Heileen 3 postmortem

With the official release of Heileen 3: Sea Maidens, the development of Heileen 3 ends. As always, both the otome (GxB) and the yuri (GxG) versions are merged in one single download and then you can choose what version to buy and play (or both!).

More info on the official page: http://www.winterwolves.com/heileen3.htm

I just did an update this morning to address a problem playing in Hard mode (getting a profession ending was really too difficult) but the rest of the game was unchanged and has been in testing since over two weeks, so decided to release it officially.

Heileen postmortem

The Heileen series ends with this third chapter, and I'm overall satisfied by it. Without doubts it's the best game of the series under several aspects: the longest, the most funny, the one with more variety of romances, the one with more artwork, the first one with a custom soundtrack and theme song, and the list goes on.

Of course, it's still not comparable with my bigger budget RPG games in terms of gameplay, complexity or mechanics. I did it mostly because I wanted to make it - I knew already beforehand that probably it wouldn't have been a big success, but even as indie sometimes you make games only because you want to do them for yourself :)

Ideally, the games you enjoy making for yourself are also a commercial success, but very often that's not the case...

Anyway I don't regret making it, but for sure I have no plans to make any more games in Heileen world, also because I feel I wouldn't have anything else to add, and I don't want to drag it too long, like happens in some TV series, where you think "why they didn't end the story in this season? Making another one makes no sense.". That's what I think about Heileen 3 too.

The development

The game development started in Summer 2011, I wrote the full storyboard of it between July and September of that year. Then I started commissioning the new artwork, and the original writer started with the story. In the course of 2012, several things happened:

• the original idea was to have four male romance options, and two females. But talking with people in forums I agreed that didn't make much sense, so I decided to divide the game in a otome and a yuri version, adding two extra female romances (Ebele and by popular demand, Juliet)
• writer had to quit about mid-way, so I found another one, Sarah, to replace her and finish the game, in particular the new yuri romances and several extra scenes. I was really lucky to find her, since she worked hard and without her help I wouldn't have met the deadline for sure!
• the last months of development were really frantic, with some extra art needed, background artists that quit, and the usual mess associated with developing a game when you have a deadline: finish the otome version before Christmas :)

In the end I didn't had to make many compromises, maybe I would have added more sprite poses if had more time, but in the end as I said I'm happy enough of the final result, considering the kind of game (light comedy) and the primary target market (teens/young adult).

Now, the next challege is to finish Bionic Heart 2 before March... :)

Loren Amazon Princess expansion is out and postmortem

First of all, I want to announce officially that Castle Of N'Mar, Loren's expansion, is finally out after a long testing stage. It features three new characters, four new romance combos, new zones to explore, non-linear quests, different endings and much more.

You can get more info at the official page: http://www.winterwolves.com/lorencastleofnmar.htm

If you preordered the game, to register it just redownload the game demo from the website to get the latest version which now includes the base game+expansion.

Making of and postmortem

I had the idea of making an expansion to the main game since beginning of the year. Including all the content in the base game wouldn't have been viable for me - since the game+expansion is now 230k words and has really a LOT of content, almost 3 times the length of Planet Stronghold!

So for obvious financial reasons I couldn't include everything in the base game, but I decided to split it in the base + expansion.

The expansion was well received and sold well. However, I made a big mistake when I planned it: making an expansion that adds new content to the existing storyline is... A TOTAL PAIN!! :D

Why? For several reasons, in no particular order:

• Because you had to check every possible change that could happen in the main story, based on the new content you added
• Because the new content was visible only before a specific point of the story, causing some confusion on players
• Because it would also change the final endings! So, sometimes you had to play it to the end to find out any plot holes
• Because not happy about the difficulty, I even decided to add non-linear quests which added extra problems!

So as you can see it wasn't definitely a smooth release. Consider also that this summer when we worked on it was insanely hot, and... yeah, it was really hard to finish it, but finally is out and I'm quite happy about the result :)

But if I had to do it again, for sure the story would take place after the base game, continuing the plot, rather than adding extra content in the middle of it. A mistake to not repeat again.

Also, while some people liked the non-linear quests, I am not sure they're really worth the extra efforts. I think players would prefer a longer game anyway, rather than having non-linear quests.

The manga bundle

As you know, in the past weeks I also ran a promotion called "Manga Bundle". It ended with 1374 bundles sold and while I don't know the final gross revenues yet, but even if it doesn't seem as good as the other bundles, I don't mind too much since I did it mainly for the charity aspect and to let more people know about my games.

It didn't do so well also probably because it wasn't a very good moment to do it. Too many good, top AAA games coming out (Torchlight 2, Borderlands 2, XCOM, etc) and also several bundles including the big Humble Bundle launched about at the same time. I think things might have gone differently under different circumstances.

Also to be fair, the games I offered were the oldest ones and plain visual novels. When Spirited Heart was unlocked 2 days ago, the bundles sold had a big spike - obviously, that game for $1 was a great deal. I have the feeling that perhaps in a different moment and with different games, it might have done much better.

So will I do more bundles in future? I don't know yet, but for sure not soon :)

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!

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 :)