Monthly Archives: September 2014

PSCD – meet Charlotte

charlotte
Time for Charlotte’s introduction! She is one of my favorite character design and a possible homosexual love interest for Diana.

Name:  Charlotte Dubois
Nickname:  Hope
Nation of Origin:  Canada
Service Branch: Imperial Infantry
Specialty:  Recruit

Description:
Charlotte was always one of those people which seemed blessed.  Whether she was head cheerleader, captain of the field hockey team, or homecoming queen, she seemed destined for great things.

So, it came as little surprise when she went into politics.  Within a couple years, Charlotte was making great strides, and there was talk of her going to the highest levels of government.  All this came crashing after a scandal erupted, one involving the Imperial Intelligence Agency.  While the details were classified, it was serious enough that Charlotte’s career was dead in the water.

After some soul-searching, Charlotte joined the military, hoping a show of patriotism would be enough to jumpstart her career when she mustered out.  Much to her surprise, she found she actually enjoyed military, and her political skills served her in good stead when dealing with career soldiers and bureaucrats.

This came to the fore when a colony, its populace devastated by repeated attacks, was on the verge of collapsing.  With the skill any public relations specialist would envy, Charlotte convinced the people that yes, while things were bad, they could rise above it, and in fact, be a beacon for others by their resilience.  Some individuals started calling her ‘Hope’, though in more personal moments she feels uncomfortable with the appellation.

When matters of military and public life grow too much, Charlotte takes comfort in her flowers, small plants and seeds she brought all the way to earth as well as exotic species garnered in trade from alien planets.

News about Nicole yuri and SOTW!

There have been some good progresses of the yuri version of Nicole and SOTW. For Nicole, as you probably already know, the game will be much more “dark” and feature spooky/horror themes. You don’t believe it? check the background below:

zombie menagerie

It’s a location for a in-game Halloween event, featuring zombies! 😉

Work on SOTW continues, I received from the artist some tilesets, not everything I need but a good amount so that I was able to begin coding the first maps of Act3. Here you see the pirate town of Shacklesplit:

Shacklesplit

I have also made a tentative calendar for next beta release date:

This weekend: chapter15 (there should be some exploration to do, so new maps) and chapter16 (jariel personal quest, is basically already done)
Next week 29th sept-5th oct: chapter 17-18
Week 6th oct-12nd oct: chapter 19-20
Week 13rd oct – 19th oct (maybe sooner): last chapter.

Of course, take it with a grain of salt since because of Murphy’s Law for sure something will happen to delay the whole process 😉

One last thing, if you have Steam, you might have noticed that they pushed a big update this week, changing completely how it works. Please take time to write positive reviews on my games (if you liked them of course) since with this new system they seem to be more important. You can find all my games with this link: http://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Winter%20Wolves

PSCD – meet Samuel

samuel

Time for another character introduction: Samuel. He is one of the homosexual romances playing as Alex.

Name:  Samuel Bellamy
Nickname: Doc
Nation of Origin:  England
Service Branch:  Imperial Xenobiological Service
Specialty:  Eco-Engineering

Description:
Ever since he was a child, Samuel had a deep love for animals, and his parents encouraged this behavior in their son.  As Samuel matured, this interest widened into a fascination with alien life, and it came as little surprise when he graduated with top honors in Xenobiology.

Numerous organizations vied for Samuel’s attention, but he settled on the military, figuring this would give him the most exposure to alien life.  This proved prescient since while he was out in the field, a disease struck the expedition he was on.  The group’s doctor was among those afflicted, but Samuel was able to synthesize a vaccine, and  earning the nickname ‘Doc’. This incident also brought a measure of unwanted fame to Samuel.  For two years running, he was voted ‘Hottest Biologist.’

Samuel was assigned to Planet Stronghold because his knowledge has allowed humanity to adapt to various alien environments.  This serves his own purpose for it allows him to research forms of life entirely unknown to humanity at large.

If he could be said to have a flaw, Samuel really prefers wide open spaces to civilization.  Given a chance, he can often be found out in the wild, recording alien lifeforms in their natural habitats.  He feels truly at peace when he can be one with nature.

Playing games is important

Yes you heard me well: is important to play games! Especially if you are a game developer like me 🙂

I have less and less free time now (especially this year with everything happening all at once, Steam, iOS ports, etc) and as you can imagine, when I have some I prefer to spend it with my wife, pets and doing outdoor activities.

However I still try to find the time to play for a few hours a week the new games. Because that’s the equivalent of “research & development” of other industries.

Some practical examples and games that inspired me while I designed and coded my upcoming RPG ToA: Seasons Of the Wolf:

Guild Wars 2: from this game I grabbed the ideas of “solve all quest in an area” and “discover all locations” and so on, to get bonus EXP. From this game I also wanted to implement the idea of stat-derived enemies (no matter your level, all enemies would be a challenge) but after only a week of testing I realized that it wasn’t a good idea 😀
Diablo 3: it’s nothing new, the random items I mean, but still while playing this game I thought that would have been cool to use random items with tiers even in my games, alongside manually created ones. I implemented it and people loved it 🙂
– XCOM and such the idea that the battlefield and environment should have a bigger impact. I implemented it in a limited way because didn’t want to risk breaking the balance too much, but I’ve added elemental conditions and some special ones (tunnel sewers where 2handed weapon do half damage, underwater where fire magic doesn’t work and ranged weapon do much less damage). I also implemented the damage penalty when hitting Thief class with Warriors. However the ideal would be to have a full tiled battlefield for this to work better. Maybe in future! 😉
Everquest 2 and another MMORPG I can’t remember now, the idea of offering items as reward for quests. Again it was nothing new, but just playing those games reminded me of this feature which was missing in my previous RPGs.

So if you’re a game designer, try to find the time to play a few games. Your own games will benefit from it!

SOTW update

rowindaunicorn
Rowinda’s flashback quest is totally… crazy ! (what you did expect?)

Work on SOTW is proceeding not really smoothly – I decided to adopt the latest Ren’Py to take advantage of a rewrite of the screen language which makes the super-complex game like mine run faster, but since is a beta… has issues. I’ve had old save games compatibilities broken already 3-4 times, even if somehow every time was able to keep the ones I use to develop the game. With the latest update though, they broke as well… so I have to go back to a previous version, because otherwise I can’t even work on the game myself lol. Needless to say, this is very frustrating, though obviously is not Ren’Py fault. I guess I was spoiled by the fact that in the past it always worked without problems! But is normal for a beta program to have such issues.

I should have the new tileset I need for Act 3 at end of month, so I estimate that all problems considered, the next act could be ready for beta-testing around mid or end of October.

The final game release *might* happen in time for end of year, since for the last act I already have all the  art I need and I’ve already coded almost all of it. I’ve also commissioned some extra ending CGs from another artist (using the same one wasn’t an option, he wouldn’t have made it in time) and they’re turning out very nice!

PSCD – Meet Graciela Reyes

graciela

Time for another PSCD character, one of the few humans with psionic abilities (in this prequel game they’re not common as in Planet Stronghold).

Name:  Graciela  Reyes
Nickname:  Serenity
Nation of Origin:  Spain
Service Branch:  Imperial Psionics Institute
Specialty:  Psionics

Description:
Graciela is among the rarest of humans; a person born with great psionic potential.  As such, this made her highly sought after by many organizations to make use of her talents.  Ultimately, she chose the military as it seemed to give the best training.

At heart, Graciela is a peaceful woman; after all, when you can feel another’s emotions, it makes little sense to cause them harm. She figured by joining the military, she would have an opportunity to use words where most would resort to guns.

This calm sense of self earned Graciela the nickname, Serenity, which was instrumental when humans made peace with the Xynthillians.  A highly empathic the species, the Xynthillians never had to psionically shield themselves before, and thus were wide-open for what was essentially emotional assault when they first encountered humans.  Graciela, underwent this pain when younger, was able to broker a peace by having the humans promise to stay away from Xynthillian space.

Unfortunately, even with her success, Graciela still faces  discrimination.  People fear the unknown, whether it be aliens or  psionics, but Graciela hopes, given time, she can help people overcome this  prejudice.

I’m still producing the art assets for PSCD, including the romance scenes. Once I have all of them will do some sneak previews as usual. There are some very interesting and unique settings for the romance CGs 😉

Seasons Of The Wolf update

Like in past week, spent this week working on ACT4 since I finished the ACT3 main coding but I’m still waiting for the tilesets. Please be patient, but at least know that I’m not wasting a single day of time 🙂

gnolls
a sidequest of Act4 featuring some ferocious Gnolls!

Roger steel world: meet Roger Steel!

rogersteel

Taking a break from PSCD characters intro to introduce nonetheless than Roger Steel himself!!! 🙂

Introducing Roger Steel… Explorer. Spy. Legend. Pawn.

When Ann and Arthur are ambushed at a remote temple, the surviving sibling and their friends are rescued by a handsome stranger in the middle of a mission of his own. Little do they know it is Roger Steel himself, whose adventures real and ‘enhanced’ are broadcast across the British Empire as part of its 20th century quest to maintain global order and confidence in its rule in these troubled times.

In books and movies Steel’s adventures have been chronicled and mythologized so much it is hard to separate man from legend. But the real Roger Steel is very human indeed, and when in a rash act of kindness he intervenes that ill-fated day, his duty to a ruthless Empire and his human inclinations are set on a collision course.

But unbeknownst to him, in the corridors of power in London, his mission has already taken a darker turn. With the endgame in sight, as with all pawns, the day might soon come when it is easier to remove him permanently from the board than keep him in the game.

Update about Seasons Of The Wolf

If you follow the game development in my forums, you know the mess I managed to make last week 😀 In practice I wanted to use the new Ren’Py, then found out the saves weren’t compatible because of a variable, I changed it, meanwhile Ren’Py coder kindly had fixed that on the framework-side, but was too late. And I even managed to run the auto-updater stopping it in half, so I had a mixed version (part old, part new Ren’Py)!!

In short: a giant mess. I can load some savegames but other won’t work, and the safest thing is to start again the game from scratch… even if is normal during such early beta testing to lose access to old saves, every time it happens I’m angry at myself.

Luckily the testers are very supportive and accept it without drama. Well, almost 😉 I heard some started drinking after the 7th consecutive playthrough from scratch…

Jokes apart, I am still going on with the game. Admire a portrait of a Kraken below:

kraken

I am coding ACT4 right now, even if ACT3 is still not playable because I need the tileset (won’t go in more details to avoid spoilers for those who never played it). So as fun as it might seem, considering the tileset won’t be ready before 1-2 weeks at least, I might be done with ACT4 before ACT3! It’s not bad though, since means I’m not losing any time.

jealousy2
During act3 you can also do all the romance talks, including some funny jealousy scenes!

If all goes well the full game (still in beta though) could be done by end of month. But when was last time that “everything went as planned”? Hmm…I can’t remember 😀