A lot has been going on lately for me. In random order, here’s what happened in last months:

THE BAD

• google hates me – I had a -25% drop of traffic from google and I have no clue why 🙁 I neglected the marketing side a bit, despite having released quite some games recently (Flower Shop just in february!). But I hope to catch up soon (see below point)
• some artists I use to work with, are no loger working for me – this was a real pity. I’m talking about Rebecca Gunter (all my visual novels so far, from Summer Session to Heileen 2) who now is booked until NEXT YEAR! Well, I knew that working for me makes people famous, but wasn’t expecting that 😉
• I had to find replacement for “lost artists” (even if some are only temporarily out). This is very frustrating as I want to have VERY HIGH art quality in my games. And browsing deviantart portfolios is really time consuming. Then, I have also to see how the artist work: some are very good but disorganized/lazy. I had to replace Planet Stronghold artist with a new one (you see an image of the new one on the right) because the 1st was simply too slow and also cheating on reason she was busy – not very professional!
• The FB/social/MMO hype. I was caught into it as well 🙂 I spend several weeks doing researches on the technology behind those kind of games, so I worked less on my regular offline games. I am not really sure if I’ll ever make one, but at least now I know much more about it.

THE GOOD

• Card Sweethearts and Vera Blanc 1 are almost done! The first game is being finished by Ayu of Sakevisual, and the second is being proofreaded/edited by her as well. The original proofreader had many university exams to do, so I thought was better to let Ayu finish the job so the game could come out soon.
• Planet Stronghold is coming out very nicely. I love the new art, and the story is starting to be interesting. The battle engine was polished even more, showing some special effects and lot more feedback on the kind of weapon/armor/item equipped (added new icons for each item). While the first battles are easy, once you start to get some 3 vs 4 or even 4 vs 4 encounter the fight gets much more strategic. I think I am starting to balance it properly.
• I have now completed an auto-patcher/updater which I plan to use for the pre-orders beta of all my future downloadable games. What is it? Simple, if you preorder one of my games, not only you’ll get a download instantly but the game will check for an update every time you launch it, auto patching itself to the latest version. Very useful for testing (as you know, pre-orders beta are essential to get user feedback, and change things making the game better)
• Spirited Heart Flash – I had someone make a small flash version of Spirited Heart that I plan to put live this weekend in some major flash portals. I even put the game on Flashgamelicense for sponsorship but of course it was ignored: it has no violence, zombies or blood in it 😉