In the image above instead you see the three main characters of my new game “Queen Of Thieves”. Before you say “what, another game in production!” – just know that all those games I’m announcing are just in the EARLY STAGES. It means that this game might be not ready before Christmas! Remember Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook? I announced it in July 2010 and is not out yet… and that’s just an example

So, don’t get too excited or start thinking “how can he make so many games” and so on. Simply, nowadays if you want to survive as full-time indie you either have to make a BIG game that must also be successful (and it’s very difficult) or produce games at faster pace. Since I like to create stories and design gameplay, the latter solution fits me more than the former.

By the way don’t worry – I will write the main plot of Queen Of Thieves but the actual dialogues will be written by a native English speaker. I’m thinking about the same person who edited Vera Blanc texts since she did a very good job.

So what’s the game about? Without revealing too much, the story is about three girls who gets their mother killed when they’re young (I might change this and have her imprisoned rather than killed!). Her mother was the famous Queen of Thieves, so when the three girls grow up they’ll pursue the same “career” as their mother, with the help of Sambo, their father, who runs a shop in town.

The three girls are from left to right: Thalia, swift rogue, Joanne, powerful wizard, and Kira, deadly warrior. They’re all of three thieves, but each one has a specific training, what would be a Class in a RPG. Indeed this game will have strong RPG influence even if I am not sure yet it will be a real RPG. There will be battles but I’d like it to have more gameplay elements beside battles, so for now I’ll classify it as “strategy game”.

So I was saying ,each girl is a thief, but every one does it her own way. Thalia is the most close to the classic thief, and her skills involves sneaking, hiding in shadows, lockpicking, backstabbing, using light armor and dual wield and so on. Joanne is a wizard so can use magic for most of her task like opening door/locks, levitating, becoming invisible, charming guards, etc. Kira instead is the classic tough warrior: she’ll prefer to bash open door and locks, and will be able to defeat guards fighting them.

The main idea of the game is that you have to do both “solo” missions, so you can pick any character you want and have a very different gameplay experience, and have missions where you need to use all of the three characters, taking advantage of each class-specific skill.

Okay, that’s all for now, I’ve revealed even too much about this game!

I call it spin-off and not sequel because, even if you’ll re-encounter several characters from the first episode (Uncle Sam, Clara, Marian, and so on) the point of view, the minigames and several other aspects will be completely changed. The first major change is the point of view or perspective: you’ll play as Natalie, a cute young girl which you see sketched on the left of this post by Deji (Garcia nickname).

As you might have noticed from the kind of clothes she is wearing, is definitely NOT summer anymore: it’s cold, it’s winter! The game indeed takes place at end of autumn/beginning of winter (we’re still planning the story so that’s why I’m so approximate) and will see Natalie helping Susana in the flower shop. So the farming-sim of the first game will become a “flower raising sim”, but there are other minigames and metagames that will be present. And they’ll be perfectly integrated with the story! This means that you’ll be able to spend the money you’ll earn in a very interesting way (I don’t want to announce it yet but is really a neat idea) and it will definitely affect more the endings than reaching a minimum earning thresold like was in The Flower Shop.

The game will be called “The Flower Shop: Winter in Fairbrook” (working title, subject to a possible change) and of course, being a spin-off, it means that it’s a completely stand-alone game: those who played the Flower Shop will be pleased to see again some characters and “familiar places”, but the new players will be able to experience the game completely even if they haven’t seen/played the first one.

I can speak for all the team saying that we’re very excited to work on this game, which should be out soon, probably after the summer!

If I have some time next month probably will make a page on the official game website with the whole cast of characters you’ll meet in the game. Almost all are heroes you can control in the battle, but there are a few exception like the Royal Family (King, Queen and Prince) and some very minor robot servants.

I’m really pleased of the final appearance of Planet Stronghold, is probably going to be one of my most beautiful games, at least in term of artworks! Of course I’ll do my best to make even the story and the gameplay to be as good as the visuals

A few last words about the beta testing which should start hopefully next month: in the first phase (open beta) you’ll be able to download the game, which has an autopatcher/updater system so that everytime you launch it, will notify you if there’s a new version available, and download it. I plan to make this part of testing free, until at about 20-30% of the game, then the closed-beta will start and people who want to experience the game immediately will be able to pre-order the game at discounted price and download it immediately with the autoupdater.

During the beta I hope people will send bug reports and/or make feedback comments to my forums to help me increase the game quality.

Once the game is finished (ended the closed beta-test phase successfully) will be released normally as my other games. I know other devs that had great results with this system so I’ve decided to try it myself!

Inspired by them,I decided that just generic/standard psionic power would sucks I want each character to have at least one unique power.

They were already different each one from the other, because of the various skills (some could have high medicine skill, other high repair, and so on) but what makes really a cool RPG (or game, in general) is the unique powers, each character having his own personality/use within a party.

So I’m going to assign to each character in the game a special power, related to the combat of course. I am also going to rethink better the rock/paper/scissor system of the combat since in the first battles wasn’t really evident. Today also got two new sketches for new enemies from my artist:

The game art-side is almost finished, just need some more enemies and a few other characters+the rebel/alien race which inhabits Planet Stronghold. Once all art is done I’m going to work on it at full speed

As I said several times, I always start many projects at once because is normal that there are some “dead moments” between a production of art, voices, programming and so on. So it’s always a good idea to have another project standing by when your main one is on hold. Or simply to “do something different”. Working always on the same thing can get tiring sometimes even if you love your job like in my case

This game is going to look very different from everything I’ve done so far. First of all as you can see, it doesn’t use manga art-style. I love manga, but I like also the other comic styles (american, etc), so I decided to try making a different game. I hope people won’t buy my games only because they’re manga! :p

About the gameplay: it will be a detective/mystery story. I’m still planning it so I can’t exactly tell much about it, but there will be some mini-games inside it, similar to the recent Spirited Heart update. There will be also a scheduler, and a very simple RPG element in it (some skills to pick at startup that will influence the story slightly).

The cute blonde on the left is Vera Blanc, and she is gifted with some special powers… while the guy on the right is Brandon Mackey, his partner during the investigations. In this image they’re hand in hand but actually in the game they’re not a couple: it was a wrong sketch made by the artists but is so nice that I wanted at least to put it in my blog!

More info about this project coming soon. Now time to get back to add some more enemies in Planet Stronghold…

I’m also going to replace the all-white uniforms in the game with more colored designs. I also have the “casual dressed” version of Lisa which is even more sexy, but don’t want to post everything here, you’ll have to play the game to see it

That nice looking guy on the left instead is Prince Cliff, a character you’ll meet later in the game, when you’ll encounter the Royal Family and decide if to work for them.

In my original idea you can choose if to remain loyal to the Empire (and the Royal Family) or become a rebel and join a group of native raiders on Planet Stronghold who wants to fight for their freedom.

Beside the sketches I’m also working on redesigning the battle screen to offer more fast-help, even if so far people who played it all said that the game is fairly intuitive to use: not just the veteran JRPG players but also a few more “casual” style players said it was pretty straightforward.

I’m happy since with this first attempt in a VN-RPG hybrid I don’t want really to create a complex JRPG, but build a base to make a JRPG (probably a fantasy one) later this year (or probably next year, considering how many projects I have going on!).