A week as webdesigner

Probably not many of you know that before going indie, I was a (rather poor to be fair) webdesigner. Many people probably think that being a webdesigner is a creative job but the reality is that after you do the 100th website, you start to have enough... :)

Anyway, this week I was waiting for some people to send me assets (writing, art, music, etc) so I was idle. If wasn't Winter I would have use this unexpected "free time" to do some trips around here to relax, but since it is, I thought to finally begin the redesign of my website, something I've been procrastinating for too long!

You can see a "sneak peek" here: http://www.winterwolves.com/test/

It's still largely unfinished and many links are broken, but that's more or less how the new homepage will look, I think a big improvement over the current one.

Roger Steel: Arthur point of view

After the big reveal of Winter Wolves' new steampunk graphic adventure romance RPG Roger Steel and the Human Element on this illustrious blog last week, Ann's younger brother Arthur was somewhat miffed that most of the razzamatazz focused on her. He wants you to know his side of the story, so ...

When Arthur Trevelyan's sister Ann falls for the wrong boy yet again, he is asked to accompany her to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, to keep her out of mischief.

But looking after Ann proves to be a challenge even with the help of lifelong friends, Neville and Christina Mortimer.

When she is inevitably kidnapped by a new flame, it is up to Arthur to rescue her and ponder the immortal question – how can two dorky friends and six perfect strangers with hidden agendas possibly be any more trouble than one headstrong big sister?

And if you want to read more, check the forums: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2844

Bionic Heart 2

This week reached scene15, which probably won't tell you much. For me means line 5799 out of about 11.000 so we're about halfway coding the game, which means that it could be out around end of the month, speaking of the beta version of course! Then there's the testing phase and because this game has so much branching options, is going to take a while...

Tanya meets with a mysterious geek boy. Who is he?

Roommates

Time for two new reports, this time Sally and Dominic (straight romances only).

See the full gallery on Posterous

Writer is working on the Spring Break scenes, featuring all characters in swimsuits ;) Unofficial rumours says that the game plot might be finished by the end of this month: however don't get too much excited, since there's still a lot of work to be done, scripting, coding, testing... and all the background art to do. So a more realistic estimate release date could be this Summer!

2012 the year of Loren

As usual I'm doing the end of the year blog post, in which I talk how it was the year that is about to end for me. Looking back at the post I wrote in 2011, lots of things went better.

First of all, and most importantly, I didn't had so many losses like last year. In April I lost my cat Orpheus, but luckily it was the only loss.

The year of RPGs and Loren

Personal life apart, the main event of this year for me as you can guess was the release of the RPG Loren The Amazon Princess. I already did a postmortem about it, but now that more than 6 months passed after its release, the response of people that are playing/discovering it is still amazing, and I can absolutely say that will do more RPGs in future :)

Does it means that I will do only RPGs? No, of course! I need some simpler games from time to time to take a break and recharge batteries. Heileen 3 was good on this regard, because while is true that making it was still working, it felt almost relaxing to have "just to design and code some simple life simulation rules" instead of balancing 60 skills and testing endless battles like I did for Loren :D

I'll still put some RPG mechanics in the other games though, like the leveling skills of Heileen 3 (which I think was something relatively new, at least in the OELVN?) or the "crafting gameplay" that will be present in Amber's Magic Shop.

This year was my best since I went indie, and this means that I must thank first everyone who is supporting my games (I'm not on any big portal, so every little sale count!) and also a special thanks to all my valid collaborators/partners who are helping me so much to make better games! In no order and using a mix of names/nicknames: Aleema, Anima, Sarah, Megan, Michael, Franklin, George, Deji, Ayu, Matthew, Eddy, Slamet and everyone else who probably missed but that helped me making games.

Future improvements

I think that the artwork of my games is already at good levels, even if will try to have more quantity/variety of images or scenes. However, there are two crucial aspects that I plan to improve in the next year games:

Custom soundtracks

It's something so obvious that is quite embarrassing for me to say it. In the past games I always used royalty free audio tracks. A bit because I couldn't afford to hire a musician, and also because I have hard time to explain exactly what music I need, because of language barrier.

However as I've seen by the response to Heileen 3 custom track bonus, people really like that. So for all future games I'll have full soundtracks made and have them available as mp3 bonus content.

Professionally made logos

A friend of mine pointed out that while the art of my games is in general quite good, the logos sucks. Indeed, I made most of the logos myself! :) That's why I asked M.Beatriz Garcia also known as Deji to create logos for all the next games, so for sure they will look much better!

It might seem a minor detail, but I must say that people often judge games by first impressions. And surely a professionally done logo has much better impact than my current ones.

In conclusion

Even for this year the show is over! I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year, and I'm looking forward to work on the next year games. Stay tuned!

BecauseWeMay sale and game prices

First of all I wanted to inform you that I'm participating to the BecauseWeMay initiative. What is it? Quoting from the website:

We believe that developers should have the freedom to price their games how they like, without interference from the online stores that sell the games. Why? Because it allows us to promote our games more freely, as we are doing here! We rely on the ability to promote our games for our livelihood and control over pricing is an important tool for this purpose.

For the last week of May (May 24 through June 1) our games will be deeply discounted to celebrate online stores that give us control over pricing: The App Store, Google Play, Steam, Desura, IndieVania, and a few others.

I offered my game Spirited Heart + Girl's Love at half price, sold directly and in the Google Play store.

About game pricing

Game pricing is more complex than what people imagine. I often got comments about how my game prices are too high, and I should price them $9.99, because that's what an indie game should cost :)

You can talk about what indie is, what is really worth (3d cutscenes or GAMEPLAY?) and if my games sucks or not. But one thing you simply cannot argue are the statistics. Us developer aren't setting the games prices randomly! At least, I don't. If you're an indie dev you should only listen to your statistics and not what people tell you. Doing occasional sales like this one is fine of course :)

Also, this is my personal experience. I am sure different game types have different audience and prices. I cannot imagine a tower defense or a platform game to cost more than $9.99 for example!

Now, let's see some graphs just to explain better. Below is Spirited Heart Girl's Love revenues graph from the launch day to the BecauseWeMay sale:

...not an impressive bump eh? The fact is that during the release day, all sales came from my own site only and a few affiliates. Instead I got lots of traffic from because we may initiative, but despite having many sales, the half-price really hurts revenues. Still, was a somewhat good result compared to the regular sales. Maybe I should lower game prices then? Let's check Spirited Heart graph instead:

...for this one I didn't even had to go back to the release day to find more profitable days. In two previous occasions, when I sent the newsletter to announce updates about Loren or promote some other game, I got more revenues than for the BecauseWeMay sale. And I got much more traffic from the becausewemay initiative than during those newsletters!

And portals?

But what about portals ? Sadly as you know my experience is very limited, but luckily there are some very indie-friendly portals like Desura. I don't have Spirited Heart there (couldn't make it in time since uses DLC and I don't know yet how to implement it) but I recently put Planet Stronghold, and many people complained about price. So, after a while I did a sale last weekend for $9.99 instead of $24.99, and I promoted it on twitter, and showed up on the "on sale" section of Desura (which I think is the most visited! lol). Result:

Yes, the day of the sale the revenue was slightly higher than release day, and in other two occasions. But what about in the long run ? I am not really sure, considering the increase was so small that could have just been a random thing! Also, I should compare prices without a promotion, because is normal to have higher exposure during a promotional sale...

I will continue to experiment with prices of course, but so far everything seems to confirm that lower prices = lower revenues. I'd be very happy if I could make same amount of money (or maybe more) and at same time make more customers happy, but so far it really doesn't seem the case.

The end is near!

No, I'm not talking about the Mayan prophecy :) Sadly, I'm not even talking about the Loren RPG, since I think will still take a few months before is finished.

I'm talking about two scary news I've read this week. They regard the upcoming MacOS Mountain Lion and Windows 8. As you might know, they both will come with a built-in appstore. But the scary news is that both will DISABLE BY DEFAULT "non signed" apps.

What does it means? It means that if you install the new MacOS and download one of my current games, you won't be able to play it. Of course, at least in those first new OS versions, there will be a work around. For Windows, you'll have to switch back to the "desktop mode", while for MacOS you'll have to enable the app by right clicking on it.

So, it's not as scary as it seems right? No, it is. First, because it's a first step towards a "walled garden", which will probably lead to the impossibility to run non-certified apps at all in future versions. Second, not all users are tech-savy, so for them running the app might become too much of a trouble, which means that my niche will become even smaller. Others might even not trust installing non-certified apps anymore, despite they are completely safe.

But it's not over yet, now comes the good part: from what I gathered reading those articles, even if I pay the annual fees to get my games certified (so they can run without any trick), Apple can still disable/ban any app remotely. Let's say I make another RPG game like Loren, which has some VERY HOT romance scenes at the end. Some users don't like that and complain. Apple might disable the game permanently! (not saying that they will for sure, but the possibility is there)

Of course, all of this is just a conjecture for now, and the danger is not imminent. I believe will take at least 4-5 more years before all of this will be very common. But still, the future is NOT promising at all.

Considering I sell mostly directly, I have really few options, and the most rational seems to abandon the downloads to move into webgames using HTML5 or Unity web plugin. I have to say that personally I DON'T like this, but is a kind of a forced choice. I don't want to make more games, knowing that in a not distant future they might become obsolete, forgotten. I'd like people to be able to play my games for years and years to come in an easy way, and right now using downloads it seems a very risky path.

Loren The Amazon Princess beta demo this weekend!

Anyway, for now I'll concentrate on finishing Loren RPG, since I definitely cannot port the game to another language now! Expect a demo tomorrow or Sunday. Will post the news on my twitter, on Facebook and will also send the newsletter.

How long will be the demo? Well, I am not sure if today will manage to finish chapter1 or not, but will try. In any case, considering you can take two paths early in the game (side with humans or elves) I believe that should be at least a few hours of entertainment.

As for the pre-orders I am not sure if I'll start them with the demo or wait a bit more. Is something that I will decide in the next days based on how much work I can put on the game before the demo is live.

2011 The Year Of Farewells

This year was... weird. It was bittersweet, crazy, successful, painful, happy, sad and... the year of farewells.

This year indeed I've said farewell to my beloved uncle, the person who helped me to become a game developer more than anyone else since I was a kid.

I've said farewell to several pets: the last one, my dog Artù, just a week ago. In the picture above I'm with him during a trip to Germany.

But it was also the year I said farewell to my old car. I know it might seem stupid: but I was somehow attached to it. It was the car I had on my first date. The car I used to go at the office for my first job. Was the car I used when I gave the first passage to my girlfriend, and when I went on my first holiday trip. So many memories, mostly good ones!

I've also said farewell to portals: or at least, to submitting to them. I've come to the conclusion that they get so many submissions that unless you make a perfectly "targeted" game, you won't have any chances. Or you need to be featured on the most popular websites, which is something that seems forbidden to me for reason behind my control. So, from now on, I'll just save my time and take care only of my followers!

How was business in the 2011

On the "business" side, this has been my most successful year ever since I was indie. This month was the best one, despite the various indie bundles, sales, and the crisis. I really hope business will continue like this month, would help me to relax a bit!

Of course, I'm not getting too much excited. Since I know that in a fast paced technology-related business things might change completely in just a few years (or even months). Still it feels good for once not being worried to pay the bills!! :)

It's interesting, if I think back about 2010 which was a rather disappointing year (mainly because of the two Vera Blanc games and Card Sweethearts, the worst-selling games I've ever made!). I was sad and angry because of the various failures, but I still had all my pets and my family members alive. I think this year taught me what really matters in life, not money or success - but love and being loved.

Next Year Goals

I really have big hopes for next year, since I'll release many interesting new games of all kinds (RPGs, dating sim, otome, etc). The only thing I fear honestly, is that I might have to slow down a bit. I am not a machine, and this year for various reasons I was forced to be at home, and since at home I have my computer and internet connection... I worked! I didn't have a SINGLE DAY of holidays. Of course I didn't code or write all the year, but even managing people/sending emails takes lot of time.

And as a consequence I released 5 games in a year, which is something never happened before. I'll try my best, but don't expect 5 games next year! Even if who knows, maybe will still happen.

Happy New Year to everyone!!

Sometimes Life Gets the Best of You

In the photo above, my dog Nick who passed to better life last sunday.

As the title says, sometimes real life gets in the way of indies. I won't be lying, this month has been the worst of my life so far. Earlier I lost my uncle Don Giulio, a catholic priest (but religion doesn't matter, he was a good person and helped a lot of people during his life). It has been a very important figure in my life, and in some way also helped me to become an indie.

As if losing people and pets I loved wasn't enough, the heat here (but also in US from what I've heard) has been insane since about two weeks. I bought an A/C, but even if I turn it on, the noise is too much to concentrate (I am not the kind of person who listen to music/radio while working, I need complete silence)!

Luckily, nowadays I use a lots of external people to work on my games. So even if this month I was mostly unproductive, I was still able to communicate with the writers, coders, artists and keep my active projects moving. But is scary to think how the life (and career) of a lone indie can be at risk when "the life gets the best of you".

This friday I wanted to have the pre-oders of Spirited Heart Girl's Love ready, for example. Everything is done: the art is ready, the story has been finished since July, the ending voiceovers redone. There are only a few sprites left to put in the game, test it a bit and do the various installers and upload them. Probably a day of work, but in the last 3 days was able to work on average 2h a day (and also had other projects to keep going that required my attention).

I think if today I worked at maximum speed I could have made it - but I don't like to realease things in a rush. I like to polish my games, adding small details and making sure everything works. But all those little things take time! I'm sure many of you that follow me are wondering what happened to the other game Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook. That is another example of what happens when the life gets the best of us, in this case of my friend and partner in this game, Ayu of Sakevisual. She had many problems too recently, and even if a "pre-order" version was ready at beginning of this month, there were still several smaller things out of place, so we decided was better to wait until everything was perfect.

However, talking about Spirited Heart Girl's Love, I can definitely promise it will be out this weekend - even if I can work only during the morning, in two days of work the game should be 100% finished and ready for pre-orders. So stay tuned and follow me on twitter for the announcement! :)

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!

Downloadables are dead, long live downloadables

In the picture above, Otello happily posing in middle of the flowers. I love spring :)

As you could guess from the title, this is a rant-post. I've heard so many discussions recently about the dying downloadables, how online games is the future, and so on. It's a very complex discussion, so I'm not going into every detail (also because I want to talk about my games) however I feel the need to say a few things:

• "dead markets" doesn't mean that you cannot make any profit in them. It only means that the main hype moved elsewhere. Also, since there's less hype, means that there's also less competition. I believe that as indie, having less competition is much more important than having a bigger potential target market.
• speaking for my games, in general story-based games works best as single player. I've never played a multiplayer game that also was immersive or told me a good story, simply because storytelling requires only one viewer/spectator. If you give other people the possibility to influence a plot or ruin the mood, don't worry, they'll absolutely do it (anyone who played a MMORPG surely has met people that would destroy the fantasy setting atmosphere in a second with some typical US-slang words :D)
• remember that very big portals are still using the downloadables model. Big Fish Games in the casual world, Steam, D2D, Gamersgate, Impulse and others for the more "hardcore/niche" games. They're not going to disappear overnight, and I believe not even in 5-10 years
• also as indie, we're different from big publishers and most of the discussions don't apply. Look at Spiderweb games. Old-school RPG are dead, right? since about 1990. He is not doing well indeed. He is doing extremely well! As indie (especially if you work alone or in a small team) you don't necessarily need to sell a $1 game to 100,000 people in a week, but you can have better luck trying to sell a $20 game to "only" 10000 in several years. That makes quite a difference!

That said, of course online games/web games can be profitable! I never said the opposite. Only that they require a completely different subset of skills vs the traditional downloadables, and also on marketing. I am currently doing research to make some online games as well, but it's a big step for me. Most of the successful online games are run by a team, with a few exceptions, and don't want to committ myself to something "too big" yet. I could do some experiments though.

For example, an idea I recently had was to add an online mode to Planet Stronghold. You would play online battles (not PvP though, at least initially) and as you win you would get experience, money to spend on better equipment or buying skills, and so on. It would be completely separated from the main game, so that I was even thinking to sell it as stand alone game or maybe use the free-to-play model. However I'm not sure if there's enough interest to justify the time I'd have to spend to do this (especially coding the server part), even if it wouldn't be a completely new game since I would be able to reuse good part of the normal offline game system.

In general I think that while visual novel, dating sims, and other similar games gain zero benefits from being online, other kind of games like RPG, simulation, strategy games can become more interesting with new online features.

Speaking of dating / life sim, I've made more progresses on Remember Me this week, and some events are really cool like the one below:

Who is this mysterious secret admirer? you'll have to play the game to find out, even if honestly is not that difficult!

I've also got some important news about the other games in development. Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook is getting close to the release! I don't have yet an exact date, but should be before next June, so not much left to wait. I'm currently writing (with help of external writers) and getting the art done for the simulation/RPG game Queen Of Thieves and the comic-RPG game Loren: Amazon Princess. My sports simulation game Universal Boxing Manager 2 is also going on well, even if right now there's not enough to make a video, since the coder is mostly doing stuff that appears behind the scenes (statistics, AI, gameplay, and so on).

My planned release schedule (which surely will be messed up completely) would be:

1. Mid/End-April - Remember Me
2. End of May/June - Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook
3. July/August - Loren The Amazon Princess
4. September/October - Queen of Thieves
5. November/December - either the superheroes game or maybe UBM2

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!