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/