Monthly Archives: October 2013

Nicole beta officially out

Nicole in game screenshotsNicole main menu image

Get the demo and buy the game in the official game page at: http://www.winterwolves.com/nicole.htm

After a long wait, Nicole is finally in beta! The beta actually started last Monday, so this version is already very stable! The latest 3 updates consisted mostly of typos and wrong images, so it should be perfectly safe to play this version (I got report of people who finished all the endings).

So what are you waiting for? Nicole needs your help! 🙂

Update on the yuri version

As you might know, a yuri version is also in the works. This time the yuri will be a completely separate game. Once it is ready, I’ll make a new demo where you can choose in the beginning which kind of content you want to see in the game.

The art is at good point but the writing has just started, so right now I can’t make any guess about when it will be available, though I hope worse case scenario Spring 2014!

…and the RPGs?

There’s no doubt that the RPGs have become my most popular games, so don’t worry I haven’t forgot about them. Right now the new Planet Stronghold 2 writer is busily working in the mines under the iron fist of my whip… ahem I mean, I’m motivating him to work fast 😉

Regarding Seasons Of The Wolf, writer should resume working on it in November and I still have to code almost two seasons of the game story. I plan to do like I did with Loren, and release the game as I’m working on it. So once I finish the full first season (Winter) I’ll release a beta demo for it, then when I finish the second I’ll update the demo to include the second season as well and so on.

I think that at leas the first season should be ready for Christmas 🙂

Crunchtime!

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When I told my wife I was in crunchtime mode, she made those cookies. I should do crunchtime more often!

Soo this week was supposed to be in crunchtime mode. And I was! Until the cosmic conspiracy decided that I couldn’t finish Nicole this week. Oh noes! What happened?

Well, after last Friday’s blog post things were going smoothly and I was making big progresses. The “online shopping screen” was done by Monday:

onlineshopping
the online shopping in the game will let you buy items to give to characters

then, the trainwreck happened 😀

Tuesday my TV LED broke, and discovered was because the cat pissed on the back of it 🙁 had to call the technician to retire it to get it fixed and then waited for the phone call. The warranty obviously doesn’t cover that, so here goes another unexpected expense…

Wednesday had power cut for 6h, and besides, <ahem> it was the 12th anniversary since my wife and I met. So I really had to take that day off! some friends on twitter said that the power cut in this specific day wasn’t random and that my wife was the main suspect… 😉

The next day, Thursday, a small vet emergency forced me to drive to town: 150km of driving with the cat, away from home for another 6h and too tired to work when I got back.

So… there went the “productive week”! Anyway, I made really good progress in the previous days so I might still be able to finish the beta this weekend or early next week. Now excuse me, going back to eat some cookies. Crunchtime!

Next week you have a meeting with Nicole

Nicole_OPver2.mkv_snapshot_00.18_[2013.10.09_17.12.02]
A screenshot taken from the game trailer. Apologize for the blurriness 😉

Yes you heard it well, next week (weekend probably) you have a meeting with a certain Nicole! Those are bold words, I know, but if I check the project status:

  • all writing completed: check
  • all texts proofread: almost (Sarah is checking them this weekend but she’s basically done)
  • all art done: check
  • all music ready: check
  • all GUI/icons done: only a few gift items are missing, but is not a problem, I can start the beta anyway even with temporary art
  • coding: need to finish implementing the online shopping and the gifts, but in a week it should be no problem

Of course in case wasn’t clear, I’m still talking about the beta testing version, but in this case should be very close to the final product (probably only some minor tweaking on stats/money/relationship and difficulty levels).

The goal is to have the game on sale for Halloween. Even if seems far away, I know from past experiences that it’s going to be very hard to release it officially before that date, but we’ll try! 😉

At least once this game is out I won’t say anymore every year “damn I wish I had a game good of Halloween!”. And when Undead Lily is out, I’ll have two! Speaking of which, below you see some nice (and not so nice, like the Harpy) card creatures:

creatures
From left to right: the Nymph, the Harpy and the Mermaid

Of course there’ll be a variety of genders from the classic mythology, those are only the ones which were done first 🙂

That’s all for now, going back to work on Nicole, I have a new deadline to meet!

The importance of custom soundtracks

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My dog Skipper in his usual begging face

In the past, I used to have royalty free music in my games. Partly because I couldn’t afford to hire musicians, partly because I didn’t think that having original music was so important.

But one day, I saw this quote by Friedrich Nietzsche on a website:

Without music, life would be a mistake.

And I immediately jumped on my seat and realized how wrong I was!!! 😀

Jokes apart, it wasn’t such an enlightening moment but pretty close. I used to have theme songs in some past games (Always Remember Me for example) but wasn’t until Heileen 3 that I decided to have a full custom soundtrack. And when I saw how much people appreciated that, and the possibility to download the music tracks (along with other bonus stuff) in the “bonus content” version of the games, I realized that indeed before I made a big mistake.

So what does this mean? it means that, always keeping an eye on budget, I’m going to have full soundtracks and in certain cases even theme songs for all my future games!

For example, you can hear a snipped of Undead Lily theme song below (is weird and scary but because of the game theme):

and Roommates will have a custom theme song + full soundtrack as well (can’t post a preview of that one though, sorry).

Seasons Of The Wolf

slavery
One of the early scenes of the game. Althea, Shea and Vaelis meet Riley for the first time

Is this game going to have a custom soundtrack? Yes, and also a theme song! Speaking of the game, I’ve finally started coding the game story itself as you can see from the screenshot above. Is still the early battles and I’m tweaking a lot of things, but I’m making progresses fast.

Short news

I know many people are eagerly waiting for Nicole & Roommates. Nicole writing is finished, though I still have to get the last scenes from writer. Some art is also missing which should be done in a week or so. I really hope to have the game finished for Halloween!

As for Roommates, there are only a few backgrounds and some CG scenes left, but most of the work is done. Will take a while only because the game is very long so needs time to be coded, but it’s at good point too.

One last news, I’m also thinking to redo Loren soundtrack, because is one of my biggest games and sucks a bit to have royalty free music in it (even if the tracks I picked were particularly good). So on the next game update you might hear a very different music 😉