Announcing a comic-book style RPG!

In the picture above, my cat Nina observing me while I code. She keeps me motivated! ;)

I've extensively talked about Vera Blanc and why it wasn't successful because of his mix of comic+visual novel gameplay in a market that is dominated by point'n'click adventures or HOG gamplay. But I'm not giving up with comic-style games! While most of my upcoming games will use manga artwork, since I really like traditional comic art I'm also producing another game with this style, this time a RPG though!

See the full gallery on posterous

It's called "Loren - The Amazon Princess" (you can see some sketches/WIP artwork above) and is told from the point of view of a servant who's going to assist her in her quest to find out what happened to her mother. The servant can be male or female, but the gender choice like for Planet Stronghold will only influence the romance subplot, but the two characters will have same statistics.

I think this choice could be interesting since the story will be told like a "diary of memories" of the servant, from his/her personal point of view. So while the main decisions will be taken by the amazon princess, the servant will be able to influence her giving suggestions. I think it could be a nice variation from the usual games, since you don't have actual direct control, but you can only try to influence the main character in this case.

The game will have 20 characters, so a very good variety, and I plan also to make the battle more cinematic with different scenes for each character when they attack or use their special moves.

While I'm not sure about this yet, an interesting thing is also the game possible pricing. If I can manage to, I'd like to try selling this game at $15 or even $10 pricetag. Why? Because I've seen SO MANY TIMES people suggesting "you should lower your game prices to sell more" and so on. And I've tried several times with different products, and every time I made less money :D But then I thought: one thing I've never tried so far is having a game with a low price from day1!

This won't mean that this game will be short or crap, more like it won't have as much texts and multi-branching plot like my other usual games, because that's what can increase dramatically the costs. Spending extra money on art can increase the game cost, but spending 2 extra months is even worse because time is the most important resource for an indie (and for anyone in general).

Since most people don't care much about tons of multiple possible endings, I plan to make this game story quite linear, but with lot of characters and very cool battles, and only with some optional romance scenes. In the game there WILL be fanservice but will be completely optional - if you don't want to see it, you'll see none :)