Loren Amazon Princess vs Planet Stronghold

As you can guess from the title of this blog post, I'm going to compare the two RPGs I made (so far). I'm not comparing them to decide which one is the best, because it wouldn't be fair ;) I mean, Planet Stronghold had a budget of 1/4 of Loren, and was made completely by myself, so it wouldn't be fair to be compared to Loren.

I'm going instead to examine the various gameplay element based on customers feedback and random forum/blog post I've encountered searching for my games around the net. For each point I'll give my personal opinion, but I'm quite sure that it mainly depends on your tastes!

From now on I'll refer to Planet Stronghold as "PS" and Loren Amazon Princess as "Loren" to save time!

The Inventory

PS uses a "classic" system: each character has his own separate inventory, they can trade items but for example if you didn't select a character in the party, his items are unavailable during the mission.
The equipment slots are only 3, weapon, armor and usable item.

Loren uses a more "modern" system: shared inventory between all the characters. It's less realistic, but more practical to use (minimizes the amount of clicking you need to do).
There are 13 equipment slots and a much more intuitive inventory system.

My opinion: there's no doubt that Loren's inventory is much more practical. It might be less realistic, but it has so many improvements over PS that is the clear winner here.

Vendors, items and impact on gameplay

Because of the setting, PS doesn't have currency, so you get new items automatically as you progress in the story, and through special quests. Since PS uses a finely crafted combat system, where each battle was tested well, I think the weapons and armors have more impact on the gameplay than in Loren, albeit there are only 40 different weapons/armors. This also because I used a "low-HP" system, where even 5hp of damage difference matters a lot especially in the early battles.

Loren has currency, and through grinding you can afford to buy better equipment even if the best stuff is found in the quests (in particular the new character personal quests of the expansion).

Loren has a very big database of items, reaching almost 1000 different weapons, armors, usable, gems, etc. So much more variety.

A mistake I made in the design of Loren was to have weapon damage as a proportional result of the character skills, and use many hit points for each enemy/character. So in practice the impact of the weapons statistics while still noticeable, is not that big. In a game where enemies can have from 80 to 500hp, the difference between powerful weapons and medium weapons can be of less than 15-20hp on each hit. Luckily, elemental damage still applies, so there's still some strategy involved.

My opinion: I think PS is slightly better than Loren, even if depends on your gaming tastes. In PS you need to find better weapons to win the hardest battles, on Loren is more about the skill combinations you use in battle.

Battle System

PS has 4 vs 4 battles. There's less strategy related to positioning on the battlefield, since there isn't a front and back row. The mechanics though, as noted above, seems to work well, in particular the aggro system.

Loren has a much more complex battle system featuring a 6 vs 6 fight, with a front and back row.  It has everything a fantasy RPG is supposed to have, including buffing, healing, area of effect attacks, guard other players, many types of attacks, and so on.

My opinion: They're two different experiences. In Loren you can have more variety of tactics, battles tend to last longer especially at hard difficulty. Battles in PS in general are quicker, because there are less units on screen and except some special cases, enemies can't resurrect allies. Loren has more variety of strategies and combos, but I don't mind PS different approach.

Classes, Skills and Quests

In PS there are 4 classes: Soldier, Scout, Guardian and Psionic. The skills are 23, including the psionic skills. They use a big scale system, so values 0 to 200. On each level up you can assign skill points. The main problem is that the impact is not extremely noticeable. If you add 3 skill points on Sniper Weapons you'll get +1 damage on each attack. Which is not really much. So takes several level ups before you see the effects of your choices.

The max recruitable characters are only 8, but in any case the characters have the same skills (even if different classes). So there aren't character unique skills like in Loren.

One thing that was really appreciated by players is the impact of the non-combat skills on the gameplay. During several points of the game, you can decide to use a skill to perform a specific task, changing the result of the mission. A door might need Lockpicking to be opened, you can throw a grenade if you have enough knowledge of Explosives, and so on.

The quests have more variety, since depending if you play as the Empire or the Rebels you'll see the same enemies but have very different goals to accomplish.

In Loren, the system used is the skill tree. There is a base Class (Warrior, Thief and Mage) and a specialization Class with a unique skilltree containing 5 skills. The total recruitable characters including the expansion is 14, so you have a very good variety of skills and attacks!

The story is more linear than PS (except for the expansion), so it's more like reading a good book and fight battles at certain intervals. The fact that there aren't non-combat skills limits the roleplay part to only the battles.

My opinion: In this case I think they both have pro and cons. The PS skills system is good because has a series of skills that can be used also outside the combat. It's optional of course, but is interesting in some quests being able to use Explosives, Survival, Charisma skills to avoid a battle or see a different outcome. Something that Loren missed. On the other hand, the big-scale skills of PS didn't work really well, while Loren's skilltree was better. I think the ideal solution is a mix between the two, with lower scale skills (0 to 10 or 20).

Romances and Relationship System

PS has less romance options than Loren, but the dialog choices that increase/decrease the relationship are non-trivial and better integrated into the story. There are several points in which picking a choice will increase the relationship in some characters and decrease it in others.

Loren has a LOT of romance options, a much longer romance path (and of course much better writing!) but as many people complained, is like playing with autopilot: to increase the relationship with a character will be enough to pick the dialog option  "(Romance)". While there are some occasions where other choices impact the relationships (like fighting Krul or not will impact your relationship with Amukiki) in general there's less freedom.

My opinion: In this case, the system used in PS is better, because is non trivial and also more realistic: taking a stance on a particular topic is very likely to create friends and enemies, like in the real world. Loren's approach is more casual, and even if I decided to make it that way on purpose, probably it wasn't a good idea.

In Conclusion

I'd like to add that making the "perfect RPG" is hard, also because every RPG player has a different idea of what is the perfect RPG. Loren might have been better with non-linear quests and non-combat skills, while PS could have used more variety of skills and combat actions, and a better writing.

I'd say that while Loren is very complete RPG under the combat aspect, and has much better story (in particular the romances), variety of enemies, is much longer, Planet Stronghold has more gameplay elements: beside the battles indeed, there are the skill choices, the minimap exploration with random places, the training facility where you can train your characters, and so on.

So in the end when I hear some people saying that one of the two games is better than the other I think it mainly depends on what you're looking for in a RPG game. Personally, I like both games for different reasons ;)

Doing a sequel is not easy as it seems

...at least for indies who doesn't make games with the only goal of money! ;)

It's quite common in the mainstream gaming to see titles like Quake 4, Might & Magic 8, and so on. But in most cases  (not the one I mentioned though) the software house make sequels just to capitalize on the game name, maybe releasing a product that is even worse than the original.

Now, so far I only made one sequel which is Heileen 2. Guess what? sold worse than Heileen 1, even if in this specific case I know why (the story was too serious for the target market, indeed with Heileen 3 it will be much more light comedy).

With a visual novel or dating sim though is easier to make sequels, with a RPG like Loren or Planet Stronghold is much harder. I am making Spirited Heart sequel right now, and it's relatively "easy" - I'm going to keep all the old dateable boys and add more (maybe as expansion, not sure yet).

But what I mean is - adding extra characters in such games is just a matter of adding some dialogues, because there wasn't a "main plot". Each characters was a separate story, and since you can replay it several times to get all the endings, it was something very different from Planet Stronghold or Loren, where the characters were inserted in a main plot with an ending.

So I'm pretty sure that no matter what I'll do, some people will complain because character XYZ who they loved in the first game, isn't present in the second. Others will complain and demand that the sequel's story starts where the first game ended, remembering all the big choices they made and the characters they romanced. And so on. As you can see, making a sequel for a RPG is definitely not an easy task, unless you set it several years away in future (so you assume all the original characters are dead!).

I believed that yesterday I finally found the right romance setup for Loren sequel, which will happily feature almost all the romances of the first game, excluding only Karen. It was harder than it sounds, really!

As you can see in the image above, Mother Morte has a nice sense of humour

Regarding the expansion, just today I finished testing the Dwarven Mines, one of the new locations, and it seems well balanced. There is still some stuff to write and script (adding images to the story) but it seems that the expansion MIGHT be really out the 15th of August! I hope to talk about it in next Friday blog post :)

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.

Show Me The Sales

"Show Me The Sales" is an indie initiative promoted by my friend Cliff of Positech and other developers. In practice is a time limited sale where you can get many indie games at very discounted prices. The games list includes:

Planet Stronghold
Evochron Mercenary
Scoregasm
Space Pirates and Zombies
Mr Robot
Project Aftermath
Magical Diary: Horse Hall
AI War: Fleet Command
Gratuitous Space Battles
Solium Infernum
New Star Soccer 5
Revenge of the Titans
Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon
Smugglers IV
Frozen Synapse

...and many more!

As you can see there are many interesting games for all tastes, including my Planet Stronghold RPG game with a generous 60% discount. I also updated the game to use the latest Ren'Py build even if this caused a few problem/bugs, so make sure you download the latest version, the 1.4c!

Even if the promotion was live since monday, don't worry: it ends the 28th of November so there's still plenty of time to buy the games. Now about my currently games in progress, I'm pleased to show you this:

See the full gallery on Posterous

Yes, in the gallery above you see the main menu, the credits and the gallery screen of Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook! The current goal is to have the pre-orders available at the end of the month! Stay tuned for more news.

One RPG a year keeps the doctor away

In the photo above my cat Grillo sleeping deeply with a stuffed toy near him :)

Now you might wonder why I picked that title for my post? As you know I've always worked on many games at once, as a way to keep up with the occasional disappearances of artists. However, while this method is working well for my visual novel, dating sim and life simulation games, for RPGs is a different story. I've noticed that is very hard to keep focused on doing more than one RPG at once (lol, not a surprise!) so I've decided that, to avoid releasing poor/mediocre games, I won't be working on more than one RPG a year!

This doesn't include expansions or even sequels like Planet Stronghold: Warzone. When/if I can re-use most of the gameplay and rules of a previous RPG, then I believe that is possible to make even two a year, but if I have to create a new RPG from scratch... that's not possible!

I am not talking only about the coding. The coding is a tough part of RPGs, that's for sure, but what makes really hard to release a good one is the amount of content needed. I dare to say (and I'm sure most game developers will agree with me) that a RPG is the kind of game that requires more work of all the game genres. You need a story. You need several quests, which are basically subplots, and they need to fit in the main story and not be just stupid "kill 10 rats" quests (having some of them are OK, but not all quests should be like that). There's need of art, lots of art. Since I do mainly 2d games, every enemy is a sprite. How many enemies a RPG have? Planet Stronghold has 40, though some re-use the basic shape changing color/weapons. Loren RPG, my upcoming fantasy RPG will have 40-50 enemies as well, but they will be all different ones! So that's already a lot of work just for the art.

And last but not least, testing. Unless the RPG you're making is very linear and has "casual gameplay" (very simple rules), the testing will be a major pain ! :) You have to take into account every possible variable and combination, and often if you don't ,you end up with very mysterious bugs and unhappy customers (though I have to say that my RPG buyers were much more supportive than those of other games genres!).

So, what does this means in practice? that while I'll keep artists working on Undead Lily's artwork, I will release Loren RPG first, and Undead Lily next year. This way, I'll be able to release two quality products. Loren RPG is at good point - even if I keep adding "just one more enemy" since a month, the plot writing is going steadly and the battle system coding is almost finished. As I announced in my forums, once the RPG framework reaches a decent state I plan to release a small alpha to get user feedback and do some testing.

As for Planet Stronghold: Warzone, the artist said that after this last convention, she will work fulltime on it. There's need of quite some art, new enemies, a new playable character to replace the old Bellamy, and more CGs scenes for the romances. I don't have any planned release date, my idea is to keep this game going on parallel with the others and see when is finished. As I said, since I can reuse a good part of the previous Planet Stronghold code/rules/system, this game will be easier/quicker to produce than Loren RPG or Undead Lily.

So the plan is to try finishing Loren RPG by end of this year (no guarantees) and Undead Lily for summer next year, while Planet Stronghold: Warzone might really be finished anytime between the two. Obviously, I'll keep releasing visual novel and dating/life sim in the meanwhile, like I did this year.

Winter is coming next week!

See the full gallery on Posterous

At least the pre-orders! No I didn't went insane because of excessive work (even if it's not a remote possibility after all!). I'm talking obviously about The Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook, which we're currently testing and polishing. I know in the past I posted the game will be out soon, but this time is really soon. Before starting with pre-orders there are only minor things to do, like adding sprites and some backgrounds but all the assets are ready. So we only need a bit more time to put everything in the right place and test it so that every ending can be reached.

As always, follow my twitter / blog / facebook / google plus for the early announcements! For those who yet haven't played the first game, during this weekend we're running an amazing promotion: the first title, Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook will be available for only $9.99 ! Spread the word and if you haven't already, buy the game and play it to get introduced to Fairbrook and its people!

Other news...

Queen of Thieves art is also progressing really well, below you can see Kira, the Warrior. Again, there will be lots of possible character customization available in the final game.

Planet Stonghold: Warzone won't be "an expansion" anymore but a real full-length stand-alone title. I worked already on improving the Psionic Powers by adding Area Of Effect (hits two targets) and mass target (hits all targets). This both for the offensive and defensive Psionics, which means now you can do a "group Heal" to your party or also a "group Harm" to the enemies. Just beware that the enemies won't like this sort of thing and they'll aggro against your poor Psionic very quickly ;)

Summer Sneak Peek

Recently my blog posts were all focused on my upcoming otome game Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook. However, people that follows me knows I'm working also on several other projects (I'd dare to say "too many" lol). Most of them are new RPGs, though there are also more dating sim and otome games in the works, but they might be done after the summer.

Loren Amazon Princess

After a moment of hiatus, because had to decide what kind of art style to use, I finally found a new artist and I'm going to use manga art for it too. Though will be more "adult" manga art as you can see from the images below:

This is Loren, the main character of the game (which won't be directly controllable by the player though)

Next two ones are Saren and Elenor, the two playable characters that you can pick at the beginning of the game. Like I already did with Planet Stronghold, the gender you pick at the start of the game will influence which romance options will be available to you during the game.

lastly, this is Dora, a female dwarf scout that will be one of the various characters that will join you during the game story. In total there are 12 playable characters.

There is also a male dwarf in the game though is really not cute as her :D He's the classical muscular, axe wielding angry warrior with long beard.

As I posted before, for indies is really hard to find reliable artists, so you cannot really know when the art for your next game will all be finished. Though I must say that if things keep going at this pace, I could have all art needed for Loren finished before end of June, which means I can start working on it at full pace. No estimate release yet, since also depends which system I'll use for the battles, and the story is only 30% or so done , so there's still much left to do.

Spirited Heart "yuri" expansion

This is one of the other projects I'm working on, with the help of Aleema from Lemmasoft who is writing the yuri scenes. For those unfamiliar with the japanese term, "yuri" means girl love. I'm going to add 6 new dateable female characters to the base game, each one with her own romance subplot and personality/secrets to discover, and is going to cost $9.99. I believe is a small price to pay for the upgrade since there are lots of new characters and some are *really* interesting.

This expansion is very likely to be out in July/August since things are going well with it.

Planet Stronghold "Warzone" expansion

This mainly depends on the artist speed. So far only a few new characters from the original game have been "redrawn" to reflect the fact that in the story the time has advanced of some years. This will be an add-on, featuring new monsters, items, weapons, but also I hope to introduce a few minor gameplay enhancement, like the possibility to have a strategic map and control resources, so that you can build new stuff with it. Adding some strategy element should make the game even more replayable than the original was. Also, there will be two extra romance option, Prince Cliff - Lisa (got sooo many requests for this!) and Shiler - Joshua (this is interesting).

I really cannot know about this, however I believe in June artist should be free of conventions and in theory, I could finish this one by September or so (I hope!).

Undead Lily and The Elemental Avengers

This is also going well - though is a very ambitious game and has lots of animations/character poses (there are already 12 basic character pose with eye/mouth animations and 10 battle poses done). So while I cannot complain about artist speed, it is still going to take a while because is a big game. I really hope to have this done by next Christmas, though I'm not sure, really!

See the full gallery on Posterous

I have a few more games I'm working on in parallel, but I want to keep those "secret" for now ;)

Planet Stronghold v 1.0 released!

In the picture above, Gilda sleeping in a "wooden drawer" we had in our previous house. She seems to enjoy it :)

After about 2 months of playtesting, I can officially announce the release of version 1.0 of my sci-fi RPG game Planet Stronghold! It has been a very long journey, from the "classic" early prototypes with programmer art to the final result which features beautiful manga artwork and a very detailed combat system. I started the game at the end of 2009, worked on it until beginning of 2010 then paused it to release the two Vera Blanc games. And then I resumed working on it in September 2010, and I've listened to all the suggestion people made in the course of those last 6 months, implementing lots of features that people requested.

Hopefully this process made Planet Stronghold a better game (I have no doubts about it) and for that I want to send a special thank you to everyone who sent their suggestions, who supported me buying the early alpha versions back in september 2010, when the game was only a few chapter long and still quite rough, and who is supporting me in any way (offering free proofread, telling friends about my site, and so on).

I don't know if the game will be a success or not, but I've enjoyed making it. And most importantly it helped me build a sort of "RPG framework", so that I'll be able to release new RPGs in future at much faster pace! :)

So, for those who don't know yet what I'm talking about, check the official game trailer:

You can download a demo at the official website: http://www.planetstronghold.com and see more screenshots and buy it on Winter Wolves main website: http://www.winterwolves.com/planetstronghold.htm

If you like RPGs, stay tuned since I have plans to create several more RPGs in the next months, alongside my other projects (mostly visual novels and dating sims). And now for those who enjoy reading postmortems:

The making of Planet Stronghold

It was the end of 2009 when I thought would have been nice to do a visual novel with some "light" roleplay elements, so I started working on Planet Stronghold.

Initially I had picked another artist, but she was lazy and uncollaborative, so I "fired" her and found a much better one (more reliable and much more skilled). A typical mistake that I always make is to be forgiving with people, but the reality is that if you're running a business, if you're not an amateur anymore, and you need to do things the serious way. You can still be friendly of course, but as soon as you notice people are trying to take advantage of you, don't hesitate to put them back on track, or you'll end up wasting lot of precious time yourself and in the end have to change collaborators anyway!

So, at the end of 2009 - beginning of 2010 I had a very simple system in place. Then I took a break to make the two Vera Blanc games, but I was still working a bit on Planet Stronghold in the "spare time". And then, I started adding features. I had the battles, and I thought "why characters must always use one single weapon? it's unrealistic! and voilà, I added an inventory. Then I thought "if all heroes have same skills, what's make them different?" and again, I added the Skills system. But what is a sci-fi RPG without some fancy replacement for the fantasy RPG magic? And so I added the Psionics skills! :D

As you can see, with such kind of games, if you like to add new features, you can basically go on as much as you want. But unless you're mad you have to stop at one point! And indeed when I was about to implement some sort of movement system, like a tilemap I thought "wait... I need to release this game before 2012", and so I opted for a simpler movement system.

Then I began writing the main plot which, as you probably have noticed if you just played the demo, is VERY LONG. Once again, maybe as first attempt into a new territory (for me) I made a mistake in making such a big game. Perhaps I should have made the game smaller, to test the waters first? Who knows, I know for certain that nobody can complain about this game longevity since I can say without doubt that is the longest (and also most replayable) game I've ever made!

From September through today, I've started working on the game full-time, and I decided to try the "open-alpha" and then later "open-beta" approach. If you're making a complex game, not necessarily a RPG, I strongly recommend doing it. Some people do a closed alpha pre-orders, and that's fine too, but I found out that by making the alpha public I got lot more feedback. Considering I'm a small indie developer, I was surprised by the amount of feedback I got, both in my forums and privately by emails!

Overall I'm very satisfied by the game - since it has already sold well during the alpha/beta stage, so means there's some potential for VN/RPG hybrids. I could have probably done it faster using some different coding tecniques, but now at least for future games I know how to get started quickly. Also, I have to be honest, while coding it the library I choose (Ren'Py) got the biggest update of its whole history, switching from software rendering to accelerated OpenGL, and adding a new screen language format. This was a great thing, but happened right when I was stil coding the game! So I was unsure what to do, and in the end I decided to upgrade, so had to redesign some parts of the game to use the new language.

This delayed the game, even if now plays much faster even on very low-end netbooks. Future RPGs will be done directly in the new system so I won't have those problems anymore.

Lastly, about two weeks ago I decided to try the "Steam Lottery". Some developer friends and I have called it that way, because you never know if you're going to be accepted by them or not, also especially because they have no guidelines, and give no explanation when your game is rejected. Since another manga game with RPG element (Recettear) was recently quite popular on Steam, I thought to try.

Obviously, they rejected it, but this time it wasn't an immediate email, they actually asked for demo and played it! It must mean that is my best game so far, in a way or the other :)

Official Planet Stronghold Strategy Guide available (plus in-game bonus items)

I've finally finished writing Planet Stronghold's official strategy guide! You can now purchase it for only $4.99 and get four unique extra weapons in the game (see picture below). The guide comes as PDF download, and once purchased it also adds four new items in the game. To get the items, you need to start a new game and make sure you're connected to internet. After you get the activation message, you can then continue play the game offline as usual. Please Note: if for some reason you use a different email to buy the guide from the one you used to register the main game, please email me to activate the new in-game weapons!

The guide is over 50 pages and is full of tips & tricks, including:

• how to defeat the boss enemies
• the right dialog choices during the romances subplots
• which are the best items of the game and how to get them
• some "cheats" and "exploits" that you can use to your advantage ;)

To get the guide use this link: http://www.winterwolves.com/buy.php?prod=17030044

If you're still not sure, check the preview below (an extract from the guide) to see what's the sort of stuff you can find inside it.

Download now or preview on posterous

PS_StrategyGuideDemo.pdf (1580 KB)