Where On Earth Is Undead Lily?

Room_Aquaria
Do you recognize her? it’s Aquaria, one of the superheroes of the Undead Lily game

In the blog title, I paraphrased the famous game “Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego” :) The reply to the question Where On Earth Is Undead Lily could be “she went on hiatus for a year or two but now she’s about to come back!”.

Yes, because finally all the backgrounds for the game are finished (that artist was busy doing Loren GUI and other things, so wasn’t his fault), and even if I asked the original character artist to redo the final romance scenes, work on the game can start already.

I’m still in the planning stage for now, but I really think that I’m going to make it a bit different from the original idea. A tag-team battle, arcade style wouldn’t really be simple to do in Ren’Py, and since those games are all about the animations, it’s definitely not a good idea. So I’m just going to make it more RPG-esque! ;)

In the game there are 12 characters, 6 “evil” and 6 “good”. That would be already enough to do a classic party-based RPG. However, since there won’t be a real exploration but more like a sort of big “map” where you move your units each turn (who remembers the old game “Archon”?), I think I’m going to make it similar to a collectible card game, where each character can learn to summon creatures to help them in battle, starting from low level ones to big powerful ones.

So the idea for now is to allow a party of max 2 superheroes, each one able to summon several “elemental minions”. Or maybe only 1 superhero each battle, as always will have to see while playtesting what is better.

Anyway that’s the initial idea for now :)

I’ve been also experimenting more with the “topsecret” RPG set in Aravorn. I had a brilliant idea (modestly MOUHAHA). Take a look at the screenshots below:

thiefattack warriorattack

As you can see, the position on the battlefield will have a big impact on the gameplay, and the Thief will have a special bonus vs the Warriors being able to always attack without penalty any enemy, no matter their position. This small change should lead to interesting decision during the battles, and finally give some use of the thieves in the front line.

I had other ideas like some random special zones on the battlefield that would give bonus/malus (like a rock area that increases defense, a mud area that slows character down). But have yet to see if they’re easy to implement. Anyway as you can guess I’m having some fun experimenting! :D

But that is just a side-project. On Planet Stronghold 2 side, Anima is going forward coding the new RPG framework that will be awesome, with lots of new features, while Aleema is doing her great job as always writing the story. I can’t wait to reach the demo stage with this game to show it to everyone ;)

Posted in development screenshot, development tricks, indie life, roleplay games, Undead Lily | 4 Comments

Show Me The Games!

tofu

My cat Tofu is trying to communicate with you using telepathy! She wants to inform you that there’s currently an indie mega sale featuring 32 titles here:

http://www.showmethegames.com/sales.php

many good games for all tastes. I put both my RPGs, Loren Amazon Princess and Planet Stronghold with a 50% discount using the coupon “SHOWME“.

It will last until 18th May!

Posted in general, indie life, promo sales | 2 Comments

Don’t rest on your laurels

Batman sleeping
In the picture above, my cat Batman sleeping in my messy office

This year I’ve already released two games: Heileen 3 Sea Maidens, the yuri version for  Heileen 3 released last year in December, and Bionic Heart 2.

But there’s no time to rest on my laurels! The show must go on! etc etc.

Roommates

So I’m very excited to announce that Roommates script is 99.9% finished (just some minor tweaks and some gameplay phrases to add). The total word count is about 130,000 which is definitely not bad. It also will have a lot of replayability, since for the first time in one of my dating sims, you can play as male or female main character!

Unfortunately, there is still quite some work to do. The game will feature a full original soundtrack PLUS a theme song for it. I’m quite excited about that, since the theme song perfectly fits with the light-comedy setting of the game :)

On the art side, I am expecting some extra romance CGs that between my writer and me were referred as “the beach sex scenes”. So as you can imagine they will be quite “steamy” ;)

I’m also missing all the 26 backgrounds, and the artist I picked (who already did a great job on Nicole’s backgrounds) can begin working on them only in July. So as you can imagine, the game is very likely to be out in August/September, a bit later than I expected, but at least this will leave us a good amount of time for editing, testing, tweaking gameplay and so on.

Nicole

I finished Darren’s path this week, and Kurt’s one is being proofread right now. The soundtrack is finished (with 7 different tracks) and art-wise I am missing four extra scenes for the “normal romance endings”, but artist guaranteed she can do them in one month. There’s still some other art left like the GUI and chibis, but shouldn’t be a major cause of delays.

So I still believe the game beta could be out at end of June, or mid-July at the latest. We’ll see!

…and I haven’t forgot about the RPGs!

I know that a good amount of people who follows me now is because of my last RPGs. Well don’t worry, I haven’t forgot about you: I am definitely going to try finishing another RPG soon. Planet Stronghold 2 looks like will need more time than I thought, so that’s why I’m playing around with Loren RPG framework to experiment with it, using a different layout, higher resolution (1280×720) and simpler interface which could work also on touch-based devices, as you can see in the work-in-progress image below:

mysterious RPG

For what game you might ask ? Well maybe Loren sequel won’t be the only RPG set in Aravorn to be out in the (near, hopefully) future… ;)

Posted in dating sims, development screenshot, nicole, otome games, roleplay games, roommates, sneak peek | 7 Comments