Loren Amazon Princess release plan

In the photo above, my cat Gilda sleeping in a plastic bowl :)

In the image below instead you see the almost final main menu of my upcoming fantasy roleplay game "Loren The Amazon Princess". Please note how I wisely placed the Buy Now text :D

Current Game Status

Jokes apart, the game story is nearing completion, even if there are still many things left to do, mainly finding typos and checking the flow. It's going to be a very LOONG and detailed game. Without doubts, my biggest game under every aspect: story, characters, art, sound effects/music, gameplay, longevity (you can play as male and female, and there's a big variety of party members to select).

For the first time I also used an artist to do the GUI (windows,buttons, icons), and I must admit that it was worth it. Special thanks also to Aleema who helped with tweaking the GUI as well!

The Game (Many) Features!

Every character has a main skilltree (the Class, which can be Warrior, Thief or Mage) and a specialization skiltree which is unique to each character. In the image below you see the Berserk Skill description of Ramas, the dwarf berserker warrior that you'll recruit early in the game.

The quest system is also more complex than Planet Stronghold, since you can have quest and sub-quests (or steps). In the image below you see the main game quest "Find Queen Karen" (Loren's mother) and also the first step, that is going to the town of Grimoire to gather more informations.

The game will have a map system and also lots of items, divided into weapons, armors, potions/scrolls/useable items. Each item will be divided into sub-categories like happens in most RPGs, for example you have cloth armors (usable by Mages only), light/medium (usable by Thieves) and heavy armors (usable only by Warriors). Same thing for weapons. You can also have items that can be used only by a specific character.

I have added already over 200 items in the game database, and will add more in the final version!

Of course, there's no need to say that the game has a lot of romance options, including all the possible combinations (straight and homosexual of all genders)! You can advance the romance talking to characters while in the camp, and also during the main plot. The writer Aleema did an awesome job in the character interactions/romance paths!

The Battle System

So I'd say the only thing that still needs lots of tweaking is the battle system. Not the rules or the skills implementation which is at good stage, but the layout. Right now there are 8 vs 8 battles, but as the coder remarked, they could be too long. My idea was to have the player fight epic battles against "hordes of undead", so having 8 enemies would be cool. In particular for the mages and their Area Of Effect spells! However, perhaps I should limit the number of party members, since controlling 8 members every battle could be too much: I am thinking to limit it to 6 or perhaps even 5, and keep the 8 enemies instead.

Also, I won't be able to use the same display view of Planet Stronghold, because of the bigger scope of the battles, so the battle might use the view of a sort of card rpg game. Getting feedback on the battle is one of the main reason why I've decided to release the game as beta pre-order (see below).

The Soundtrack

The game will feature another custom song by Cristina Vee & Matt Myers. I have it already but for marketing reasons (we'll launch the song also on youtube and itunes) I will add it to the game only on the official release day (so pre-orders won't have it). Trust me when I say that is one of the best pop-rock song I've heard this year!

The Release Plan

Those of you that follows me on twitter already know that I've decided to release this game in beta pre-order like I did for Planet Stronghold last year. However, differently from Planet Stronghold, I won't be able to sell it initially at a cheap price, because I put too many hours and invested too much money on this, sorry :(

So the game when will enter the pre-orders beta will be regularly priced at $24.99, while the expansion will be likely priced at $9.99.If things go as planned I'll start the pre-orders stage in January - however is more likely the END of January.

The expansion instead will be released about 1-2 months after the main game. All the people that buy the game during the preorder phase though will be able to play it in exclusive before the others, and will also receive some extra items inside the game as reward, and possibly other "goodies" (suggestions are welcome!)