Daily Archives: December 10, 2010

Friday catblogging – moral decisions in RPGs


In the picture above, the young cat Maja. I found her while on a trip in Croatia and decided to bring her home. She lived with me for 7 beautiful months (sadly, she’s not here anymore).

I’m writing right now the Planet Stronghold quest with the Matricks. They’re giant rocky humanoid, very resistant to physical damage but weaker against Psionics. During this quest, if you side with the Empire you’ll face a big moral dilemma: you have the option to kill their “breeders”, as sort of distraction so you can fight the King Rock (the evil tyrant of the race) with less defenses. Of course, even if we’re talking about aliens, killing breeders is always a bad thing! And indeed, some party members will be seriously disappointed if you do that.

I like how the “Empire side” is turning out. Because even if the ultimate goal is to submit all the alien races, it’s a somewhat grey territory – the decisions you make might seem inevitable since there’s a big war going on, but you’ll often wonder if what you’re doing is ethically correct, and you can still choose to act differently.

About the mid-december deadline, I’ll try my best to met it, however after the Matrick race I still need to write the Arnox and Apex Rahn quest, and then the final battle. My goal was to finish the game plot, apart for the romance subplots that can be done anytime since they’re not connected with the main plot (except when you decide to do the final fight). So I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it, it might be more like 20-21st december.

I want the next version 0.8 to have the full plot so anyone who preordered can play/test it and let me know any problem. Note that after 0.8 is released, I’ll raise the price to $19.95 and then once the final version is out, to $24.95.

Finally, I also got the new boys images for Spirited Heart new game. You can see a mockup below. Frebo is always the best! 😀