Category Archives: postmortem

Cursed Lands postmortem

One of the many endings / epilogues of the game. This one is not a big spoiler since we know already about Loren and Breza from Loren first game!

As promised, here is the postmortem of my latest RPG Cursed Lands. The game was released in May this year after about 3 years of development. Personally I was involved in coding and writing it from past year, starting around April/May until May this year, so I spent about one year of work on it (not always full time though, since February to May was mostly bugfixing).

The gameplay

For the gameplay, I reused my RPG engine with the changes done for Queen Of Thieves, of which the biggest were:

– no front/back row and no position swap during fights
– possibility to damage target’s defense to increase damage done and hit/miss chances reducing normal damage done
– portraits showing on the map when you can talk to a character
– non lethal battles

but at the same time I also introduced several new gameplay elements:

– “first person view” with the possibility to have bigger enemy sprites and monsters of varying sizes
– the social talent system with a series of new things like enemies attacking each other, fleeing battle, giving items to player
– the deteriorating defense system, so that over time the defense would go down as target takes hits, to avoid the battles dragging out too long
– skill checks outside the battle
– items with associated skills (like a magic book casting a spell, usable even by non magic users)

now I admit that some changes were mostly cosmetic, like the “first person view” of the combat, but I think it looks really better than before. In a way it’s like my first RPG Planet Stronghold in which you could see the enemies fully, and not just portraits. I know that some people disliked it (not this change in particular but the removal of front/back rows).

I agree that from the tactical point of view removing the front/back row is a step down, and I will probably re-introduce it in Loren 2. I’ll also try at same time to have a nice visual, so perhaps still “first person view” like in Cursed Lands, but with the enemies placed in a front/back row, and the party as well. The screen will be a bit crowded though πŸ˜‰ Anyway, there’s time to think about this.

The numbers

Cursed Lands numbers are very impressive:

– a plot of over 300,000 words with a lot of branching paths
– character creation system with over 1 million possible combos
– over 100 unique item designs (not 500 as I erroneously posted on twitter a while ago)
– if we consider color variations, over 250 different items (this means I reused same icon design but tweaked the colors to create a new item)
– a soundtrack of 21 tracks + theme song
– 5 love interests for each gender (though 4 bisex characters, the nagas, Nuala and Vaeril)

it is hands down the biggest game I’ve ever made: biggest story, soundtrack, items. SOTW has more combat and enemy variants, while Loren had more love interests, but overall this one was the biggest.

Bigger is not always better

That’s what they say, right? Well, in this case of course some people liked it a lot, others were neutral, and another group disliked it. But they are just people’s opinions, what interests me mostly are the hard facts, the statistics/figures, so let’s see some numbers:

– during the first week on Steam, Cursed Lands sold twice the amount of SOTW
– during the first 3 months, Cursed Lands sold more than Queen Of Thieves in 2 years
– during its first month of direct sales, Cursed Lands sold slightly more than Loren

I don’t think comparing it to Loren is fair though, since those were really different times. Indeed Loren sold about the same amount each month for longer, while nowadays after the launch month, it’s really rare for a full price game to keep selling the same amount for many consecutive months.

So it was a success? Yes, I think it was, especially considering the big “indieapocalypse situation” and for my modest standards of course. I know other indies that made twice the money with simple porn yuri dating sims of not even 1/5 of the size of my game and, of course, zero gameplay and complex coding. I love doing RPGs so I’m a special case, but if you’re after the money I definitely wouldn’t recommend doing one!

Anyway, I am personally satisfied of the job I’ve done with the help of the various collaborators and I’d like to think that maybe one day I’ll be remembered by the RPGs gameplay and not just by nice art/sexy contents.

Using different artists in a game

A complaint I heard (not too often to be honest) about Cursed Lands, was that some CG look different. Indeed, another artist did them, so that’s the reason.

When writing the game, the original content was much less (in truth it’s hilarious to say this, considering it was still around 200,000 words!!!). In case you don’t know, I added about 30-33% more content myself, in particular “extra romance scenes”. I felt the original script while was good telling the main story and characters backgrounds, didn’t go deep enough in the romances, and especially the “after”. In many games (including mine) the romance subpath ends when you make love/kiss/unlock the final scene with the love interest.

In Cursed Lands (and I plan to do the same also in future games) I wanted to break this system, since I also think romance scenes in which you’re already engaged or in a deep relationship with the love interest could be a nice bonus.

However, I faced a problem: the art was made by the same artist as Loren, who unfortunately doesn’t work for me anymore (luckily I managed to ask him all the art for Loren sequel and several more NPC/character art before he left). So the only option was to find a replacement artist for these new CGs. I think she did a good job, even if she clearly draws females better than males. Sylrissa and Nuala extra CGs in particular looks very good, while I think for example Jasper’s could have been better.

I think overall I made the right call, since from the feedback I got, the vast majority of players didn’t mind to have a different art in exchange of more content for the game. I could have just written the scenes without art, but would have been worse in my opinion.

More outfits, please!

A different situation instead is when you only add more outfit/poses to existing characters, and that’s what I’m doing with Planet Stronghold 2. I’ve already posted in the social media some images of character with new outfits (like Damien finally in a proper uniform suit).

Haha the image above shows one of the most fun bugs (though for some it might be a feature…lol) that is using a wrong variable to set the outfit of a character! Anyway, the nice underwear Lisa is wearing is one of the many new outfits added by another artist to the existing characters. Also a bit harder to notice, but even Rebecca’s pose is new: the old characters only had one pose, holding his gun in one hand. This one with both her hands on her hips is a new one.

They’re small details and maybe not immediately noticeable (well apart in specific situations like above haha) but they all add variety and if you can find an artist who has a very similarΒ  coloring style (like in this case) the result is always going to be worth it!

Conclusions

In an ideal world, you would first write all the story, and then commission the art. However, during my career so far, I found out that this is a risky approach if you want to be able to release at least a game a year. Artists can disappear, or take long time. So maybe you wait 1 year for the big 150,000+ words script to be finished. Then, once it’s done, you commission an artist, who can take another 6 months or more (depending on how much art is needed of course). As you can see while it can work, it will delay the release, instead of using the approach to produce the art in parallel or almost with the writing (even if this has other problems too).

And it’s not uncommon to find yourself adding more content to the game as you write/code it. It happened to me for example in my old game Spirited Heart, in which to be honest the different art styles shows clearly too much (it was one of my first games though…).

Personally I’m not sure what is the best method. Whenever I found a good artist I commissioned him/her a lot of art, and then adapted the story to the existing art (I had already a basic plot planned though). After all, that’s what we did with Loren and it has worked well it seems πŸ™‚

Love Bites is officially out!

Special thanks to Aleema for the awesome trailer video above. For sure the best trailer I’ve ever done for all my games!

You can find out more and purchase the game here: http://www.winterwolves.com/lovebites.htm

This game is a perfect example of a project where “everything went smoothly”. I know, it’s rare in the real world (and even more in the game development world!) but happens when you put together reliable people!

Brainstorming / planning

Miakoda, the game writer, had just finished writing the epic PSCD (over 240k words of text) and I wanted her to do something smaller (even if Love Bites is definitely not “small”, but you know how it goes, right?) and most importantly, simpler for me to code. I knew I would be doing more RPGs and complex games after PSCD (indeed I did Queen Of Thieves and Cursed Lands! Two RPGs, and now I’m working on a third, Planet Stronghold 2).

So I definitely didn’t want to have to deal with some more games with complex gameplay at the moment, and after some quick brainstorming, we decided to go with a game involving supernatural, horror, and romance. Seems a good combination!

Artwork

At the same time, I got in touch again with Rebecca Gunter, the artist who did my first games (Heileen and Bionic Heart series) and despite the very busy schedule, she said would have time to do the art for a new game.

Personally I love her style (might also be because I’ve a sentimental attachment to them) but if I try to be objective for a moment I think perhaps her best skills are with males, and I think yaoi fans will like this game in particular… even if both the females (Sabrina and Nadia) are hot too! The only downside is that she doesn’t draw full nudity, but you can’t have everything.

Writing

On the writing side, I think the game features the right mix of seriousness, jokes, and sexual innuendo. I also think the use of the “inner voice” (during the game, as your curse grows stronger, you start to hear a voice telling you… to do “things”…) was a brilliant idea by Miakoda and really adds to the game “something more”.

Gameplay

As mentioned above, I wanted to keep things simple. Originally I was going to use a weekly planner similar to Roommates, but then after some preliminary testing, and remembering well what people told me, I thought…”why?” πŸ˜›

So I reviewed everything and kept things simple. I didn’t bother to add a “visual novel mode” in this game simply because there’s no need. Yes you can trigger some early endings, and yes reaching a certain amount of money will play a slightly different text endings and so on, but overall you can definitely finish the game without going crazy with stat raising like my other dating sims.

This choice was almost universally well received and I think I’ll keep doing this also for future games: either I have some gameplay that works well with the story, or there’s no point in going crazy with coding when it’s not needed or doesn’t work well, just for the sake of it.

Conclusions

As you can guess I’m really happy about how things went with this project, and the previous one (Cursed Lands) as well. If you asked me in Summer last year I’d have never imagined that I would have two games out in the first half of 2018! Next stop is Planet Stronghold 2 and then, finally I’ll start working on Loren 2 πŸ™‚

Never Forget Me official release

Let’s get straight to the point: Never Forget Me is now officially out! You can download the demo, find more info and purchase it from here: http://www.winterwolves.com/neverforgetme.htm

And now a short “postmortem” about the game and a few considerations.

The game idea

The game basic idea came to me last year, I thought that could have been fun to explore the married couple life, something very different from what the usual dating sim do. In practice, start the game where most other dating sim end! And then I thought that the perfect game to do this was a sequel to Always Remember Me.

For this game, I wrote the storyboards myself, since I am quite attached to those characters and this story. The first game was quite popular, also thanks to a series of videos by the famous youtuber Dodger. Will she cover also this game? who knows, I hope so! πŸ™‚

Of course, being about the married life there was a basic problem: you couldn’t pursue several romances! (well, at least in theory…)

So I had to think how it would work, and I opted to let the player choose at the beginning of the story which romance route they wanted to play:

The other characters might appear on each route, but only as secondary/minor characters. The main focus would be the one you picked.

The gameplay

Then I had a big problem: what kind of gameplay? Originally I wrote the game as a pure visual novel, with the endings determined only by the choices. Each character has 10 scenes, with a choice in each and two options.

Based on your choices, you’d get 5 endings: 2 happy, 2 sad and 1 neutral.

Please note that while obviously people will want to get the happy endings, I think that even the sad ones are somewhat meaningful or interesting to play. In one sad ending for Eddy for example you learn how to stay away from men interested only in their career, while in a Hugh’s one you could learn that you need to fight to get your hard work recognized, even if the boss is your husband, etc.

Every path has a specific theme, as described in the game page.

I decided during the last month of development, to try adding also a scheduler/stat-raising gameplay. By completing the game in this mode, you would unlock two extra bonus epilogues: a happy epilogue and a normal epilogue.

Even for the stat raising, I wanted to try something different from the usual: the big difference in this case is that beside raising the character’s associated stat (like in most other games) to get the 100% relationship you also need to complete “goals”. The goals are randomized a bit, based on each love interest, and they are based on raising the OTHER stats.

For example, Aaron main stat is Romance. But to complete the goals, you’ll need to raise the other 3: Diligence, Culture and Creativity. Each goal will have different requirements. Some are also influenced by the Social/Energy values at the end of each week. This way, there’s more variety of gameplay and also a bit of strategy I think. Time will tell if people liked this idea or not πŸ™‚

Conclusions

The game is just out so of course I cannot know how it will do, etc. During the beta it was doing “OK”. However, this game also took me only 2 months of storyboarding (done last year in February/March) while I was waiting for other games to be done. And another 2 months to script/code.

In summary this could well represent one of the infamous “smaller games” (for my standards: it’s still bigger than many other games! about 90k words and 8 CGs is not bad!) that I want to make, to ease the wait for the bigger ones.

Never Forget Me beta + Future romance games

luis

First of all Public Service Announcement: my upcoming otome game “Never Forget Me” is now in beta. The only thing missing is the official game main menu and the theme song. Everything else is there and should be working!

For more info, check the forums: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=3937

Expected final release should be end of month or November at the latest, depending how testing goes (however being a visual novel/dating sim, most of the mistakes could be typos or other minor stuff!).

And now I wanted to talk about a topic I find interesting to me:

Romance in future games

After Heirs & Graces release on Steam, there was an interesting discussion in the community forums. To be honest, I expected a much worse reaction, considering the game topic (yaoi/gay only dating sim). I just deleted a couple of obvious stupid threads but not much.

Anyway, here’s what I’m going to do in future games, regarding the romances.

Finding an audience

The most important thing for an indie dev, is finding the audience, the niche. Either you try to make a game in a popular genre (platformer?) but in that case you have to compete against many top indies (and the chances of succeeding are small) or you can try to cater to a smaller but loyal audience. That’s what I’ve always tried to do.

The question is: there’s a gay/yaoi audience on Steam? probably, but it’s very small. It’s not just Steam though: I sell the games directly, but also on mobile. The result though, is thatΒ  Heirs & Graces did much worse than, for example, C14 Dating, on all platforms.

So if I had to make games for an audience, I would stop making BxB games completely. BUT! There’s a big but πŸ™‚ What is my goal? I think everyone should ask themselves what is their goal in life. I did it when I went indie. Originally, I wanted to make simulations and RPGs. Recently, I still want to make RPGs but also make experiments and story-based games. And regarding the stories, my goal is:

“I want as much people as possible to read my stories”

Yes, as simple as it is, that is my goal. Not because I’m arrogant and I think my stories (and those of my writers) are good or better than anyone else (they’re good though!). But simply because I want everyone to read them.

Now in the case of Heirs & Graces, I think it has one of the most beautiful stories of all my games. The father/son relationship, the fun and sad moments, etc. Not just my opinion, but basically of everyone who played the game. And here’s the problem: many people didn’t play the game because is yaoi only. And they missed a great story. This is bad, but honestly I knew it, it was inevitable, as much as some people wouldn’t play a yuri only game, etc.

What is the solution then? Well, the most obvious solution is to make games in which you can play as male/female, and have all kind of romances! On the other hand, doing such games takes a lot more time, as you can imagine. Also, usually you can’t offer 8+ romances (since you need to write them from the male/female point of view! it’s a LOT of work) and then you have complaints like with SOTW, in which people say that the game could have been better than Loren, but because of the few romances, it isn’t πŸ™

Are they to blame either? No. I can understand that as male straight player, perhaps Krimm is not my kind of romance. Or as female player, I could find Jariel just too “nice” (the DLC changes things quite a lot though!). There’s no one to blame, really.

Finding a compromise

So as author I need to ask myself what is the best thing to do. As you can imagine it’s not like I can do all games with male/female main character AND 4+ romances each gender. Then we have situations like Loren 2, Roger Steel or Undead Lily where the game isn’t ready yet after 3+ years! Doh, insanely huge games takes a lot more time to make! Who would have guessed! haha

However, I think perhaps the best way is to try, whenever possible, to have a male/female main character and at least 2 romances for each gender. Sure, there won’t be as many romances as if the game was otome or yaoi or yuri only, but at least this way there are moreΒ  chances that everyone can read my stories. My main goal.

If someone thinks that having maybe only 2 romanceable characters/combos is too few for a full price game, well they can always wait and buy the game discounted later. But at least they will read the story, as long as there’s at least one romance they’re interested in πŸ™‚

Of course, I have a lot of games I started years ago (some even in 2011… ahem) so for those, they could still be yuri only, no straight male romance, etc. Nothing can be done about this, except finish them as they were originally planned.

But for future games, especially bigger ones, that’s what I’ll try to do πŸ™‚