Monthly Archives: January 2017

Amber’s Magic Shop: Introducing Lynn

intro_lynnTime to resume with Amber’s characters introductions. Now it’s the turn of Lynn: a serious contender for “most cute character in a game”! 🙂

One of the many Elves that makes up a sizeable proportion of the population of Icesilia, Lynn spent most of her life away from Grandtree and her extended family.

Her mother took her north east during the Third Demon War and settled alongside many refugees from that conflict. She grew up in the premier herbalist establishment in Icesilia and that has afforded her a fairly comfortable life. Her mother is an ambitious woman who believes that every generation should be more successful than the last.

To aid her daughter in accomplishing this, she has raised her to be what would be regarded as the perfect bride for the noble Elves in the city. Lynn, on the other hand, just wants to follow in her mother’s footsteps and be an herbalist like them.

As an adult, Lynn is torn between running the shop now that her mother has retired and the arranged marriage she has with an older noble in the city. She is not necessarily against the marriage but she wants to be sure the person she marries loves her as much as she loves them.

Lynn is a kind person who tries her best not to judge others. She quickly becomes Amber’s best friend and frequently confides in her. Despite having no memories of Grandtree, she is very interested in her roots and dives into Elvish tradition when she has the chance between all of her other responsibilities.

Despite this interest, she does not hold to the traditional discrimination against Dark Elves and frequently defends Amber’s right to live in the city against those who seek to drive her away.

This is the last character intro, regarding the love interests. But I still have a couple more introductions for secondary characters! They will appear on the next blog posts!

Queen Of Thieves on Steam

At last, even Queen Of Thieves is available on Steam. You can get it at this page:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/524200

as usual those who purchased directly can redeem a free Steam key here:
http://www.bestanimegames.com/steam/

If you liked the game, remember to leave a review on the store page since they might help others to enjoy the game as well 🙂

The 2017 plan!

The character selection screen at beginning of Undead Lily game (work in progress)

As already said in other places (forums/social networks) this year I am not aiming at releasing 5 games again! 🙂 However, if that happens, of course I wouldn’t mind.

The thing is, that of the upcoming games, many are RPGs. And as you know, those kind of games need a lot of time to be properly designed, coded, balanced, etc. There are also a couple of “simpler games” in the works (luckily!), one of them is Love Bites and the other is <CURSED GAME> (to not be confused with “Cursed Lands” which is another RPG!).

There are a couple more games in the works but I’ve decided to never announce or show anything about a game publicly again, until it’s almost done (just a few months left).

So depending how things go, this year you could see some sudden releases of unannounced games. I am not sure it will happen since many are still behind, but who knows!

Talking only of the currently known games in progress, I would estimate this (I’m only talking about beta versions, not final releases):

  • First Quarter: Amber’s Magic Shop. Writing is done, art is done, all is left is scripting and coding. The crafting works, I’ve added over 250 recipes, but still all the remaining simulation part needs some tweaks. I also am doing the shop-builder minigame, which wasn’t planned but seems such a good idea that I think it will be worth the wait.
  • Second Quarter: Love Bites. The art is mostly done (we might commission a few extra artwork), the writing is at good point, the gameplay will be classic dating sim plus VN mode as usual.

Obviously it could happen that Love Bites is finished sooner than Amber. I’ll give the priority to the game mostly advanced. Anyway, both those two games should be out in the first part of the year. But what about the second part of the year?

Things get a bit more complex. Beside obviously finally releasing the <CURSED GAME>, I would like to work on both Planet Stronghold 2 and Undead Lily but of course not release both! (it would be slightly madness haha)

Also, PS2 will be written by Love Bites’ writer, and I imagine that she’ll want a break after finishing Love Bites 🙂 So I think Undead Lily it’s more likely to be out first. Also remember that for RPGs, I need to spend weeks if not months for the gameplay design and testing, it’s much harder to give an estimate. With a dating sim, once writing, music and art is done, you’ve basically everything and it’s easy to say when it will be out. For RPGs… no.

Another important factor, as you might know since I often talk about it, is the “burn-out”. I definitely don’t want to risk being burned out. Last year I released a card game (PSCD), 3 dating sims and a RPG (Queen Of Thieves). Most of PSCD work and a good amount of QoT RPG design/coding was already done in 2015, otherwise would have been impossible to make so many games in a single year.

This is also why I’ve decided to switch from “full RPG” (like Loren/SOTW) to… something easier to do.

The “select companion” screen has some sort of fighting game vibe and I like it 🙂

And it’s not because it’s less work, but because redoing another RPG design (classes, skills, etc) shortly after finishing QoT was really bad for my morale/motivation haha! Doing something new/fresh will be interesting for me, and hopefully will be also fun to play.

That’s all I can say for now. As time goes on, I’ll make more updates about what’s going to happen when I’m more sure 🙂 Happy New Year!