also has a Book 2 steam key. I'm doing the same on Book 3, so it currently exists on Book 2's Steam Beta (as well as a standalone download here). To play Book 2 on your Steam Key, just opt into the Beta branch, and it's there and complete. 

I'm still not 100% sure what the final solution there is... Steam's pretty strict about selling the game on other platforms for less than what it's sold for on Steam (to the point of terminating your account); if I give away both Book 1 and Book 2 steam keys for $15 I'm basically undercutting them by 50%, not something they'll take with any kind of good grace if they find out.  I don't want to raise the price to $30, and it's kinda late in the day to do it as 3 different products.

I know most users don't care, and honestly if I hadn't given away a Steam key it would be a none-issue, so maybe the solution is to remove that.  You still have  access to books 1-3 here on Itch.io, so maybe that's the 'most fair' option. As always, it's fun trying to balance this between platforms, especially if your personal goal is to have everyone share stuff as soon as possible. 

Yeah, there will be no ingredients in Book 3. I'm spending more time expanding the Kingdom Events instead; I do however need to make sure they're removed from the Elsewhere events.

Book 2 has a partial Android  build. The problem is that Android needs to stick <2GB for the base app, and Book 2 is 5.4GB. I can side-load some stuff (images), but when I set up that system it didn't support videos (of which there area  lot of in Book2). So even with all the images downloaded separately, and with video resolution reduced, I'm still at 2.5GB, and the app crashes on start.

I'm trying to work out a solution for that, but... that's why there's no Android build atm.

It's already updated on Book 2's Beta Branch on Steam. Because I use Steam for testing and development it's always getting the latest version first.

Steam announcement here:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1570980/eventcomments/3446961485766645740/?tscn=1...

Yeah, I agree. There definitely will be more little things like that where cleaning out the sandbox didn't get everything.

If you see anything, let me know and I'll update it for the next build.

So the Beta testing path is only for Steam builds. There are 3 branches of the game:
- Default (Just book 2)

- Beta (will have completed Acts of Book 3 as I finish them, nothing yet)

- Development (advances as I make the game, but obviously not cleanly wrapped up).

The itch.io steam key is right now only for Book 1 (which has Book 2 on the beta branch)... I'll need to go ask Valve for more keys to do key give-aways for book 2 as well.

Not really a bug (except he should probably disappear after training you). It's because he's just supposed to show up during morning/evening, not night. 

There is a WebGL demo of Book 1.
https://droid-productions.itch.io/love-of-magic-webgl

I haven't done one for Book 2 because it doesn't make much sense without playing Book 1 (they're designed to be played back to back, so while there is a "the story so far", you really want to have played book 1 complete first so the setting makes sense.

Ah, cool. Thx :)

You scared the hell out of me there :)

Weird; I just downloaded it on my side (win64), and it unzipped cleanly. 
Are we talking about love-of-magic-book2_win64.zip or love_of_magic_book2_0_6_17c_win64.zip? What unzip package are you using?