Loren Amazon Princess is out and postmortem

In case you missed my newsletter or twitter announcement, the fantasy RPG game that kept me busy for the last six months is finally out!

You can download the demo from the game official page:

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

The postmortem

Making such a big game like Loren was really a tough journey. Now that I have finished it, I can confess that several points during the development of the game, I thought to quit, to cancel it. Yes, I started thinking that perhaps I could reuse the art in a simple fantasy VN, or that I tried to make something beyond my capabilities and was the biggest mistake of my indie career.

If you tried the demo, or purchased the game (thank you!) you'll quickly realize how complex the game is. It's a full RPG, with classes, statistics, skill trees, several characters, a detailed turn-based battle with many tactical choices, quests, different endings, map,  and more.

Now that is finished I'm really really proud of it. I'm happy to have finished it, despite several problems I had to face developing it.

The bad

As I already wrote, the bad is that is a game that is quite hard for a small team to make. I want to thank again Aleema (the writer) and Anima (the coder) for their effort, but even with their help, "assembling" the game was still a real pain.

It was also my fault, because from the initial design, I added lots more skills and more complexity to the game. The result, as you'll notice, is very good since there are lots of different strategies to win the game, lots of different character skills customizations. That's a clear sign that I made a good job with the design, however implementing it was a real NIGHTMARE.

The problem with RPGs is that there are so many gameplay elements linked together, that is easy to break everything: when you fix a bug in a point of the game, there are good changes that you're adding a new one in another point! Add to this that I didn't have an autoupdater in place, and every time I had to reupload the whole game (100mb) I cried.

As you can see, "the bad side" is not really bad because I screwed up something, but because it's just how hard those kind of games are to make. I'd say is the hardest kind of game you can make nowadays.

So, now I know that if I ever start a new one beside the already planned expansion, will need to restrain myself from adding too many features, because each new feature is extra pain to debug and extra weeks to test.

The good

I had a fantastic support from several people who pre-ordered the game as soon as it was out, and helped a lot during the beta testing phase. The beta testing lasted two months, during those I had lots of feedback: both bugs/typos report but also very good suggestions to improve the gameplay.

Of course I wasn't able to implement all of them, but the ones I implemented really helped making the game even better than it was.

I think the final result is awesome - I usually am pretty modest with my games, but this time I'm breaking the rule, because I think Loren is the best game I've ever made and I'm not even sure if I'll ever make a better one.

Yesterday I sent the game PR and a BIG site showed interest in reviewing it, even if I know from past experience that I must not get too much excited until I see the actual review.

Conclusion

Even if I sent it just yesterday, I can say that the press release was the usual disappointment, the game was mostly ignored (except that big site above that I won't mention now) and people quickly labeled it as "just another bishoujo game" just looking at screenshots. But that's something I am used to :)

I was however pleasantly surprised to see how much traffic I got from social network like Twitter, Facebook, etc. Seems really like that lots of people started talking about the game. Not journalists, not websites, but people who discovered the game through other friends, the infamous word of mouth!

In the end, is still too early to draw any conclusion. Anything can happen from now until the end of the month, and will most likely decide if I'm going to make more games like Loren in future or not. So if you're reading this and enjoyed Loren, and want to see more games like this, you know what to do - spread the word about it. Contact the big websites and tell them to review it - maybe they'll listen to you more than they listen to me ;)

The Release Candidate

What is it? As Wikipedia says:

A release candidate (RC) is a beta version with potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. In this stage of product stabilization, all product features have been designed, coded and tested through one or more beta cycles with no known showstopper-class bug.

So, I'm proud to present you Loren Amazon Princess version 0.97a which is a release candidate! Download it here:

http://www.winterwolves.com/download.php?game=LorenRPG-0.97.zip

The game should be playable from beginning to end and not contain any blocking bugs. Does it means it doesn't contain ANY bugs? not even a wrong text, or a slightly different value in gold, or some skills report a slightly different damage prediction, or...?

Again Wikipedia is useful:

A release is called code complete when the development team agrees that no entirely new source code will be added to this release. There may still be source code changes to fix defects, and changes to documentation and data files, and to the code for test cases or utilities.

Once the game is released as version 1.0, we'll keep releasing updates to fix any new bug that might be found, while we work on the expansion for the game.

Murphy's Law at work

In the last 3 days I've seen all possible things to happen to prevent the release candidate to be tested. First, a few days ago I uploaded a wrong build myself (0.95) that had a crashing bug early in the game. But that was my mistake because I didn't retry the game from beginning, as I should have done.

Then yesterday (I live in GMT timezone) was the last drop: the new version was uploaded, but SOMEHOW the file was corrupted! It's the first time that this happens in over 5 years that I'm indie. How can a file be corrupted, if shows the right size on FTP ? A mystery, really, especially considering that I uploaded it in one single try, and connection didn't drop.

Anyway I uploaded it again, and several people tested it confirming that it works.

A few final words

I'll do a proper "post-mortem" about Loren next month, but all I can say is: making RPG game like this one is really very very hard. It was stressing. I was foolish for not having an autoupdater system in place. It was a real pain, even with the help of Aleema (writer) and Anima (RPG coder) that really did an awesome job, and I want to thank them again publicly for what they've done.

But as simple fact: it had the logest development time and it's the most expensive game I've ever attempted to make. Will it be ignored by the main press as always happens for my games ? Won't end on any big portal (Steam...) like usual? So in the end, after all this time and money spent to make the game, it was worth it?

I think it was worth it, no matter what will happen, since I'm very proud of the result. However, if I must say the whole truth, I am not looking forward to make another one before next year minimum (this doesn't include the expansion of course). I need to RELAX! :)

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.

Getting covered

I'm not talking about getting coverage as indie, but getting the characters of Loren RPG covered! As you can see below, was enough a spell by Apolimesho the Archwizard to give a proper cover to those excessively undressed fantasy heroes:

...no exceptions...

Jokes apart, I decided to put more cover to some characters based on customer's feedback. Initially I admit I wasn't much convinced, I kept thinking "well, I'm an indie, so I should do what I feel right". However some friends and my writer Aleema convinced me that having an OPTION (because you can still play the game without any cover of course!) was not a bad idea. For example some users in my forums mentioned being quite embarassed to play the game on netbooks while traveling in public places, or when some family members were asking what they were doing...I pictured the scene in my head:

- "What are you doing, son?"
- "Hi dad! I'm playing an awesome indie RPG game!"
- "Oh! RPGs? You mean those games with mages, swords, dragons and... wait. What is that? Boobs!?"
- "..." (covers face in shame)

So, since there was already an option to skip the ending romance scenes, we have tied it to showing covered characters, but you can conveniently toggle it on/off with 2 mouse clicks ;)

I also got the battle voices, and made a very short video showing some of them:

I know I know that now the question is... when the next version will be out? the one with the voices? the one with many bugfixes? the one with the full plot/romance implemented?

Well, while I cannot say for sure, it should be out this weekend! As usual follow me on twitter or Facebook to be updated in real-time :)

Bionic Heart 2 prototype

During some pauses in Loren development I started prototyping the dialog system for Bionic Heart 2. My goal is to make a sort of RPG-style dialog system, similar to those seen in classics like Fallout: some choices will be tied to specific skills and on the left will be displayed a sort of scheme of the dialog, showing the various possible paths (icons represent a choice that needs a specific skill).

I'm still in the early design stages though, and since Loren has full priority I'm working on this only during the pauses. I know, working on another game when you have a free moment is a bit weird but... :D

By the way, speaking of Bionic Heart, I made the port to Android even of that game. You can play the demo here.

Androids, drakes and college

Don't worry, the cryptic title of my blog post can be easily explained.

Androids: because I finally had time to take a break from working non-stop on Loren The Amazon Princess RPG, I made the Android port of Heileen! I chose that game since is one of the simplest as gameplay (is a basic Visual Novel). I kept the original resolution of the game, so if you play it on a tablet the resolution will be good, while on phones with smaller resolution the game will scale down.

It's available for only 4.99 in the Android marketplace: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.winterwolves.heileen

It has been tested by several people on various devices and nobody had any issues, though on devices with small screen size like phone can be a bit problematic to play, so be warned!

But androids also because I've started writing Bionic Heart 2! I've only made the storyboard for the 3 first scenes, but the new writer is doing a good job with it so far. It's cool to be able to finally resume working with Bionic Heart's universe / characters again after almost 3 years since the first game release.

Drakes: because the chapter4 of Loren is basically finished, and contains a big battle against a Giant Drake which will be one of the toughest enemies of the game. The plot is only missing some romance scenes, but I'm also waiting for 4 new backgrounds and the battle voices to do the next update which will have the full game available (including the romance scenes!). I hope it to be ready sometimes next week or no later than next weekend!

College: because finally I found a replacement writer for the Roommates game, and seems I'll be able to resume working on it at normal speed again! We're redefining the game structure/gameplay and the various breaks, changing the game from being Quarter based, rather than Semester based (so there are more breaks which will lead to some cool scenes like Winter / Spring Break).

How it's going

How it's going? Well, not really good since I've got wrist pain since 3 days, because of carpal tunnel syndrome :(

However I still managed to code good part of Loren RPG chapter4, and also add the new map. The latest available beta version is the 0.91 which can be downloaded here:

http://www.winterwolves.com/download.php?game=LorenRPG-0.91.zip

Chapter 4 is coming along very nicely, and we hope to have the final 1.0 release by mid-April! I'm really looking forward to finish this project, the biggest I've ever attempted :)

What about the other games?

As you know, before devoting myself completely to Loren, I had started many projects. Unfortunately, I miscalculated the amount of work I had to put to make a BIG game like Loren, so when the time of the beta came, I realized that I couldn't work in multi-tasking as before (working on several projects at once). This means that I temporarily paused many projects, except those which had already the full storyboard written (like Heileen 3 or Nicole).

Now that Loren is about to be finished, I'm going to get back into managing the other games. Here's a detailed status for each one:

Heileen 3

Art: (100%) is completely done now. I might decide to do two versions, a otome and a yuri one, adding two final CG scenes with two new female romances. Have yet to decide if to do that or not, but I have time since the artist won't be able to make those last 2 scenes before next July!

Writing: (90%) Marie's path is being written right now, and she's the last romanceable character (unless I decide to do what I said above). Game is pretty long, over 150k words, so much bigger than previous titles!

Coding: (25%): Well, it's not that bad actually, since is a dating sim but not very complex. I still need to add a lot of choice changes (based on the 7 cardinal sin/virtues), testing, the scheduler, and so on. Probably 1 month of work.

Amber's Magic Shop

Art: (60%) I need some more backgrounds, and the potion-making interface, but apart this, the sprites are done and only needs to be colored.

Writing: (15%) It's still in the beginning, but several scenes are finished, and Lorelei (the writer) assured she'll resume working on it quickly next month :)

Coding: (10%): I still need to design and implement the potion making interface, that will be the part that needs more coding and testing of the whole game. Also need a "shop" interface, and a lifesim but will probably modify Always Remember Me one. I think about 2 months of coding needed.

Nicole

Art: (50%) I have some character sprites done, but still missing some, and also missing all the CGs, UI and backgrounds. So there's still quite some work to do art-wise!

Writing: (60%) The last character storyboard is being written now. I might review the whole writing later, to check for plotholes, or add some more scenes (I'm used to make big games now!).

Coding: (50%):I plan to reuse Always Remember Me framework for this game, with some small changes, since will also be a mystery game I want to put some kind of diary in the game. Also want to simulate a sort of computer with college intranet :) So because of those new features, probably need at least 1 month to code everything.

Roommates

Art: (70%) all characters are done (might add a few more though). The backgrounds are missing, but the ending CGs scenes (8 in total plus some variations/close ups !) are almost finished (saw the sketches already and artist is finishing them right now).

Writing: (5%) Sadly, previous writer disappeared, so I need to look for a replacement. I also need to plan the gameplay better and do the storyboard, but for this kind of game (set in US college) I definitely need to find someone who knows well that kind of reality so can help me with storyboard beside writing scenes!

Coding: (5%): I haven't done much. I am planning to use a mix between Flower Shop scheduler and Always Remember Me various places to visit. Still need to do lot of design though, including the player stats. I'd say around 2 months of work.

Queen Of Thieves

Art: (80%) is missing the final kissing scenes, but artist disappeared since 1st February, and I'm not sure if he can continue working on the game. In any case, there's not much hurry since I need to design the gameplay, interface, and so on. And worse case I can hire someone since are only the kissing scenes missing.

Writing: (50%) This game is a bit different, meaning that there's more gameplay than other life/dating sim, and less texts. About half of the romances are finished though.

Coding: (5%): As I said, this game will have more gameplay than all the others, but I need to think how to implement it. It might include: 2d turn-based tilemap, short RPG battles, shop simulation... so there's still a long way to go. I think minimum 3 months of work!

Planet Stronghold: Warzone

Art: (50%) all the romance CGs are done, but misses all backgrounds, the wargame tilemap, many enemy sprites, so still long way to go.

Writing: (5%) I only wrote the beginning, and while I have the general plot in my mind have yet to write a storyboard for it. Since is a RPG, will take LOONG time to write it, but Aleema already said wants to work on this one :) Still, probably won't be able to work on it before next summer!

Coding: (90%): Even if it's a RPG, since I'm going to reuse most of the first game RPG framework, coding is quite advanced. I need to code the "wargame" map, but that's it (since I already did some coding for it last year).

Undead Lily

Art: (80%) it's missing some backgrounds, but depending how the battles will take place might add some more sprites, and perhaps some more backgrounds.

Writing: (25%) Several characters scenes are finished, but I paused it because need to rethink how to program the main gameplay, so might have to rework what has been already written to simplify it, or change it somehow.

Coding: (10%): Not much done, and while it will be a simpler RPG than Loren or Planet Stronghold, I decided to pause the development for now. Will resume working on it next year!

 

I tried to put them in order of a possible release: however, there's no guarantee about the release order, with the exception of Heileen 3 that will almost surely be out this summer! :)

Crunch mode

In the image above, the map (still work in progress) with the new fog feature. When you start the game it will look like in the image on top but as you discover new locations, it will slowly become like the image at the bottom.

Why Crunch Mode ?

Today's blog post will be short, because I'm in a sort of "crunch mode". Those who worked in companies know well what does it means - it's a period (usually lasts some days or weeks) during which you work non-stop like crazy to finish an important project.

Obviously in my case, the project is Loren The Amazon Princess :) But also, I need to get back on managing the various other projects going on, since I've been "away" (busy working on Loren) for too long!

For a small indie like me, releasing games regularly is very important, since it's one of the most effective way to get attention. The last game I've released is in December (Winter In Fairbrook), so not too long ago, however if I look back at the past year, during this period (end of March) I had already released Love & Order and was about to finish Planet Stronghold!

Now I know I'm not a machine, so I need to take breaks sometimes, but I usually reserve the summer for that (when it's too hot to work much anyway).

So my goal would be to release 0.9 this weekend, or no later than end of the month. Today I managed to finish scripting the 3rd chapter of Loren, and will take tomorrow to test it again. Meanwhile Aleema is finishing the last touches to the romance scenes, since we're trying to include many of them for the next beta update, the 0.9.

The Bionic Heart sequel

Bionic Heart was one of my early visual novels, but also one that was most popular (was featured in some big japanese websites and that was the first time for a VN made in the west). However, commercially speaking, it wasn't a big success.

Almost 3 years later, I think I know the reasons. It was a pure visual novel, aimed at males, and with my writing (lol). Definitely I don't want to repeat the same mistakes in the sequel, even if I want to make this game mainly for my personal satisfaction than money.

See the full gallery on Posterous

In the image above you see sketches of the main characters, plus there will be new ones which I don't want to show yet. I have written already a generic basic plot, but need to go in the details. For now all I can say is:

• won't be a pure visual novel, but will have statistics, even if won't be a RPG
• you'll be able to play as different characters (differently from the first game)
• it will contain nudity, both male / female
• will have all possible romances (straight & gay / male & female)
• will have lots of endings :)

Now remember, I am NOT working on this game right now, but I am producing / supervising the art production. I don't know yet when I'll have time to start working on this, maybe for Christmas, or maybe later next year!

"Nicole" game

Nicole's plot continues to make progress, and I got also a new characters images. Below you can admire Nicole in her various outfits (yes, cheerleader is also an option!):

That's all for now! Stay tuned, since next month I plan to definitely release something :)