itch.io

Good to know, thx!

Weird. I'm pushing a build, but (since my macbook died) I don't have a working mac. Let me know if it works.

Thx! Glad you liked it.

If this is Mac, it's because they're downloaded from the net and not signed from a mac:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253714860?sortBy=rank
(A s dev, I *really* feel the "@Apple: You certainly MUST know this. Why don't you hand it to your customers?" part. )

Sadly not. You're free to chase the side girls without any repercussion, but the final ending is Emily (Path of Light), Katie (Path of Fire), Lin (Path of Peace) or none (Path of Shadows). Choice points are pretty clearly tagged.

Done:

https://droid-productions.itch.io/morningstar/devlog/832314/steam-keys-added

Okay, let me see about doing it. I remember there was a system for  handing out keys to Itch.io players.

I've always loved itch.io, it was the first place I released Love of Magic (initially as a free game, back in a happier pre-covid world). I put up Morningstar on Act 1 here, and I've been both surprised and thankful how many people supported it as I developed it.

One of the things that strike me is that, because I use Steam for beta-testing, people on Itch.io might want Steam keys. Especially because I intend to make (at least the first couple of acts) of my next game available on a Steam beta-branch.  

Is there an interest in letting all itch.io Morningstar players get a free Steam key? Let me know in the comments. 

Cool, thanks for letting me know!

Glad you're enjoying it! :)

The final release is 10 days away (11/11), with my discord gang testing it and helping track down the final issues. 

Weirdness; I'm re-uploading it now, let me know if it works.

With Morningstar almost done (final release is 11/11) I'm back on working on NG+ for book 2.

Nah, I've seen way too many fantasy stories screw up that way. Mom and Dad are basically gods... where do you grow as a character from there?

As Morningstar gets closer to done, the next one looks like it'll be Scifi / Space Opera.

After I wrote the instructions, Apple added an additional Quarantine Flag to the process of downloading apps from non-apple websites.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253714860?sortBy=rank

I'll update the installation instructions to include that information, thx.

There's four endings planned; the Path of Light, the Path of Fire, the Path of Submission and the Path of Shadows.

Maybe one of them will be what you hope for ;)

Hmm. That's the end of Act 4; you should be able to load the end of Act 4 save and play from there.

Alternatively, if that's gotten corrupted, go to load from day, load day 74, and it'll play the morning through from there. 

The itch.io build has one more act, ending day 93.

Patreons get Steam Keys; that's the easiest option :)

When it's done; I decided against Early Access for this (I need to edit the steam page to change that, though).

Only in the epilogue, and to a far lesser degree.

Love of Magic (due to it's basic nature) put pregnancy, children, legacy and being parents as one of it's central pillars.

Love of Magic makes impregnation a pretty major thing; the two of them conceive in Act 4, and a large chunk of the rest of the story deals with the fact that they are expecting their daughter, becoming parents, wanting to create a better world for their daughter, etc. There's some pregnant sex, etc, but it's not really a purely sexual thing, it's very much a central issue in the book.

Morningstar isn't planning any (on camera) pregnancy content.

The first boss battle being Ubekz?

I'll have a look at it, the next big build will spend more time balancing the minigame and possibly adding a replayable dungeon. The testers on Discord seems okay with the difficulty, but they're obviously playing it more than most casual players.

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