I was making the Community Items for Morningstar when it struck me that I never finished the ones for Love of Magic: Book 3. I submitted a set, back in June 2023, but it came back with so many "must fix-it" notes, and by that time I was neck deep in development of Morningstar, so it slid off my radar and into the great unknown.
Steam Community items are a curious bit of Meta-gameplay Valve added to the storefront. The basic process goes like this: - Developer creates some collectible cards, backgrounds, badges and emotes. - The game drops the card based on play-time (in my case, a card for every 30 mins of gameplay) - The game will drop 1/2 of the cards for any one player (assuming you've played at least 3 hrs). Beyond that it gets... complicated. There's a crafting system to create and upgrade a badge, steam store backgrounds that can be unlocked, and a secondary market where prices can occasionally go insane. Sadly, I'm not involved in any of that; the only thing I get out of Community Items is the fun of making them. They're also *incredibly* fiddly (which is why I got more red ink on my first submission than my last algebra exam). A lot of it is pixel art (emotes are 16x16 pixels, for example), and I'm very much not a pixel artist :) Finally I did beat it into submission, so here it is. Which brings me back to *why* I started thinking of Community Items in the first place; Morningstar went gold!
For those of you who haven't followed, Morningstar: Book of the Fallen is my second story. Featuring some of the same 'souls', but set in a very different universe.
You play as a young MMA fighter, preparing for his comeback fight in NYC. It's a grittier, more noir world than Love of Magic; a lot of inspiration from 80s and 90s action movies (Rocky, Highlander, The Crow, etc). It's a world where the sun never really reaches the dark alleys, and heroes drink their bourbon neat.
Along the way you get dragged into a supernatural mystery, meet Angels and Demons, discover the secrets of your own Bloodline, and hopefully fall in love.
Morningstar's got 4 distinct endings. The Path of Light (Emily's branch), The Path of Fire (Katie's branch), the Path of Peace (Lin's branch) and the Path of Shadows (rejection of romance). Emily and Katie share the limelight as dual primary LIs, and it was super satisfying to finally get justice for Katie.
In addition to the returning characters (MC, Emily and Katie starring, with Chloe, Molly and Bella returning as side-characters, and Snowdrop somehow stealing scene after scene) there's also a brand new cast.
When you're not busy saving the world, spend some time flirting with tiger demons, drinking with Sidhe princesses or training your favorite gym-bunny.
Hope you'll enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it! You can check it out here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2396740/Morningstar_Book_of_the_Fallen/

This is a quick hotfix that pushes some changes from Development branch to the default branch. Notably it fixes a bug a lot of Mac users were having with unresponsive UI. It also adds in better support for starting a game in Book 3 without an existing book 2 savegame. For those of you who have Book 1 installed on Steam, a new Beta branch has also appeared, called NGPLUS. This will provide a way to return to Book 1 with your end of Book 3 savegame, and see how the world changes as a result. It's still WIP, but hopefully I'll push it forward as the final build sometime in the next month or so. Full changelog: 1.0.2h - Fixed a bug where partial completion of Black Rose 1 in book 1 could cause you to get stuck in Book 3 1.0.2g - Built with Unity latest LTS for improved mac support - Ensured all videos were properly transcoded to VP8 - Can use space to speed through the reward UI - Fixed a bug that could cause flickering while transitioning from Elsewhere to Dark Elsewhere or back 1.0.2f - Fixes for people starting Book 3 without a Book 2 savegame: - Dylan and Fiadh are shipped by default

Quick little hotfix addressing various issues raised here and in the Discord. The biggest update is to people starting a new playthrough without an existing save; it's not a very common path among the guys testing on Discord; I went through and assumed the player had done more of book 1/2 if starting with a fresh save. 1.0.2d - Added map exits for the various Elsewhere rooms, in case anyone gets stuck there. - Fixes for people starting Book 3 without a Book 2 savegame: - Opens up the old hunting grounds - Opens up the demon hunting groups - Bella's fully upgraded - Akane's shadowhunter gear unlocked - Default loadout now includes storybased gems from Book 1/2 (Shield9 from Emily, Rage9 from Bella, Lightning9 from Thor) 1.0.2c - Fixed a bug where you could risk not getting RP if you started a save without having an existing savegame - Fixed a bug where you could tell Zenia about Matthew ahead of time