Category Archives: indie life

My 2018 Goals

Political intrigue! Hot milfs! Cursed Lands has it all!

First of all, Happy New Year! Let’s see what I hope to achieve this year.

Considering how went in the past years, this time I’ll try to be more realistic. Of course two games already in progress (Love Bites and Cursed Lands) should really be finished this year, plus some more possibilities:

Cursed Lands – I don’t know exactly when it will be out, because with RPGs is really hard to set a good estimate release. Let’s say I get all the writing by June (just a worse-case scenario). The game should be finished by Fall of this year, even considering long time to do balancing, etc. Of course as soon as I finish the second act/full moon, I’ll update the current beta version.

Love Bites – Even in this case I can’t say exactly when it will be out, but since it’s not a RPG, once I have all the writing should be a matter of weeks. I want to be a bit more optimistic and say Spring in this case.

Volleyball Heaven – like above, in this case while the writing is basically done, there’s still a lot of art to draw, and do the scripting of the whole story. So it depends on those two things mainly, plus some extra coding required. I think that Summer could be a good estimate.

Anyway just looking at the last title above, I hope you understand why I’m done announcing games: even if VBH writing was 99% finished when I announced it, it was last Summer! And the estimate release is this Summer. One year. For an almost finished game. And it’s honestly nobody’s fault, everyone involved worked hard on it, just a series of bad luck happened.

That’s why I won’t talk about the current games in progress and it was a mistake doing it in the past.

I can also say that I have a few ideas for some SHORT GAMES ™ that I could write myself with an editor’s help. Of course for my standards “short game” will probably mean at least 70-80k words lol

And then there’s Planet Stronghold 2, I didn’t include it in this year of possible releases only because I honestly don’t think I’ll manage to finish it. After all I am already doing another RPG this year, and after I finish it I’ll probably need a few months to recover. So an early next year release it’s a more likely outcome for PS2. But you never know what’s going to happen πŸ™‚

That’s all, and Happy New Year again!

2017 and you never stop learning from your mistakes

I’m writing the naga storylines now and yes, I’m having fun!

I decided to break my “a new post every 2 weeks” rule today, and will also do another the 5th of January to make the usual two posts where I review the year and I write my goals for upcoming year. It’s a tradition and I don’t want to stop doing it πŸ™‚

Let’s start from what I posted earlier this year, my goals for 2017.

What went bad

Well, I did release Amber’s Magic Shop. I didn’t finish Love Bites, but at least it’s half done. And even if it’s not finished, Cursed Lands it’s at good point and I’ve personally invested at least six months of time on it (only the character creation phase with the custom portrait generator took me over a month to code). So even if I haven’t anything else finished doesn’t mean that it was a unproductive year, not at all!

Regarding my only release, Amber’s Magic Shop. The game didn’t do bad, and to be honest in current climate where you’re lucky to break even, it did much better than the average, but still… I have the feeling of a missing opportunity, that it could have been something much bigger.

I know the game got several complaints about the writing (especially on Steam) but I don’t want to talk about the writing quality itself but my own mistakes. First of all, doing a new game genre like a crafing/sim game, and having the story written BEFORE the gameplay. That was a totally stupid move and I am banging my head on the wall every time I think about it. Second and related to this, if I do a dating sim or a visual novel, there’s no problem in using external writers, but if I do a game where the gameplay is so interwoven with the story, I HAVE to write at least the storyboard myself. Otherwise, as many people pointed out, the story feels too detached from the gameplay.

Still, as I said it could have been much worse. Many people loved it, maybe I’m being nit-picking, not sure πŸ™‚

What went well

Planet Stronghold: Colonial Defense manga version. I was unsure if to do it or not (investing a non trivial sum of money to redo almost all the art of an already released game was risky) but the reception was amazing, and the sales increased by 300% (so now are in line with my other games more or less). I’ve said it many times: you won’t ever see me do a game with non-manga art again! πŸ˜€ I also felt relieved because I thought both the gameplay and writing of that game were good, and the results of the manga version just confirmed that the main/only issue was the art style.

Roommates extra nudity/sexy patch. This time was a smart move since the costs were much smaller (the original CGs were just edited and not redone from scratch, so much less work involved) and people obviously liked the possibility to (re)play the game with optional sexy content. I might try it again with other games but depends how quickly/cheaply it can be done.

Cursed Lands. As very often happens, some projects remains are there, unnoticed, slowly making progress in silence, I even forget about them, until one day I check all the writing already done and I’m like “DOH! this game could be finished relatively soon!” and then I start working on it full-speed (also because I don’t like to stay idle as you guessed). The game is in beta and so far people seems to love it, even if of course it’s still early days. I know for sure that we put a lot of effort in it πŸ™‚

Volleyball Heaven. Yes the game is not even in beta yet, and there’s still all the CGs to do, but I was particularly happy how the new writer finished all the story in basically 3-4 months! It’s also a very different game from my usual ones, so I’m curious to see how people will react to it. An experiment, but personally I like it. Hopefully you’ll like it too.

In Summary

Things didn’t go as planned, and I’ve learned a lot of things which should prevent me from doing the same mistakes in the next years. The main thing will be to get back writing one game a year myself with help of an editor.

This will also help me reduce considerably the amount of games I’m working on at once, because I noticed in the last months that I’m being too much stressed and health comes first.

It’s also “fun” for me to see how there’s a sort of pattern for my work which repeats almost every two years, alternating a good/lucky/productive year with a bad/unlucky/unproductive one:

2012 Loren+DLC, good
2013 Nicole, bad (not for the game, but because I just released one simple dating sim and it’s not much in a whole year)
2014 Roommates and SOTW, good (probably my best year ever since both games did great)
2015 No games, very bad!
2016 Five games!, very good
2017 One game, bad

The good news is: based on that “magic pattern”, 2018 should be a good year!! Let’s hope it is. Happy New Year to everyone!

Professional vs amateur freelancers

In the image above, this is what happens if you make Tofu angry. Be careful!

I’ve always been a rather unique indie. My main peculiarity was to release games at good pace, without necessarily sacrificing quality (at least, in my intentions!). I’m not writing this to brag, but as a matter of fact. And of course, doesn’t mean that my games were more successful than those of other indies.

Why I work this way? Mainly because I get really bored if I am always working on the same thing, same game, same story. If you think that SOTW was my game with longest development time, and still it was “only 10 months” (for the base game) which is really nothing compared to how long most indie games take (usually at least one year, yes even for normal dating sim/visual novels). And in my case was a full featured RPG…!

Consider also that except for some of my first games, all my stories are at least 100,000 words long, with an average length around 170-180k words! :O

As I said, I’m not bragging, wordcount in definitive means nothing (but if it’s well written, for sure players appreciate a longer story). Many indie colleagues are ten times more successful than me making smaller games and taking much longer each one. But I wouldn’t even try it, simply because I know already that I wouldn’t enjoy the process.

So what does this has to do with the blog post title? well like many other indies, I get a lot of people who want to offer their services (writing, art, music, even coding though it’s more rare). Since I made so many games, I worked with A LOT of people in the past.

I’m only aiming to give my humble advice to anyone who want to collaborate with other indies to create games over internet. This is my opinion, but I believe it’s also valid for other indies (or even other freelancing jobs in general). So what separates someone doing it professionally vs someone doing it in their free time?

Keep in touch

There’s literally nothing worse than not hearing from a collaborator over internet. This doesn’t mean you need to email every day but, especially if some work is expected from you, don’t disappear. This is literally the worst thing ever for me, something that really can’t forgive. Of course I’m talking about weeks (even months lol) of radio silence, not days.

Believe me, it’s much better to hear even stuff like “sorry but a new expansion for the MMORPG I play is out, so updates will be slower for the next week”, than hear nothing. Of course, strictly related to this, there’s also…

Meet deadlines

This is obvious, but it’s probably the thing all my collaborators miss. I’m more lenient because I know how hard is to met a deadline myself. However, there’s a lot of difference from missing a deadline by a day or a week, or by months…

But still, if you do the point above and keep in touch, it’s still somewhat OK. “Look boss I can’t finish XYZ by end of month, but I promise to finish it before the next” etc. Obviously, if you always miss deadlines one after the other… well that’s not good! πŸ˜›

Be honest

Another seemingly obvious thing, but that many times doesn’t happen. You don’t know how to do a task or are unsure if you’ll make in time? don’t say “yes I’ll do it” and then maybe either do a bad job, or be late or any other bad outcome. Another thing to avoid is coming up with sudden expenses before talking with the other part. The writing is going to be twice long because you think you’ll do a better result? inform,discuss, not write twice the word count, and then show the bill after the work is done. This is not going to make you get more work from that person…

Conclusions

In conclusion, if you keep those 3 points above in mind, I think you’ll have a much easier life as freelancer. Honestly? even if you only follow 1 or 2 of the point above you would be already a good freelancer! πŸ™‚

Notice that I didn’t talk about skill. First, because except coding, everything else is based on tastes after a certain minimum level. It’s better the art of Nicole, Roommates, C14 Dating, Loren, or PSCD? depends on tastes. Same for music and also writing.

But also, because sometimes someone who keeps the 3 things above in mind has more chances to get work (from me at least) than someone 10 times skilled but that’s always late, lies or disappears for months. I’m making this example, PSCD artist: you probably know that the character art was the main reason the game greatly underperformed at launch (now it’s doing well after the manga update).

Still, that artist definitely meet ALL the 3 points above. He is honest, works fast, always asks when it’s the deadline and if he cannot met it, emails me. Result? since people didn’t like his character art, I hired him to do other art: a LOT of icons for my future RPGs,Β  Amber’s all crafting icons, the shop builder rooms, colored all the PSCD manga CGs, and he’s doing even more work for me right now.

Speaking of skill, it’s also true that sometimes I have to stop working with someone if the results aren’t “good enough”. If I get a lot of comments like “this art/music/writing is bad” all for the same collaborators, well sadly I need to run a business so I need to think mainly about what customers say.

If you’re short on cash it’s fine to work with amateur (that don’t follow the 3 point above), just don’t expect to get anything done very quickly.

Well hopefully this post was useful for someone and wasn’t too boring! Next time I’ll talk about the games in the works and their status πŸ™‚

Amber’s Magic Shop postmortem

The light/dark system was one of the most appreciated innovations of Amber’s VN part

First of all, the usual Steam Summer Sale has started and my games are on sale with discounts from 30% to 50%. You can check them out here.

What I learned from making Amber’s Magic Shop

About two months have passed since Amber’s Magic Shop was officially out. The game performed well, as expected, however I want to talk about a specific topic in this post-mortem: the gameplay.

Reading reviews on Steam it’s always enlightening. Apart the usual joke reviews like “Sadly, no.” and a thumb down (ROFL that one was epic) in general you get a good idea why people liked your game or not.

Now in this case, reviews can basically be divided in two: those who played the game mainly for the story, and those who approached the game more for the crafting/sim gameplay. The first group has mostly positive reviews, the second mostly negative πŸ˜€

First of all, I think it was obvious that I wasn’t so arrogant to think to be able to make a game as good as the Atelier series! Fun fact: I started this game, back in 2011, because I noticed that on PC it was missing a crafting/dating sim game like one those.Β  Then, had the usual issues with writers and the game got GREATLY delayed. By Murphy’s law, exactly 2-3 months before Amber was ready, finally the Atelier series appeared on Steam! Perfect timing as always, right? πŸ˜‰

But apart this “bad luck”, my goal was to make a more casual/accessible crafting sim. I was the first to admit that I wasn’t satisfied with the gameplay, and that in future games I will think carefully before adding gameplay.

Of course, don’t get me wrong, there are people who played/liked it. Just last week an user in forums reached level 30… so clearly played the crafting sim a lot! πŸ™‚

Sometimes, less is better

Sometimes even just a map, and story that changes based on the order in which you do things, it’s enough to make a game fun (from Bionic Heart)

I came to this consideration: sometimes, doing less is not necessarily worse, more like the opposite. In future games, either I’ll be very confident about the gameplay I’m going to add to the game or … I wouldn’t even add it! It’s better to have a “plain dating sim” (it’s not a bad thing, really) than spend 3-4 months extra on something that: people who are playing the game only for the story won’t even touch, people who were interested in the gameplay mostly won’t appreciate/like because it’s not “good enough”.

At that point would be better to save my time, and release the game faster and maybe if possible at cheaper price, no? since after all I didn’t have to spend all the time/money to design/code/build a gameplay part.

I still want to have gameplay though

At the times of making it, Spirited Heart gameplay was very complex for a Ren’Py game. Luckily now it’s much easier to do sim games!

When I first started, I always wanted to have a story mixed with gameplay whenever possible. Sometimes the result was good, other times less. But while I want to offer a “VN Mode” for all future games, one of my goals will still be to try to provide some interesting gameplay as well.

Another conclusion I came to recently (not related to Amber but in general), is that unless the writer knows very well the gaming world (and luckily a few of my writers are also players), giving them too much freedom doesn’t always work well. It’s better if I write my own games and then ask an editor to do some heavy editing to turn my mediocre English into a decent prose πŸ˜‰

I believe that this way the end result will be better, with the story more integrated into gameplay (because I can code while I write the story). Also, since I would be writing my own games, once the story is done the only delay would be due to the editing, but luckily that’s a quicker process (the editor doesn’t need to come up with the story, the characters or think how to write a sentence so that makes sense in the gameplay context etc etc).

This is something I want to try too, but of course once I have finished all the current games in progress, and are really many: including the unannounced ones, I have 14 games in progress! Time to trim that number down I think πŸ™‚

A typical day of my indie life

First of all PSA: Amber’s beta demo should be finished very soon. Not sure if today or in the weekend, but look at my twitter/forums for an announcement πŸ™‚ As always, it turned out to be a much much bigger/complex game than I thought!

And now, I’ll talk about a typical day in my indie life!

Some people, even fellow devs, wondered what a day of my indie life looks like. Knowing how many projects I do at same time, people are probably curious about how I do it.

Spoiler: to be honest, I don’t know how I do it either!!! πŸ˜› Many days I do things in different order of course, and some days I take a half-day break or even a full day off if I’m particularly tired (like after a big game release or something). Anyways, here’s what a typical day looks like:

7.30-8.00 – it’s when I usually wake up. The first thing I do in the morning is turn on the computer and check the emails. Unless there’s an urgent email, I just read them but don’t reply and instead go downstairs to have breakfast.

8.30 – 12.00 – During the morning it’s where I do most of my work. I am really much more productive in the morning! I usually reply to all the emails first, and then depends on what is the current situation. If I’m working on a game, like doing some coding job or beta testing, then coding/fixing bugs takes the precedence over anything else.
If I’m not currently coding a game instead, I could be writing a storyboard for a new game or doing some game design (ie. new RPG ruleset, gameplay ideas, etc).
In summary I keep all theΒ  coding or creative tasks for the morning, because it’s the moment of the day where I’m more productive and also more “fresh” (not sleepy or tired).

12.30 – 14.30 – After lunch, I usually take a break. Some days I could do trips outside (when weather is good). Even when the weather is not particularly good, as long as it’s not raining, I take 20-30minutes of walk outside in my garden (luckily big enough so that I don’t seem a fool going around in a small circle! :D).

14.30 – 18.00 – This is my “afternoon working time”. Here I usually try to do tasks that I still need to do, but that doesn’t require particular attention/concentration. Of course, as I said in the beginning, I also did coding in that period many times. During SOTW beta I was coding almost every day even during these hours. But it’s not something I’d like to do again! πŸ™‚
So usually I do stuff like: answering emails of artists, musicians or writers asking for feedback or suggesting examples/stuff to work on next. For musics I browse youtube videos as references. For art, I google images around (many artists aren’t native English speaker, so a photo/image reference works better than trying to describe the situation!). For writers, I sometimes send them random ideas/feedback on what they showed me.
This is also when I usually read stuff. There are some periods where I get even 20-25,000 words to read in a day (having so many projects at same time…). And as you can imagine takes some time for me to read them all! After reading them I send my feedback (usually positive) to the writers or in some cases I ask for some changes. Same thing for art and music, though at least those take much less time! For art, it’s obvious if a sketch is not good, and for music I listen to the track in a loop several times before giving the feedback to the artist.
Other tasks involve: updating my website, preparing banners for Steam, fixing some small art mistakes (like a wrongly colored outfit or something that’s easier to fix myself than ask the artist), and of course scripting the games, which takes some time even if luckily it’s not a complex task.
During those hours, when I’m particularly tired, I also play games and watch movies/tv series. I know it sounds like an excuse but that’s still “work”!
I took many ideas for my games from those activities. For RPGs, I took inspiration by playing other titles. SOTW isomap was made after playing some Spiderweb RPGs. Loren and Planet Stronghold were clearly inspired by Bioware’s Dragon Age and Mass Effect series. Amber’s crafting is based both on Atelier series and Guild Wars 2. And so on πŸ™‚
Even tv series give me a lot of ideas for the stories of my games. Like some years ago “ah interesting so this character was her boyfriend, but now he lost his memory?” bam, Always Remember Me plot started forming in my mind!

19.00 – 22.00 – After dinner, I might still do some activities if it’s a particularly intense period. Still, no coding (unless it’s really an emergency, like a new Steam release with a crashing bug!). I was doing coding in the past, but at these late hours, I found I was having a very hard time to sleep afterwards. So I would end waking up the next day very tired and less productive in the morning. Because of this I stopped doing very “brain-intensive” tasks at those hours. I could say that 21 PM it’s when I stop completely working, but it’s a lie since sometimes because of timezones, I get emails at 22-23 PM from my collaborators and usually I can’t resist replying to them if they have any questions πŸ™‚

As you can see, in practice I could say I work 12hours every day. Oh yes I forgot: this is Monday to … Sunday πŸ™‚ I work every day like this. There are no weekends or holidays for me. Even if as I said, sometimes I take a day or two off to recharge batteries, because overworking yourself it’s never a good idea! But my friends doing regular jobs think I’m crazy for not taking even a single week of holidays. Who knows maybe in a distant future I will, but for now… that’s it.

You could say that in the afternoon besides doing some “monkey tasks”, I also gather ideas, inspiration for new games. And in the morning I put to practice all those ideas/rules/designs, working hard to keep releasing at least 2 games every year, which is quite an achievement for today’s standards πŸ™‚

I hope someone will find this post interesting. Of course it’s just how I do it, but there isn’t “a single way to do it properly”. However I think having a sort of fixed schedule really helps to stay productive in the long run and taking regular breaks helps to not get burned out too fast.