Word of mouth power

First of all, let me say farewell to my cat Orfeo, 7 years old. Found him dead on the road nearby our house 2 days ago :( Man, how I wish I could get a house far away from all the roads and crazy drivers...

Word of mouth ?

Getting back to the post topic: word of mouth is really one of the most powerful marketing tools available for indies. Very few indies can afford to spend lot of money on advertising, and many don't get covered by the biggest review sites. Of  course, some do, but mostly indies doing games in popular genres, not "niches".

As a visual novel/dating sim author, is quite hard to get covered. Even Planet Stronghold which is mainly a RPG, probably didn't get much coverage because of the "excessive texts" problem. I remember a reviewer politely emailing me, saying that they would rather not cover PS because they would have to give it a bad rating because it has "too much texts".

I believe it wasn't just the text amount though, but also the quality, since Loren The Amazon Princess RPG has over 175,000 words of texts but so far nobody said "it has too much texts"... ;) Did I mention I'm not going to write directly any of my games anymore? ok good!

Anyway, what happened this month? In some very popular RPG forums, people discovered my game Planet Stronghold. Here are the forums threads:

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/mass-effect-gaiden-planet-stronghold.70928/page-8
http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16777

Let's say that in the beginning the tone was definitely NOT positive towards my game :D But on the other hands I could understand since they were comparing it to Mass Effect 3! But then... something incredible happened! Some people realized that behind the manga artwork (which somehow is associated with younger audience, like if is a negative thing!) and the slow beginning, there was a full featured RPG with armor, resistances, different attack types, skills, moral/ethic decisions and so on, and some of them started to be literally enthusiast about it!

Of course, despite what they say, I know that my game is NOT better than Mass Effect 3 :) But I think that it offers something that most games nowadays don't include: gameplay. The few AAA games that have been successful in recent years, beside top production values, also include lot of gameplay/innovations.

Anyway, this month's sales for Planet Stronghold have been much higher than normal, thanks to the "word of mouth" started by those threads but also by other people talking about it as a consequence. I got many new members in my own forums, and got suggestions for the sequel. I even got a journalist from RockPaperShotgun online magazine to play it, and while I don't know if it will be actually reviewed (so many good indie games out recently), before it was always ignored!

Sometimes, to have some "success" (modest in my case, of course) you just have to be patient and wait. Make the best game you can, and then be patient, because remember, not all the indies have quick success stories like Mojang.

One last thing before I forget: Loren version 0.94 is now ready! Get the update here, and the full changelog in my forums.

The light at the end of the tunnel

In the picture above, Othello looking at the new arrival, our dog Skipper.

I'm starting to see the light at the end of the Loren Amazon Princess tunnel :) If you follow me you know that last week I made public a sort of sneak peek, to see what people think. So far the response was very positive. People like the art, the story/writing, and beside a few bugs (all my fault though!) even the gameplay.

After the public preview, I made a big spreadsheet document with all the bugs and suggestions. I spent the following 2 days fixing them and evaluating the suggestions, and today finally I started to get back into the "content creation" phase.

Yes, because even if the plot is done until chapter4, as I play the game I'm adding the fights, creating new enemies, and also adding some extra movement steps on the map to make the game seem less linear (even if in reality it is, but nobody complained so far!).

The goal is to have the plot fully scripted by mid-March, and Aleema (my writer) said it would be possible, and I self-imposed myself the deadline of end of March for the almost-final release. It won't be easy, but I'll try to make it!

The next appointment with Loren is 1st March when I'll start pre-orders and release a new improved demo.

And the other games...?

I know that not everyone who follows me is a RPG fan, and they might be wondering what happened to the various games I have announced!

Well, to be honest I underestimated the amount of work that was needed to make a huge game like Loren. So while I am still waiting for the artwork and the writing for most other games, I was so busy that wasn't able to use my traditional "motivational techniques" to encourage my collaborators. In other words, the famous "spanking lazy collaborators"! :D

So the progress speed for my other games has been slower than usual, but until I finish Loren I don't think will have time to follow/encourage them.

Also, this week I decided to move the main Winterwolves site into a cloud server, so this added some extra delays (those kind of things are always problematic!). But better do that before Loren is released, just in case somehow it becomes a popular game!

Anyway, just to reassure that the other projects are still going forward, here's a sneak peek of Heileen 3 male romances:

From top-left to bottom-right: Heileen with Sebastian on the shore at night, Heileen with Jonathan in an artist atelier, Heileen with Morgan on the ship bridge, and Heileen and John... in bed! :)

Heileen 3 is still missing some art, and the whole Marie subplot, but I'd say that is 80% complete (of course, I still need to put everything together and test it).

And below is Jeff, one of the four pursuable characters of the mystery/otome game "Nicole":

I am at good point in this game too, story and art is about halfway finished, even if being a sort of mystery/detective game I'll have to review everything to make sure that there aren't spoilers early in the game or plot holes.

That's it for this week, see you next Friday!

Winter In Fairbrook is finally released! And fan art contest!

In the picture above,my cat Gilda in the snow. It's a picture of last year, since there's still no snow here!

As you probably know if you follow me on Twitter / Facebook, or are subscribed to my newsletter, the final version of Winter In Fairbrook is out, just in time for Christmas!

If you haven't played the first title yet, you can now get both for 15% off. For more info check the Flower Shop series page.

I also need to update the first title to online activation and new Ren'Py, and probably make it easier too since is much harder compared to Winter In Fairbrook.

Meanwhile, the other games in production are making good progress:

Loren Amazon Princess RPG

The plot is still being written, but I'm happy to say that counting the expansion, it will be the longest game I've ever made, even longer than Planet Stronghold. Also there are a lot of romance options, for all tastes. The only thing that concerns me right now is the battle system. I have asked the coder to make a 8 vs 8 battle. However, I'm thinking that might be too hard/confusing or simply the battles could last too long, so following the coder's suggestion I might drop the number to 6 vs 6 maximum, which should already offer a good variety in the battles.

In practice I'm wondering if the battle isn't too much "for the hardcore RPG fans" than the occasional RPG players. I have to say though that even Planet Stronghold was supposed to be a light-RPG, a visual novel with RPG elements but then quickly evolved into a full JRPG and people seemed to like it.

I guess the moment of truth will be when I'll publicly release the Alpha Version, with some battle examples, so I'll be able to get feedback on it and see people's reactions.

The Queen Of Thieves

I got more art finished, below you see Arianna, also know as The Queen Of Thieves! Yes she is the mother of the three sisters Joanne, Kira and Thalia, the main characters of the game.

Artist is working on the various kiss scenes for the romance subplots, and then will do the introduction which will be in the form of short comic. I have yet to code all the gameplay but I think I have some good ideas for it, and I'm eager to start prototyping something to see if they're good or not! :)

Draw fan art and win a free game! Facebook contest

I've setup a new contest in my Facebook page. I'm giving away three coupons to get a free game to the top 3 entries. What you need to do? Draw fan art of any characters from my games (including Winter Wolves and Tycoon Games) and submit it to the contest application on Facebook.

There's a voting system, so the three most popular fan art images will win a free game coupon! The contest will end the 25th December 2011, unless the amount of entries is too low (for example below 10) in that case I'll extend the deadline by some more weeks.

Queen of Thieves customers

In the image above, my cat Leon seems almost in a meditation pose :)

So, who will be the customers of the game Queen Of Thieves? Take a look below:

See the full gallery on Posterous

Yes, I was talking about the in-game customers! For those unfamiliar with the game (which is still work-in-progress) it will feature a shop simulation similar to the popular Recettear game. But one thing that annoyed me a bit of that game was the fact that there were only 3-4 different customer appearances :) So in my game I asked the artist to draw a sort of doll-dressing game, and as you can see, the combinations can be a lot.

The main variations are by body shape (normal, fat, old) and by social status (poor, middle clas, noble, guards, priest, wizard). And of course there are several minor variations based on face shape, hair and beard color/shape and hats.

Beside the example above, there will also be female customers of course!

The writing is being done right now and art-wise there is really not much left to do. The game will be a bit different from my usual ones, even if I haven't yet decided how I'll do the mission part. I would like to use a sort of 2d boardgame view, where you move your characters in a sort of turn-based strategy game.

I am not sure yet if I'll also include RPG battles, even if the temptation is strong, since I have lots of armor/clothing/weapons ready to use, but the playable characters would be max 3 (the three sisters Joanne, Kira and Thalia) so it would be a somewhat simplified RPG.

So in theory it could be an otome life simulation game with strategy and RPG elements :D I don't want to rush things with this one since I have anyway other games in production, so I'd like to experiment a bit with a different gameplay system. Time will tell, as always!

The other games

Meanwhile, all the other games I announced are progressing, and we're waiting for the UI/skills/items art to finish an alpha build of LorenRPG to release it to public to get feedback about the battle system. I think it could be ready next month, so stay tuned.

Promotional sale

Promo sales: this week promo sale is of the game College Romance: Rise Of The Little Brother that is only 4.99 until Sunday (included).

Four new games in progress!

In the image above, my cat "Micia" back in 2002. She was living with my parents now, and she died last week, at 15 years old. It's kind of sad since she was the first cat I rescued and officially adopted. I want to remember Micia with that funny picture of her in the bath tub :)

Now, speaking about my games, some interesting news:

First of all, I updated both Vera Blanc games, added a new "visual novel mode" (that eliminates the need to solve the minigames) and put on sale until Sunday for 4.99 each. So if you haven't already, check the demos here:

http://www.winterwolves.com/verablanc.htm

Four new projects!

I've started 4 new games. Yes, four! I'm crazy, I know. But as you know I'm now using external writers, so I'm "only" writing the scenes and doing the games storyboard. Obviously I won't release all those games this year, also because I expect some of those writers to quit/disappear halfway, like usually happens...
Of those 4, only one has already some art ready and is the Queen Of Thieves game, which will be a fantasy RPG/lifesim (though I have yet to think about the gameplay in detail).
The other 3 are: "The Hospital" a horror game, "Amber's Magic Shop" another fantasy lifesim/potion making game with both good/bad endings, and "Roommates" a more light themed game with college settings.

All the game titles are temporary names which might change.

The Queen Of Thieves game

Is being rewritten by another person, which hopefully won't disappear from one day to another. I am sorry for previous writer since she was doing a good job, but I can't keep chasing everyone, especially if they don't email for 2 months ^_^;

I want to push this game hard since as I said is the one where I have most of the art done (still need to be finished though) and it could be one of my next games to be released, alongside with Loren and Planet Stronghold: Warzone.

Amber's Magic Shop game

As you have noticed, recently I released mostly light-themed games and all of them had happy endings. While I like them of course, I also like games that offers sad/bad endings. Sometimes, a bittersweet ending or even a sad ending can be more rewarding (story-wise) than the more "classic" happy endings.

So in the fantasy life/potion sim game I'm writing right now, I'll have bad endings, since the overall game setting is dark fantasy. I wanted to try with one game to see how the public would react, since honestly I'm a bit tired of writing only happy ending games! Besides, there will be happy ending even in this game, alongside with the sad ones.

The Hospital game

This is a kind of an experiment, I admit it. I have absolutely no clue how a horror VN game can sell. It will be probably shorter (and so cheaper) than my other games, and still have some romance options as well, but obviously quite different from my other light-themed games. The game starts and you wake up in a hospital bed, with no memories of who your are...

(I know, not the most original start, but the rest of the story I think it will be!)

The Roommates game

I got lots of feedback from people who wanted a game with college/light setting. I am designing one right now, which will include both male and female main character. So you'll be able to play it as GxB, GxG or BxG, BxB. In practice, all relationship tastes included!

 

Loren RPG framework status

We made lots of progresses this month so far. Right now, we're waiting for some new icons/UI for the equipment screen and then we'll be able to post a public alpha preview, which will be very useful to find some possible nasty hidden bugs. I tested the battle a lot, but I only recently added many new items, and I also want to start creating some new enemies, so is likely that some bugs could pop-up.

In the image above you can see the equipment screen mockup, which obviously is not final but just a work-in-progress.

Obviously my other games like Heileen 3 and Planet Stronghold: Warzone are progressing as well, with the former getting lots of the 100-scenes done, and the latter almost all the romance CGs finished.

Warning: Promo Sales Ahead!

In the photo above, my cat Orfeo (italian name for Orpheus) in a curious pose (to say the least)!

What's about the promo sales in the title? Well, the game engine I used for all my recent manga games, Ren'Py, got a big update recently, improving the speed, compatibility and adding the DirectX support (requires DX9 installed though).

So I am slowly rebuilding all the games I've developed with it in the past years. The first one to be updated was Heileen 1, the first visual novel I developed myself. For each game update, I'll have the game on sale at very big discount, with the idea that many people will buy it and report eventual problems (there really shouldn't be any, but you never know!)

As I'm rebuilding the games I am also adding some small features, like for example I added the infamous relationship bar (see the image below) that was missing on the first two Heileen games.

I'm also going to switch all the old one to the new popular online activation, with the exception of big games with voices like Heileen 2 or Bionic Heart (which would require demos of over 100mb, and it's a bit too much!).

To buy the game for only 4.99, simply head to the game purchase page. You don't need any code, but be careful since the offer expires next sunday!

What other games I will update? well, all of them, but I'm taking it slowly, so not more than one every week or better every 10-15 days. The next ones I have scheduled are Heileen 2, then will be the turn of Bionic Heart, Flower Shop, and so on.

The best way to know when the promotional sale is on is to follow me on Twitter or Facebook, since I announce the offers there first, while I update the blog only once a week.

Apart the promotional sales, I'm working hard on the various games in progress: I've written half of the 100 scenes for Heileen 3, the RPG framework for Loren RPG is at good point, and I got new art and ending images for Planet Stronghold: Warzone and Undead Lily.

And, "sometimes before Christmas", Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook will finally be released (we decided to add a bonus extra scene to compensate the long wait!).

Numbers, numbers and formulas...

In the picture above, Batman looks broken. In reality, he was sleeping since hours...

What's about the numbers? Well, not many people know what's behind a game. It's much more complex than what you think. That is, if you do the things like a good game designer should! ;)

Numbers of a dating sim

What's behind a simple dating sim like Heileen 3 that I'm writing right now? nothing, you might say, it's just text and images, and a few choices. No, not really: the choices needs to be balanced, otherwise the gameplay would be a disaster! So, even for an apparently simple game like a dating sim, there's a lot of work behind the scenes. Check the image below:

this is the OpenOffice spreadsheet of the first 37 scenes of the game. In each row, I put a short description of the scene, and then I added a "1" when the choices possible involve one of the seven Sins or Virtues. Below, at the bottom (but is not visible in the screenshot), there's a formula called "Summatory" that sums all the values. Why? Because a well designed and balanced game should offer the player the same amount of choices for each of the seven Sins/Virtues!

So, while writing, I keep constantly open the spreadsheet, and I try to balance the game so that the player will always have the chance to  get one of the 14 possible job endings (tied to the Sins/Virtues).

I'm not going too much in the details since discovering the skill+sin/virtue combo will be part of the fun of the game, but for example, the "Nun" ending will involve having max Chastity and max Faith skill.

On the right part instead, there are the choices that will affect the 6 possible romances of the game. The labels means: Morgan, John, Jonathan, Sebastian (the 4 male characters, Sebastian is a new one) and Marie, Lora (the 2 female characters).

Numbers of a RPG!

If a dating sim is so "complex", imagine a RPG! Making a RPG without spending at least one month first designing the rules, is a suicide. Don't do that. I can guarantee that you'll be unsatisfied by the result.

Now check the OpenOffice screenshots below:

See the full gallery on Posterous

one is the condition/skill relationship for Loren the Amazon Princess RPG. How you read that? is a bit complex, but in practice:

• the first table is the warrior skills. the cells with orange background require the target to be "Staggered". Once it is, you can use for example the Gladiator "Battle Cry" (which has chances to Scare enemies), or the Blademaster "No Mercy" (which has chance to Weaken the enemies).
• the second table is the thief skills. Thieves have weak attacks, but if the target is in the right condition, they can deliver powerful critical attack using their skills. They can set a target in a specific condition themselves. For example, using the Flaming Torch on a Slowed target, they can set a target in the Burning condition too. Then, a Demonblood (Mesphit) can use the Immolation skill to deal an incredible amount of damage.
• the third table is the mages. Differently from Warrior and Thief class, a Mage doesn't need any condition pre-requisite. They can just attack using their spells, which will inflict specific conditions as you can guess (Blizzard will inflict Frozen condition, Plague inflict Poisoned condition, and so on).

The second image instead is a work-in-progress of the weapons dabatase. Some values might not yet bet final. But as you can see there's already a good variety of items! We've decided to use the following weapon division based on damage type: Edged (dagger, sword, axe), Impact (mace, club), Flail (Flail, Morning Star), Polearm (Staff, Halberd), Bow, Missile (Crossbow).

Explaining all the values will take too long, but if you're familiar with RPGs you might understand already what is their use.

This was just to show the tremendous amount of work behind a RPG, and just for the skills and weapons (there's more, balancing the classes, the enemy encounters, and so on). Now you understand why I've decided not to make more than 1 RPG a year? :D

Homosexual relationship in games

I want to spend a few words about the homosexual relationship that I plan to put in all my future games. First of all, I am honestly a bit shocked by how Spirited Heart Girl's Love announcement was mostly ignored by the press and reviewers. It's not something new for me (I'm used to that) but this time was even worse than usual.

I really hope that is NOT because of main theme (women homosexuality) of the game, and hope is due only to random circumstances (I know from past years that September is not really one of the best months to do a new game release).

In any case, everyone who played the game said that the romances are much better than the original game, and in general the players' feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and that's what matters to me. So I plan to keep adding homosexual romance in all my future games, alongside the straight options, since all I care about is what my customers think!

Three years ago...

In the image above, my cat Otello looks broken! (in reality he's just sleeping peacefully)

Three years have passed since I released my first manga game, the dating sim Summer Session, made in collaboration with Hanako Games. It was July 2008, and was my first attempt in the world of visual novel/dating sims. Shortly after I started looking with extreme interest to Ren'Py, the library/tool that was used to make that game. I remember had never heard about it, the documentation was scarce, and had so many questions/doubts despite being a C/C++ coder! Questions that could be answered only by asking directly on the official forums.

After the initial "shock" though, I was quickly converted into a fan, the possibility to code in python, which was a breeze to work with compared to C, and the instant delivery on three platforms were awesome features!

Summer Session indeed was also the first of my games to fully support Linux, the first of a long series (in practice, all my next games used Ren'Py so they all support Linux!).

Around September 2008, I was also writing the last chapters for a small, ambitious attempt at making my first visual novel ever, Heileen. I always loved to write and the game was overall well received, but soon enough I found out that writing in a foreign language was something really hard for me, so for the next games I started using editors/proofreaders, until the most recent ones, where I hire writers to write the game texts for me based on my storyboard/scene descriptions (which is without any doubts the best solution!).

And here I am, three years later, still writing about Heileen, in the third installment (and very likely last) of the series. Same character, same setting, same artist: even if Rebecca told me that won't be able to work fulltime on it until January, so this means that sadly Heileen 3 will be out only next year (I hoped to release it around October to celebrate the third anniversary...).

As some of you might know, the kind of games I was making before was quite different. Sport simulations, tycoon games, wargames. However, I always loved to write and tell stories, so when I saw the opportunity I didn't think twice. Being paid to tell stories? There's hardly a better job for me! :D

Recently I tried going back to an old interest of mine - RPG or roleplaying games - and I think the first one, Planet Stronghold, was a good result. But I'm not satisfied, and even if those games are really hard to make, I want to try and make even better ones!

I sell mostly directly, and my products are a niche: I might not become famous, I might never get on Steam or any other big portal, but slowly but steadly I'm building a following of people that keeps my morale up, gives precious suggestions on gameplay, art, design and motivates me to wake up early every day to work on my games.

So, if those three years were simply amazing it's only because of you who are reading this post, you who played one of my games, you who decided to support my efforts financially. So to you, I say a big THANK YOU! :) And stay tuned, I still have many more stories to tell!

there WILL be a Heileen 3

In the picture above, my black cat. It was the first one of my pets to be included in a game of mine. He is "Black" the cat in Heileen 1-2. We call him Batman, but for obvious copyright reasons I couldn't use that name in Heileen games! :D

Incredible how time flies. It was October 2010 when I made a blog post where I was thinking about doing a third (and very likely last) episode of my Heileen series. And now, almost one year later, I've decided to make it for real. Last year I was dubious because the main artist of the game (and of all my early visual novels / dating sims) Rebecca Gunter, is now working fulltime as webcomic author (it has always been her dream) and last time we spoke she said that unfortunately she doesn't have a minute of free time, since she is busy working on THREE webcomics at once (she reminds me of a certain indie author who has several running projects...lol).

So I started asking around, since in theory I have all the sprites needed to make the story, what I'm missing are the ending scenes. However, talking with other indies and customers, everyone agreed that is enough that the style is similar and the CG scenes should be fine. CG scenes are the one displayed as the end, as "prize". It occurs to me that none of the Heileen games had ending scenes with custom art, because at those times was just starting and had a much limited budget for each game... but Heileen 3 will have them for sure, since is the last chapter I want to make something very good.

As replacement for the CG scenes I'm going to use Loren RPG artist (who is working right now on the last scenes for that game). As you can see from the image below, the style is very similar and should be fine :)

Reading again the old post, I had lots of ideas. Obviously I'm not going to do them all, but all I can say is that Heileen 3 won't be a normal visual novel, like the previous ones. I want to add at least a simulation gameplay element, after all at the start of the story we are in a pirate ship, so... plenty of interesting options for Heileen, don't you agree? :)

I would also like to keep the idea of the Good and Evil choices that was present in the second episode, so that you get different endings based on what you do, on how you behave towards other people and which moral/ethical decisions you'll take.

Similarly to my most recent games, I plan to have both straight and homosexual relationships. In previous episodes of Heileen, you couldn't pursue many love interests, but this time I'll try to expand the number. For the straight GxB endings, Marcus and John are the ideal candidates, and for the homo GxG obviously Marie and... surprise :)

Beside improving romance, I want also to do a management section with all the characters present in the story. Each character would have a role on the ship and give you a bonus. The main idea is this: you start your search to find the other missing people, and as you get them, they join you aboard and give you gameplay bonuses. For example "recruiting" Marco will give a bonus to cooking, Jack will increase woodcutting and maybe also will give a hand during struggles... and so on. I want to keep also the quest system present in the first two games and have more variety of quests. It looks almost like a RPG, but in reality I think is more accurate to say it will be a dating sim with island exploration/colonization. Something like that, I have yet to define the details!

For the Visual Novels "purists" don't worry, I will include also a "super mega easy" playing mode, so that basically you'll be able to play it almost as if it was a standard plain visual novel!

Loren Amazon Princess new skilltrees and battle system

As you can see from the photo above, I hired a very skilled coder to help me working on the future RPGs ;)

Jokes apart, I really hired a coder, but for Loren Amazon Princess (since Planet Stronghold Warzone will re-use the same battle system with some interesting new features like area of effect psionics).

I know I already published some skilltrees, but when the new coder arrived we decided to revamp the plannet battle system with a new, greatly improved one. Check the WORK IN PROGRESS image below:

The main "battle flow" will work in a similar way as Final Fantasy X battles, where each action adds to "wait time". So no more Action Points, though the basics are the same. On the right of the screen there's a list with the moving order, and when is your turn, you'll decide what action to do. Clicking on your currently active character, or an ally, will open a menu with the "friendly actions" that you can do (like Heal another party member, or use a potion, and so on). On the other hand, clicking on an enemy will open the menu with "hostile actions", like attack the enemy or use one of the various special skills / spells that you have at your disposal to crush your opponents!

Each action will add a wait time. So for example drinking a potion will be such a quick action, that you will be able to move again the same character immediately, though "behind the scenes" some "seconds" of battle passed. If you perform a more complex action, for example use the "Pinning Shot" skill of the "Hunter" subclass, your character will need much more time before he/she can act again. The list on the right will update in real-time when you hover the mouse on the skill, so you'll have lot of time to plan your strategy. It's already working quite well, in the test battles I often paused wondering if was better to use a quick, but less powerful move to finish one enemy, or instead choose a more slow move but that would hit all the enemies in front row.

Yes, because differently from Planet Stronghold, there's also tactical disposition on the battlefield! There's a front-row, and a back row. If a character is using ranged weapons, can hit anyone in front/back row. But if the character is using melee weapon, he can hit only enemies in the front row. Also obviously Warriors will have more HP, while Thief and especially Mages much less, so putting them in the front row won't be a great idea! This means that you'll have to choose your party formation, and right now we're thinking to have glorious 8 vs 8 battles that will offer a great fun, and will let you use most of your party members (there are 12 in total that you can recruit).

skilltree.pdf Download this file

I'm also particularly happy about the various skills and how the interaction between the 3 main classes (Warrior, Thief and Mage) will work. But this is a complex topic and will require a completely new blog post (and new flowchart to explain it), so for now I'm going to stop here. The skilltrees are basically 99% definitive this time, there might be some that will change slightly during testing to balance better the gameplay, but in general what you see in the PDF is going to be the final version of all the skilltrees.

There's something cooking...

But fear not, I'm not going to cook my sweet cat Gilda, who in the picture above found a new way to use my pot :)

Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook

We're getting close to finish it. I know I've been saying this already, but there are still a few backgrounds missing, and some more testing needed, but definitely not much! Is really likely to be finished in July!

Spirited Heart Deluxe Girl's Side

Even this expansion is at a very good point. Only a character subplot left to finish and then will need to test and check everything. This is very likely to be done either in end of July or August. The sprites are not yet all ready, but what has been done so far is absolutely lovely. Check the image below:

But don't think all the girls will be like Reid, the sexy demoness dancer. Each one has her own personality and different life goals: cute princesses, fearsome thieves, anti-social genius and more bizarre characters will be present in the expansion, who is going to be as big as the main game! I think there's really a very good variety of situations in the game and even if the theme is girl's love, I think some scenes are really beautiful and everyone should play it ;)

Loren Amazon Princess

This is going to be delayed a bit, since I'm getting a complete RPG framework done by a "real coder" (that's not me! lol). This way I can re-use it for future games or add-ons (even in different settings/game worlds). I should have done this before, but as they say, better late than never! Meanwhile, right now the romance scenes are being drawn, the first ones are Loren and Elenor/Saren. Everything will happen during a full moon night, when Loren goes in a lake nearby to take a bath... As said already the scenes will be completely optional because will be more sexy than usual, and you won't see them at all if you disable the option in the preferences screen.

Undead Lily and The Elemental Avengers

The final battle poses of the last two heroes are being made right now! Though there are still all the romance scenes, and probably will also need more art for the strategic map... this game is becoming really bigger than I thought, hopefully my efforts and investment will be rewarded! :)

More news and surprises coming soon...

I'll be also promoting soon some games made by indie game developers friends, and I am also getting ready to launch an interesting promotion somewhere in July, offering several themed games that will make sci-fi fans happy. Stay tuned for more news!

Visual Novels vs Life Simulation vs Roleplay Games

In the picture above, my cat Othello who found a bizarre spot to relax in my home. He seems caged but in reality he is relaxing in that pose!

As the title says, since I have no relevant news of my various games work-in-progress, today want to make some ramblings about those three game categories: visual novels, life / dating sim and roleplay games, since are the genre of games I made the most in the last 3-4 years (since I discovered Ren'Py in practice). In the end I will assign a percentage to each skill required to make them (is just for fun, remember!).

• Visual Novels are rather easy, coding-wise. The main focus is the story, without any doubt. By story I mean: the basic setting/idea (which personally I believe is the most important thing), the characters and the style of writing. I put the style of writing as last thing, because even if I think a good writing is important, I think it's not as important as the game idea and characters. You can have a good writing, but if your visual novel uses a very common setting (high-school...) won't be as much interesting as a more uncommon/original setting. An aspect most VN developers ignore though is the visuals/soundtrack. I believe nice visuals will make the gaming experience much more interesting, even if is true that the main focus should be the story. A nice soundtrack, or even better, atmospheric sound effects would help even more to get into the story.
  So in summary: visual novel = 60% story/writing, 25% art, 10% sound/music and 5% coding
• Life or Dating Simulation are already much more complex. No matter how much branching your visual novel can have, a dating sim will be more painful to code. Take my latest game Always Remember Me: there are lots of gameplay factors to consider. Difficulty balancing can be solved by adding a difficulty setting at start of the game, but making sure that each scene plays in the right order it's not easy as it seems, and making sure there are no easy cheat/way to win by raising a statistic requires lot of time and testing. I grouped life with dating sims because usually are very similar. Almost all dating sim I've seen have much in common with life sim: a calendar, several statistics, several action/location to visit to improve them, character relationships and more. While not as complex as RPG, life sim can still be quite hard to develop, even with a powerful tool like Ren'Py. Writing is important, but in general life sim have much less texts (in some cases even A LOT less) than visual novels. Art and music are always important, but since there is also the gameplay element, they are LESS important than in a visual novel where the user will be staring at the screen reading for most of the time. In life sim the UI/interface is much more important than beautiful animated backgrounds.
  My conclusion is: dating / life sim = 20% story/writing, 20% art, 10% sound/music, 50% coding
• Roleplaying games are probably one of the most difficult kind of games to code! they have everything life/dating sim have (statistics, relationship, skills, location to visit, actions to perform) but in addition they also have a complex inventory (life sim can have inventory, but easier stuff) and obviously, the combat! I remember when I was younger, I almost ignored the story in RPGs and played them only if they had a well developed combat system. Now I pay more attention to the story but still I believe that MOST of the players care only about combat and exploration, and skip most of the writing. Art is important, but probably is the kind of games where it matters less. If you look at the various RPGmaker games or Spiderweb ones, you can clearly see that having a top quality art is NOT needed to be successful in this field. Is more about the ruleset, the battle/level up system, the skills, the quests, maps and so on. Clearly having ALSO a better art, will help, but is not an essential requirement. Same for story/writing, is enough to see how many successful action RPGs are there!
  I'd say that a good RPG = 5% story/writing, 15% art, 10% sound/music, 70% coding.

Please note that I am talking only about 2d games, so 2d RPG too, since 3d RPG are of a completely different league!

This justifies in part why took me so long to make a RPG game like Planet Stronghold vs the other kind of games. And also why I'm probably going to focus on life/dating sims in future, with some RPG hybrids from time to time. Ideally I'd like to make a life/dating sim every 2-3 months and a good RPG every 6 months (or perhaps more). That's why I put the Loren princess game on hiatus for now, since I wouldn't have been able to do a decent job while doing so many other projects at same time (lazy artists aside! lol).

Cinders visual novel

The picture you see is from a upcoming visual novel game from MoaCube, the debut title of a new development team friend of mine. They're new in the visual novel world but they're well known in the casual market, and the art style is quite unique. I've seen it in action and the attention to details is amazing, lots of particle effects going in the background. I cannot comment much on the story because the version I tried was early alpha but as the title says, is going to be based on the Cinders fairy tale.

For more information, check the game official site: http://moacube.com/games/cinders/

new otome game release and plans for the future

Good news: Always Remember Me is out of pre-order phase and now the difficulty problem has been solved. The game now on start-up will offer your two playing mode: the Hard mode is the previous one, with some minor adjustments, and is the right choice for dating sims experts. The Normal mode instead is aimed at casual players who I'm sure will appreciate the much reduced failure rate when trying the actions inside the life simulation part!

Of course you will still need to find the right actions to do, and the correct "path" for each character. Some scenes are very well hidden requiring you to be at a specific day/time on a specific place. I will probably write a sort of walkthrough on my forums later next week (since the game is just out I don't want to spoil the fun!!).

In case you haven't tried the game demo yet, check it now: http://www.winterwolves.com/rememberme.htm

(and yes, I changed only slightly the name adding "Always", to differentiate the game title from the movie).

In this week cats picture, Gilda and Grillo are sleeping peacefully together.

As indie developer instead, I can never sleep so peacefully! Numerous dangers lurk in the night... portals lowering price so much that soon they'll start paying people to play games, your server that goes down after hackers attack at midnight, some mysterious new bug appear in your latest released game and so on! But... the most feared of all is surely this: artists that disappear in the middle of development process! :D

Almost every indie I know had this problem, exception for those that use professional teams (but I've heard some problems even in those cases). Also most games don't really need much art like visual novels/dating sims, or even better just need 3d models: in this case you can commission them even from different people, since in 3d is much harder to notice a difference in style (while in 2d is immediately evident).

Anyway I'm not here to complain, but I find myself in a fun situation, where I have lots of story texts and game design ready for 3-4 games, but they're all on hold because of artists. Not everyone disappeared, some of them just took a break, others are busy doing commissions for other people (this is last time I give away my artists contacts!) , other moved full-time into comics and so on. That's why I start so many projects at once, unless you're making a game where you just need a few portraits (thinking about the RPGMaker XP games haha) is really hard to be sure that the person you hired for 2-3 months of will finish everything as planned.

I just finished 3 games this year so now I'm taking a break to see what I can do next. I think I could probably start working on the sequel of Spirited Heart. It has all the art done, but I wanted to wait until I was skilled enough to do a online game using Monkey (a new language that allows people to code games for HTML5/Flash without knowing JS/AS3). Problem is... I'm too used to Ren'Py now, and any other language looks too slow to develop with! :)

I really cannot imagine myself coding in something where I cannot immediately test the changes I just made with a keystroke to reload all the script, like I do with Ren'Py. That's just too much time-saving! The only other thing I know that can do that is VisualC, the system I was using before, but that would mean to leave out Linux from the target platforms and I don't like that, since I'd like to support my "penguin friends" :)

Speaking about that, a friend of mine, Neil (who runs a successful zombie-MMO) told me an interesting thing:

the question is, if you were to use Flash for example, would the result be anywhere near as good as with python? How much longer would it take? If it's going to take 2x longer then I'd say stick with what you know since I doubt the difference in conversions between web player and download will be more than 50%.

sometimes you really need an external point of view to fuly realize the situation, the pro and cons. That's why I always ask for advice and feedback for my games and my choices in general, because it really helps. My friend is basically right, it's not use to me to try making a game using another language if takes me x2-3 time more than just using Ren'Py and python (even if that means I need to have that damn auto-updater done!).

For now I'm still thinking how to design the game - probably there will be a normal offline part, and then a big online integration, though since I'm new to all of this I have to see how it works, and if I can actually make it without going mad :)

Meanwhile, the other projects like Loren RPG are on hold (even if the story is about 30% finished), while Planet Stronghold's add-on should  (not completely sure yet) see the light around July/August, since the artist said she would take time to finish the new images, even if she is quite busy with convention and school. Undead Lily game is also slowly progressing, but there's still a lot of art to be done, so probably won't be done quickly.

The only thing that's 100% sure to come out is Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook, since all the art is done, and will be released before the summer. More info about the game coming soon in the next weeks!

The Tao of indies!

In the picture above, Gilda and Grillo sleeping on the same basket. They seem to be forming a sort of Cat-Tao (or Dao)!

According to Wikipedia, the meaning of Tao is:

While the word itself literally translates as 'way', 'path', or 'route', or sometimes more loosely as 'doctrine' or 'principle', it is generally used to signify the primordial essence or fundamental aspect of the universe.

Today I want to talk about the Tao of indies! I hope my English will be up to it XD

Inspired by the friend/colleague Andy Schatz and his talk at this year GDC (I wasn't there but I've read lots of blogs posts about his talk) I want to remark how important it is, even for an indie, to follow your true inspiration, to do the game you want to do. Too much often I see indies working on "clone of game XZY" or "I had to change this because the publisher/distributor wanted it this way" and so on. Indies by definition should be free, free to do whatever they want.

Of course, you still have to keep some common sense and not start making the most crazy ideas that comes to mind! But the truth is that I've seen often projects that started as "quick diversive" (because you couldn't find the strength to finish the "big safe commercial project X") turn into great games. To summarize it better, I want to quote Andy himself:

“If you work on a game that’s really cool, you’ll either get recognition or you’ll make money,” says Schatz. But if you make a game to just make money, you’ll either fail, or you’ll make money. “So the way I see it is that if you make a game just to make money, that’s actually riskier.”

That's completely spot on. I know basically... nobody who made a game he hated AND made lot of money. Every single developer I see who made lot of money (and I know plenty) made it by working on a project he really loved.

For me, last autumn was a critical moment too. After the two Vera games that didn't sold very well, I was tired of writing VNs, and in general of making games! But at same time I felt almost like I completely forgot how to code, how to make a good game.

So, I decided to aim higher this time, and in 6 months I built a RPG framework on top of the Ren'Py engine and wrote Planet Stronghold. At first glance you might think that's simple, but in reality it's not at all. Writing the code for a RPG that features: a turn-based battle system, special attacks/effects on enemies and your party, inventory system, skills system, level up screen, training screen, exploration map, and probably something else I forgot, was a big effort.

But already from the first months, when I started the pre-alpha phase, and first sales started coming in, and at same time my almost desert forums started to see some activity of people suggesting new features / changes / improvements, I made peace with coding and once again I found the FUN in making the games, that I thought to have lost forever!

Because making games is fun. It should always be fun. If you're making a game, and you're not having fun, something is seriously wrong.

Next week will talk about progresses with the otome/lifesim Remeber Me, which hopefully will be out in April!