Category Archives: the flower shop

A cute weekend


The official trailer for Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook redone for Steam launch

This weekend will be full of cute stuff. First of all, one of my first non-otome dating sims, Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook, will launch on Steam today.

New members of C14 dating cast revealed!

Those are secondary characters, but still important for the story. I am officially in love with Joan, because… freckles! 😉 Click each portrait below to see a full body image!

sherriSherri Keller
Occupation: Professor (anthropology department)
Languages: English, French
Melissa’s professor and mentor, who specializes in zooarchaeology and human remains. She will be supervising Melissa during the field school and providing feedback on her performance. With her informal method of teaching, students find it easy to seek her guidance.

rosemarieRosemarie Brenner
Occupation: Archaeologist and lithics expert
Languages: German, English, a little Dutch
Originally from Germany, Rosemarie joins the Calen Cave team during the summer excavations. Although she may clash with the staff over ideals and procedures, she’s dedicated to her work on stone tools. She’s energetic and demonstrative, with a teasing side to match.

joanJoan Petit
Occupation: 1st year music student
Languages: French, some English
Joan is a bashful, but amiable girl, and Chantal’s close friend. She is currently learning English, but will often get lost during conversations, leaving Chantal to translate for her.
Plays flute.

dupontAugustin Dupont
Occupation: Chief archaeologist
Languages: French, English
Head of Calen Cave, Augustin has been supervising the excavation for over twenty years. As the leading expert, he’s devoted to meticulously recording the history of the cave. Although passionate, he can be strict and overbearing depending on how the students perform.

chantalChantal Masson
Occupation: 1st year archaeology student
Languages: French, English, a little Spanish
Chantal is a frank girl who’d rather be diving for shipwrecks than be stuck digging in a dank cave. She can be blunt at times, but she’s supportive of her friends.

 

The game is still in the works, but could be out sometimes this Summer. More info in the next weeks 🙂

A game that instead has been finished is Autumn’s Journey. Is not my game, but many people who collaborated/partnered with me in the past/present worked on it:

– Deji – she did most of the art of the game, and she worked on my Flower Shop games, did some extra sprites for Spirited Heart yuri, and of course she’s working on C14 and will also do sprites for Spirited Heart 2. One of the best manga artist around 😉
– KittyKatStar – She wrote it and helped Arowana with some of the coding. For me, she worked on Heileen 3 yuri romances, she is writing C14, will write some of Spirited Heart 2 romances, and helped editing a lot of games including the upcoming SOTW. A hard worker! 😀
– Arowana – she coded and edited the game and she started to collaborate with me recently, coding/editing SOTW and C14
– Nellie –  She helped with the GUI, organized the music/voices, and drew chibis. When working for me, she did the Heileen 3 chibis.

So what are you waiting for, go check it. Is free 🙂

And last but not least, to celebrate this cute weekend, here’s the romance scenes sneak peek for Seasons Of The Wolf, currently under development 🙂

sotwromances

Sometimes Life Gets the Best of You

Imgp9018

In the photo above, my dog Nick who passed to better life last sunday.

As the title says, sometimes real life gets in the way of indies. I won’t be lying, this month has been the worst of my life so far. Earlier I lost my uncle Don Giulio, a catholic priest (but religion doesn’t matter, he was a good person and helped a lot of people during his life). It has been a very important figure in my life, and in some way also helped me to become an indie.

As if losing people and pets I loved wasn’t enough, the heat here (but also in US from what I’ve heard) has been insane since about two weeks. I bought an A/C, but even if I turn it on, the noise is too much to concentrate (I am not the kind of person who listen to music/radio while working, I need complete silence)!

Luckily, nowadays I use a lots of external people to work on my games. So even if this month I was mostly unproductive, I was still able to communicate with the writers, coders, artists and keep my active projects moving. But is scary to think how the life (and career) of a lone indie can be at risk when “the life gets the best of you”.

This friday I wanted to have the pre-oders of Spirited Heart Girl’s Love ready, for example. Everything is done: the art is ready, the story has been finished since July, the ending voiceovers redone. There are only a few sprites left to put in the game, test it a bit and do the various installers and upload them. Probably a day of work, but in the last 3 days was able to work on average 2h a day (and also had other projects to keep going that required my attention).

I think if today I worked at maximum speed I could have made it – but I don’t like to realease things in a rush. I like to polish my games, adding small details and making sure everything works. But all those little things take time! I’m sure many of you that follow me are wondering what happened to the other game Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook. That is another example of what happens when the life gets the best of us, in this case of my friend and partner in this game, Ayu of Sakevisual. She had many problems too recently, and even if a “pre-order” version was ready at beginning of this month, there were still several smaller things out of place, so we decided was better to wait until everything was perfect.

Piggymerchant

However, talking about Spirited Heart Girl’s Love, I can definitely promise it will be out this weekend – even if I can work only during the morning, in two days of work the game should be 100% finished and ready for pre-orders. So stay tuned and follow me on twitter for the announcement! 🙂

I had a Midsummer Night’s Dream…

First of all, Ayu of Sakevisual just told me she is attending a convention today, and Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook is going through the final stages of proofreading/balancing (it was a bit too difficult). So… no pre-order links yet, though keep following twitter because I could post them during the weekend 😉

Second, I’d like to introduce you a friend of mine, called Undead Lily. You can see the first promo trailer below, which introduces a bit the story and the first two characters, Undead Lily and Mantras.

As you can see, this is probably my most unconventional game I’ve ever made. A undead girl, ex burlesque dancer, that in the afterlife becomes a superheroine? Yes it’s bizzarre, and you haven’t seen the other characters!! 😀

On startup, you can either take a short quiz to “shape” your character, both the personality (Good, or Evil) and also the starting statistics. Yes because Undead Lily and The Elemental Avengers, while not a super detailed RPG like Loren Amazon Princess, is going to have a RPG gameplay element. You can see the work-in-progress for the character creation screen below:

Chooseyourlily

The game plot-wise is at good stage, with all the romances for the “Good” version finished. As for the gameplay I’m still in the brainstorming stage, since I’d like to have a map similar to the old game Archon, divided in sectors each one linked to one of the game elements: Death, Life, Air, Water, Fire and Nature. The character would move in turn and when two teams are on the same sector a battle triggers, which is a sort of turn based tag-team battle, 3 vs 3 characters.

Obviously everything is still only an idea, since I have to see how fun are the battles done this way. What is going to be fun for sure is the dialogues and general mood of the game, with many incredible superheroes each one with a different personality. And the romances, like Planet Stronghold, will have lots of variety too: the current plan is to divide the game into two separate ones, the first one with Undead Lily as the main character and Ace as the main antagonist (so the “female” version) and then one with Ace as main character and Undead Lily as antagonist (the “male” version).

You can see a flow chart of all the various romance options below:

Undeadlilyromance

As you can see there’s something for every taste! And of course, the release dates I wrote on the flow chart are going to be inevitably missed! 😀

See you next week for more news about the upcoming games.

Winter is coming next week!

Flowersim Holidayseason Scheduler

At least the pre-orders! No I didn’t went insane because of excessive work (even if it’s not a remote possibility after all!). I’m talking obviously about The Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook, which we’re currently testing and polishing. I know in the past I posted the game will be out soon, but this time is really soon. Before starting with pre-orders there are only minor things to do, like adding sprites and some backgrounds but all the assets are ready. So we only need a bit more time to put everything in the right place and test it so that every ending can be reached.

As always, follow my twitter / blog / facebook / google plus for the early announcements! For those who yet haven’t played the first game, during this weekend we’re running an amazing promotion: the first title, Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook will be available for only $9.99 ! Spread the word and if you haven’t already, buy the game and play it to get introduced to Fairbrook and its people!

Other news…

Queen of Thieves art is also progressing really well, below you can see Kira, the Warrior. Again, there will be lots of possible character customization available in the final game.

Kira

Planet Stonghold: Warzone won’t be “an expansion” anymore but a real full-length stand-alone title. I worked already on improving the Psionic Powers by adding Area Of Effect (hits two targets) and mass target (hits all targets). This both for the offensive and defensive Psionics, which means now you can do a “group Heal” to your party or also a “group Harm” to the enemies. Just beware that the enemies won’t like this sort of thing and they’ll aggro against your poor Psionic very quickly 😉

Multipledisrupt

Spirited Heart Girl’s Love: the elven girls

It’s now the turn of the elf girls. In the video below you can see Thym: I’m sure that many people will consider her the most annoying of the characters, since she is quite snob and spoiled. However, the romance plot with her is full of cool moments (like “impossible love”), because in the second part of the romance (when you work as maid in her villa) you discover that you have some “serious competition”… 🙂

Leah’s path instead is very different. I think is also probably the most original character of the game. She’s older than all the other girls, and I think the sprite manages to picture her perfectly, a very classy and cute person who is excessively obsessed by her age, thinking that she doesn’t look attractive like she once was… Also Leah’s personality is dominant, and this will lead to very interesting (and different) choices in particular if you choose the elf (she will submit to her) or the demon (she will become the dominant one, obviously!).

I also got some very good news related to my other games in development. Not only Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook should be out at end of this month, but the artist of the game Queen Of Thieves, which I announced back in February (time flies!) is finally back and he is working fullspeed to recover the lost time. Below you can admire a few of the many clothing combinations possible for Joanne, the wizard:

Joannewizard