INTERVIEW WITH AN ADULT GAME DEVELOPER:

FAMOUS FOR:

Interviewed by: Sihil

Love of Magic is a game that I’ve just recently found out about and am blown away by how well everything flows together in the game and am naturally curious about how the dev managed to pull this off. Luckily for me, I’ve had a chance to ask Droid just that in this interview.

The interview is divided into 2 sections, one is about the game specifically and the other is about the dev. So without further ado, let’s jump right in.

Sihil: Hi Droid, so I’m curious, which games or other media inspired you to create Love of Magic?

Droid: There are more inspirations than I can easily count. I would say there are 3 key inspirations. The first was the Poker gameplay, which I stole from this really gorgeous little Japanese iOS game from 10 years ago, called Sword & Poker. Sadly they went bust, and their IP was bought up and reused in some Free-2-play monstrosity. But the idea of making poker hands and using that to drive combat was theirs, and it was a huge inspiration. Continuing on gameplay, Persona 4 and 5 have been two of my favorite RPGs in the last 5 years. I used to be hugely into Bioware, Obsidian, and western RPGs, but they've progressively lost their luster. From Persona I stole the idea of an 'upper' world, filled with normal things, and a hidden world (Elsewhere) where you can explore magic in a randomly generated dungeon. I also stole the idea of a calendar that moves forward, carrying the key story even if the player is lost. I love how it makes the time the only currency that actually matters, and how it stops players from getting totally lost. Finally, I was inspired by a BUNCH of books. Dresden Files (Jim Butcher) was a big one, certainly. Changeling Blood by Glynn Stewart, as well as other urban fantasy novels like Alex Verus and Iron Druid. I'm a huge fan of Terry Pratchett, Monty Python, CJ Cherryh, and a multitude of authors, books, and stories... many of them get a nod in-game, and inspired me to start writing

Sihil: Nice! I’ve been meaning to try Dresden files and Discworld saga by Terry Pratchett. And of course, who doesn’t like Monty Python. So moving to the next question, can you share any early concepts of the game?

Droid: depends a little on what you're asking. If the question is visually, I put together a little video showing how Act I evolved from launch to (well, this is a while ago, it's evolved again : D)

If it's about how the game's 'core' has changed from the early days... it more or less settled the moment I started rendering and giving voice to Emily. Since then I knew where I needed the story to go; I just needed the characters to agree with me on the trip. Some of those arguments were long; Emily really didn't want to share MC, so the whole "you can keep a harem" part was the hardest part to write.

Droid: If it's about how the game's 'core' has changed from the early days... it more or less settled the moment I started rendering and giving voice to Emily. Since then I knew where I needed the story to go; I just needed the characters to agree with me on the trip. Some of those arguments were long; Emily really didn't want to share MC, so the whole "you can keep a harem" part was the hardest part to write.

Sihil: Agree, writing internally consistent stories with multiple love interests gets complicated super fast. Another difficult thing to pull off is the UI, you can’t be too generic or else the game would look bland but you can’t turn it into a Paradox game either. The first thing that struck me as interesting about your game was how well the UI was designed.  It felt extremely smooth and responsive. Did you take inspiration from any particular source for it?

Droid: No, the UI is largely kept very clean and sleek because I'm a coder, and as such I'm both incapable (as in photoshop semi-literate) and not a huge fan of fru-fru in the UI. So I designed a UI that was as minimalist as I could, both out of preference and necessity 🙂

Sihil: Generally, when we're playing an H-game, the devs tend to make their MC as bland as possible with their bland slate approach, in contrast, the MC in LoM is charming and has a sense of humor, what made you deviate from the norm?

Droid: I think one of the things that change the way I write the game is the Call/Response nature of the dialog. In pretty much every line, MC has his chance to say something. It means that MC actually needs to be someone interesting because half the text you write is his. But it also means that the gulf between MC and the main characters (Emily, especially) is a lot less than in most games. I often hear that it feels like LoM has two main characters, one male and one female. Apart from that, I just like MC. He's a fun character to write, and likely far too much a self-insert.

Sihil: Lol. Though it was definitely a smart choice to make the game more conversational in nature, it kept the pace decent and didn’t make the game too pondering as I’m prone to doing. Speaking of fast pace (another seamless segway, boom,) one way you must’ve sped up the development time is by using the 3-d images with IRL pics, generally, it ends up looking a little tacky so how did you make it work?

Droid:  Lighting. Lighting is everything. Though the backgrounds aren't really the bulk of the work, and as things get...er... intimate... not having a full 3D world to fall back on actually handicaps you, camera-angle-wise. So I'm not sure it was a great idea, in the long run. 🙂

Sihil: Tradeoffs, tradeoffs everywhere. So this is the question I ask every dev I interview, who's your favorite (in-game) waifu?

Droid: Emily, definitely. But the character I never intended to love as much as I did was Bella. She was supposed to be a side character,  holding down Keith's role at the Court. Instead, I completely fell in love with her, wrote her into the main cast, and she's probably the character I love most apart from Emily (Katie and Molly fight for 3rd place).

Sihil: Definitely makes sense that the most used character will be the most liked by the author. Which brings me to my next question, what lies in the future for the game? How far into the final product do you reckon you are?

Droid: I'm done with Act 9 out of 16, so a little bit past halfway done. Book 1 was 6 acts (because I wanted it to end on Newyear's eve), Book 2 will end on Spring Equinox, so in terms of days, I'm about 2/3's through Book 2. As always, you can catch the game as it's being developed on Steam's beta-branch of Book 1

Sihil: Awesome, I’ll be looking forward to the finished game. The RPG system implemented in the game is very simple yet very unique, how did you get the idea for it?

Droid: I wanted a streamlined RPG system, because I wanted choice to matter. Chase, the designer of Paradise Lust, likes to say that 4 is not a number. If you need more than 3 stats, go to 5 or 7. So I looked at the player directions I wanted to move, and decided the MC could chose the paths of Charisma (which involves his interactions with other people), intelligence (which subsumed D&D's WIS stat in the process), and STR (which similarly hijacked CON). Being a solo dev I'm super-aware of the need to avoid the branching tree of death, so I love that I'm sticking to 3 stats 🙂

Sihil: Contrary to popular belief, keeping your game simple as time progresses requires its own kind of discipline as well. So, what new things did you learn from making movies that you got to apply in LoM, moreover, what new things did you get to learn from book 1 that you got to apply for book 2?

Droid: I've been making games for a long time; longer than some of my players have been around. But for most of that, I've been a pure programmer/tech guy. Making Movies was the first time I tried doing art, and more importantly, writing. The first thing I learned was that I'm likely to fall in love with my characters; Mia, from Making Movies, was originally supposed to be the tutorial character, to be disposed of by the end of day 1. Instead MC (and I) fell in love with her, the whole game went sideways from being a business simulator, and the two end up married. For Love of Magic I decided to just admit defeat from the beginning, and made Emily the Waifu of my (and MC's) dreams. The changes in Love of Magic from act to act are more procedural; I become better at art, at writing, at design and at working out what players like; occasionally that means I go back and fix up stuff that my 2019 self thought was good enough, but my 2021 self disagrees with.

Sihil: With this much experience under your belt, you remind me of Rich, the creator of Family friends and strangers. So asking a somewhat similar question as before, IF you were to go back in time, what one thing would you change about the game?

Droid: This one's hard. And dev will tell you his previous self was an idiot. But I'm largely happy with the characters, the story, the major beats. I probably wouldn't have used real images, or if I did they would have been photo-bashed into 3d environments (which is how most of Book 2 is made); there's a lot of painful compromises in the fully rendered scenes that came out of that decision that I regret since

Sihil: Do you tend to play LoM often? Not for proofreading, just for having fun, that is. What kind of build do you gravitate towards?

Droid: Devs rarely 'play' their game, the way players do. Especially programmers. I don't really have a 'build', because I very often play from whatever random savegame someone sent me for debugging. If I set up one, I tend to go with Rage/Cluster, or the Winterking Combo (Fire/Ice) , depending on how impatient I am. There are scenes I return to, from time to time; the end of Act IV is probably my favorite event in the game so far; while I usually close the room to my 'office' when making porn, I also close it when I know I'm going to touch the aftermath of the dragon, because it always seem to summon dust into the air.

Sihil: Are there any particular fetishes that you're excited to introduce in the game?

Droid: My personal tastes, I always assumed, were pretty vanilla. I did really enjoy researching and writing Jenny's BDSM questline in Book 2; once  you dig into it, it's a lot hotter and a lot deeper than most popular fiction representations of Master/Slave relationships  would lead you to believe. I've been lucky to have fans who're really into the lifestyle to ask, and bounce ideas off there. On a personal note, I really enjoyed adding this Nyotaimori sequence into Book 2; Nyotaimori means to eat sushi off a naked woman, and there was something very hot about the whole sequence.

Sihil: Have to play that sequence, sounds enticing. Or maybe I just need to eat. Hypothetically, if you were to choose someone to voice-act the characters, who'd you pick?

Droid: Ever since I heard @lauraloveshanks do her first read-through of Love of Magic I knew I wanted her to do a few of the voices. She's got this really gorgeous crystal-cut english accent that's perfect for some of the girls (most especially Emily, Chloe and Sarah).

Sihil: Were there any popular inspirations that influenced your characters?

Droid: Largely no; some of them pulled inspirations from various places, but it's often so obscure most people completely miss it. Olivia, the clueless Librarian, was inspired by Alex Jones and Drax the Destroyer, for example. 🙂

Sihil: That caught me off-guard and I straight up chortled. So what's next for you as a dev after LoM?

Droid: As a dev... I don't know. I refuse to make Love of Magic into an infinity game. It's had an ending since the beginning, and like all good fantasy stories it's a trilogy. No trilogy ever got better by the author refusing to end it, and going back to "continue the story", in the history of fantasy books.

I originally started making porn games because I was burned out with free-2-play mobile mechanics and the feeling that I had no real creative input into what I was putting my heart into. The game company I work at wasn't going to do porn, so I thought that was a safe way to  have a creative output without a conflict of interest. Of course, by now my 'day job' is also making porn games (Paradise Lust, you should totally check it out), and we've ditched the free-2-play side of things. So there's less of a push in play to force myself to make my own games from scratch. Maybe once I'm done telling my story I'll go back to being just a programmer. Or I'll find a new story, in the same universe or another one. All I can be certain is that once the story is over, the next game won't star Love of Magic's MC; he and Emily and the Chosen deserve their happily ever after.

Sihil: True, though I think the first law trilogy was an exception to the rule you mentioned. Either way, definitely look forward to seeing their “happily ever after.” This is a game that definitely deserves that ending. Which other H-games do you like?

Droid: I play a lot of games, but some stay with me. I love great writing, and I usually go through a book a day when I'm not working. As such; DeLuca Family and Light of My Life are great games. I really like What a Legend; it's got a gorgeous art-style, and a really fun and relatable main character.

Sihil: Where are you from? What did you do before developing adult games?

Droid: I'm from Northern Europe. I studied in Edinburgh, met a gorgeous girl from a distant realm there, and followed her home. That was 22 years ago, and we've been married for 15 years and have a cute daughter together. And yes, our first date was at a Gurkha restaurant, called the Khukuri.

Sihil: How incredibly sweet is that. So how do you post updates so regularly?

Droid: I usually feel it's not regular enough 🙂  Mostly the Love of Magic Discord (https://discord.gg/NQrQrht) has largely been my home through this weird pandemic era, and they both inspire me and keep me sane-ish.

Sihil: What led you onto the path of creating adult games?

Droid: Frustration. Well, that's true for most of us, but not just sexual frustration. I was tired of being a cog in a psyop machine to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo, which is true for both taxes and free-2-play mobile games. I wanted to make a game that I believed in, and even if it didn't make a dollar (I never even had a patreon for Making Movies), I just wanted the satisfaction of saying "this is mine". I'd been making games professionally for 20+ years, and just felt I'd stagnated, and not in a great place. So I decided to evolve. Making adult games forced me to learn how to use Daz, and Photoshop, and AfterEffects. How to market effectively. And, being on my own, I started digging into things that could have been my job scope before, but which I'd always left to other people, stuff like how to do community management, working out how steam really works, running a discord, etc. I felt I grew more in the first year of Love of Magic than I'd grown as a developer in the previous 10 years, making normie games.

Sihil: What's your advice to someone who's considering becoming a dev?

Droid:  Make a game, and put out it out there. Your first game will be crap; gods know my first game was. And my second. And my fifth. At some point I managed to convince my thesis supervisor to let me make a game realtime simulation involving blowing up nuclear sheep for my thesis, and bargained that into a job at a games studio. Then I made normie games for a long time, and had a great time doing that. The key way to become a good developer is to make games, and give them to people to play, and learn from their feedback. If you do that, you'll get better.

Sihil: Live and learn, eh? What do you think about the adult gaming industry?

Droid: The first thing that'll surprise you about the adult games industry, is how nice it is. Especially if you're a developer like me who came from normie games. The fans here are largely nicer, the games get more love, and even the comments and reviews make more sense than you're used to from normie game space. Devs help each other out, give shoutouts and feature each other in ways that would be unthinkable in mainstream games (unless you involve a small army of lawyers, and 6 digit royalty checks). Fans flow freely between discords, and mostly they're just... nice people. I guess us pervs get a bad rep