Monthly Archives: October 2015

Queen Of Thieves – Fredrick

And now time for another male interest introduction: Fredrick! Read what the writer has to say about him below:

Fredrick Holtzer

Fredrick has been a lifelong resident of Ahkra. He was born in the town and expects to die there. His family has been living in the area for generations and he has some pride in that. Even when things might be better elsewhere, he has rather stubbornly refused to move on.

He currently runs a rather successful shop selling all kinds of goods. The middle classes and even some nobles frequently patronize his establishment leaving him relatively well-off compared to many others under the rule of Lord Raul. His success has made him rather unpopular with his fellow merchants but he cares little for that. So long as those that count him as friends like him then he cares little for those he is not friends with. He does not make real friends easily, however, so there are few that have a high opinion of him in Ahkra.

Most consider Fredrick a troublemaker who has no respect for the rules of business. He scoffs at such attitudes, attributing them to jealous rivals who struggle to grow even as he becomes more successful with every passing year. That is not to say he believes himself superior. He just believes in taking risks and reaping the rewards. Sometimes those risks do not work out but he does not let that destroy him like so many others. No matter how badly he is put down, Fredrick will get back up.

More progress on the robbery missions

Another week has passed, and made progress both on PSCD and the robbery missions of PSCD. The screen below is the main screen you’ll see when doing your night raids with the three sisters:

I am quite satisfied by the results, since there are several mechanics and they seem to work well together. Beside running the shop normally during day and earning a few money, during night you can:

pickpocket people: merchants is the safer district, but if you try to pickpocket nobles or even military people… you could get in trouble. Failing at pick pocketing will start battles, some with specific goals (stop the noble from calling for help for example)
explore: you will spend time to find new targets to rob. But even after you discover one, you won’t know much about it
and that’s where gather info comes useful: you can spend time eavesdropping or a little money to bribe people to gain more info about the chosen target: how big the house is, how many floors, how much money/gems, level of the encounters, etc
finally, choosing start robbery will start the robbery mission itself 🙂

I like the freedom you have, since you can choose to start a mission even without getting information, but maybe the target won’t have much money, or the enemies inside will be tougher than expected, and so on.

Regarding PSCD, I made a video of the current status of the battle screen:

For more info check my forums here: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=3724

Last but not least, all the romance CG ending for C14 Dating are done! It means that the game should be out soon 🙂

Queen Of Thieves – Therjalla

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Therjalla is the only elf romanceable character of the game, so already for this rather unique, but I also like a lot her design, I think artist did a great job with her 🙂

Therjalla Arme’Fallanerien

No one really knows who Therjalla is apart from being Ahkra’s new healer. The old and much maligned healer died very suddenly a couple of weeks before the sisters arrived in town, and the priests of the temple begged the traveling elf to stay on as temporary healer, until a replacement could be sent from the order’s headquarters hundreds of miles away. She agreed to do so, as despite being a scholar first, she still held to her vow as a healer, and could not let the people be without one for however many weeks it will take for a replacement to be sent.

Outside of healing, Therjalla keeps to herself at all times and talks to no one, except to collect various supplies she has brought in, to aid her research into the various herbs and plant life of the world. Several people have spotted her roaming the woods at night, collecting samples and carrying them back to the temple where she stays, but what she does with them nobody knows.

Many mistake the scholar for being cold but she is nothing of the sort. Therjalla actually cares a great deal about people, she is just not a particularly expressive person. She does not think there is anything wrong with this, and makes no effort to change her demeanour to suit others.

Queen Of Thieves update

Speaking of this game, this week started working on the last part of gameplay missing: the “robbery missions”.

In the image above you see the pre-robbery setup screen, where you can choose which usable items to carry with you. Yes, because differently from my previous RPGs, you have a limited amount of items you can carry with you (starting at 6 in Easy, to get as low as 3 in Nightmare difficulty). This was added to solve the problem that had in both Loren and SOTW, that is you could stock up a big amount of items, like bombs, and then kill even the most powerful enemy just using them (in SOTW there was a clever AI so it wasn’t always possible, but it was still unbalancing a bit, giving a clear advantage to Thief classes).

Now don’t think this restriction will make the game much harder or less fun: it will still be possible to win using the right item at the right moment, and since you are fully healed (both in HP and SP) after each battle, you don’t need to fear entering in battle already injured (like could happen in SOTW).

I wanted each item and decision to use one, to be more meaningful/important, and this way I think I’ve achieved my goal. Also, class restrictions have been removed, even a Mage like Joanne knows how to throw a bomb! 🙂 This mainly because with only 3 playable characters, having a limit of items usage by Class would have been too much.

Work on the other games goes on as well. I’ve commissioned new GUI for a few of the games in progress, like Summer In Trigue, which you can see below. I particularly like the star-shaped menu choices and the new dialogue window 🙂

Queen Of Thieves – Tiberius

Captain Tiberius Celsus

The captain of the guard has served Lord Raul for all of his adult life. He joined the city guard as soon as he was old enough and quickly rose through the ranks. Due to his tall height and build, most assume him to be a mindless thug but that could not be further from the truth. Tiberius is an extremely thoughtful person although he can come across as being rather slow because of this. He thinks things through from all sides before coming to a conclusion. This can frustrate some, but he can be stubborn when others try to force him to move at their pace.

Tiberius is extremely popular with the women of Ahkra, although as yet he is not known to have had any real relationship with any. It has led to rumours of him having interests outside of women although he has always denied such accusations when questioned. Asking him about such things is one of the sure ways to embarrass him. His female friends get very defensive when he becomes uncomfortable, so it is often advised not to fluster him in front of others.

Most people find Tiberius rather taciturn. He tends to speak little of himself, when he does speak and overall his speech tends to be to the point. His duty comes before everything so he rarely socialises except with those he knows very well indeed.

A very big PSCD update

This past week, was basically… insane 🙂 I started working full speed together with coder, and in a single week we fixed a lot of bugs and added a lot of new features to the card engine. Some of them will be also useful for Undead Lily, and the new AI system will also be reused (at least partly) in future RPG frameworks, like for Loren 2 and other games.

This of course doesn’t mean the game is ready, but at least for the framework behind it, we made really BIG progresses. I joked with coder because recently was unavailable, that if he works like that, he just needs to be around 2-3 weeks a year for me to finish a game 😉

Anyway, I also made progress on the layout. It’s still clearly work in progress, but I added some nice visual effects:

The first unit on left (Laser Squad) is invisible (there’s a moving fog over it), while the battle drone has a force shield which prevents any damage the first time the unit gets hit.

The cards can also be zoomed in to examine their stats and abilities. Not all cards have one, but most yes. It was fun to design over 120 cards (only for the Human Empire!) and several aliens:

As you can see, there’s also our friend Kaden. He is present in a main mission, but if we decide to make a small adventure also for the DLC (possible, though not yet officially confirmed) I will include also some other secondary characters which aren’t main heroes in the base game.

As you can see I’m quite enthusiast about it! I have coded 15 missions, but I know already I’ll need to replay them all once the computer AI is finished, to make more challenging battles at higher difficulty levels.

Next week I plan to take a break and go back working on Queen Of Thieves robbery missions. Doing a RPG and a CCG at same time sounds crazy? well, yes, it actually is 😀 but I’m having fun so far, so that’s all matters to me!

Queen Of Thieves – Moirgane

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After the main characters introduction, in the next weeks I’m going to talk about the love interest. Let’s start with Moirgane, one of the three yuri romanceable characters:

Moirgane Mercier

More commonly known as ‘Girl!’ or ‘Hey you!’, Moirgane is the long suffering waitress at the biggest tavern in Ahkra. She has been working there for several years now and knows practically everyone in town because of it. No one has a bad word to say about her and she is very popular with her often surly employer.

Moirgane can be a little awkward when around people she is not familiar with, but she tends to warm to people quickly. She has a reputation for being kind and accommodating, something she is quite proud of although it embarrasses her to be praised in front of others. Many do not realise it, but the waitress is actually extremely intelligent and particularly gifted when it comes to working with numbers. She does not keep this fact a secret, but it so rarely comes up in conversation at a tavern that many assume she works as a waitress because she was too stupid to do anything else.

With her life largely dedicated to working and helping her family, Moirgane has almost no experience in love. She is fairly sure that she is attracted to women, but outside of that she has done nothing about any desires she has ever had. To her, she cannot spare time to indulge in love while her family needs her help. Perhaps one day she might be able to find someone to love but for now work is what she needs to keep focused on.

Quick update

This last week was busy working on PSCD again. I am at good point, my goal is to finish with the coding/design of all the cards and plot missions, then add some extra side-missions, a bit like what happens on open-world games.

In practice my main fear is that people would play the game on Easy, beat it and complain it’s too short: each battle in Easy mode could last between 8-10 minutes (on average, depends on several factors including player’s speed), so multiplied by 30 missions = around 300 minutes = 5h. This because differently from popular CCG games like Hearthstone, the computer plays INSTANTLY 😀 so you don’t need to wait for the other human opponent to make his move (which is what usually takes most time in such games).

I am talking of course about non-visual novel players, with less interest in plot. Because about that, with a plot over 200k words, a TON of characters to romance (if we include also the future DLC already announced, there’ll be more romances than Loren!), and also several choice that affects the ending texts/CGs, visual novel players really have nothing to worry about it 😉 So if you play it only as VN, it will be worth it for sure.

I’ll probably change the normal card into bronze, to make it more different from silver

But since it’s also a cross-genre with a card game, I need also to think about that. So, I was saying, the goal is to add some side missions to raise your resources/XP that will result in more powerful cards in battles, which will be needed especially in harder difficulty level, and will also increase playtime. Increase but not in a boring way, since I’ll design those side-missions with mini-goals or variant. One example would be to do scouting missions with Remi, and you’ll have Remi playable card only in those missions 🙂 and stuff like that, so that would be fun to play.

The Queen Of Thieves – Thalia

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Thalia is probably my favorite character of this game. Whenever she opens mouth, I laugh 🙂 that alone is a good reason to like her in my opinion! But to know her better, read the writer’s official intro:

Thalia is the youngest and more rebellious of the Queen of Thieves’ children. She is short, scrawny and not particularly strong but she has been blessed with great agility. Throughout her life, she has used that skill to great effect to play pranks on her older siblings and overall make a nuisance of herself. She was the first to leave the family home at the age of fifteen and seek out a ‘better life’. Soon after, Thalia found herself working as an acrobat in a troupe of traveling performers. She was very good at it and soon found herself performing in front of many rich and powerful people throughout the world.

Her travels brought her into contact with many people and she found all of them interesting. As part of her exploration, she found making love to those new attractive people she met was the best way to get to know them. She slept with men and women of all shapes and sizes. Species was little barrier to her nor was social class. A performing acrobat was quite attractive to jaded nobles and she was more than happy to oblige their curiosity with her own desire for exploration.

There is little Thalia does not like about herself. She loves her body and loves how easy it is to get people to do what she wants. Discretion is not in her vocabulary and she has a habit of offending as many people as she delights because of her extremely plainspoken nature. Her boldness greatly upsets her oldest sibling and subsequently she often gets into arguments with Joanne over just about anything. When she gets into fights of any kind, Thalia’s usual tactic is to go for the most vulnerable area and attack it over and over again until her opponent yields. In the case of her sister, it is constant teasing that Joanne remains a virgin at thirty years of age. On the other hand, she does get very angry if she is ever accused of being some kind of whore because of her sexual exploits. She does not consider herself easy and hates that her sister accuses of her of such. The fact she is so cruel in return feels justified because of that.

Unusual in this day and age, Thalia is an avowed atheist. She refutes the existence of divine beings and will openly argue with those who do. She thinks priests exist only to extort money of others and that temples are just expensive status symbols designed to show off how much money a particularly religious order has. When pushed, she will accept powerful magical beings could exist but they cannot be gods since they clearly do not see and hear all like the priests claim.

When it comes to her mother, Thalia remembers little about her but that does not make her any less determined than her sisters to free her. Being such a lover of traveling, it horrifies her to think her own mother has been trapped in one place for twenty years and so she wants to free her to give her the chance to see the world just like the young acrobat has.

Other news

Regarding the new games, this week I mainly focused on PSCD gameplay. There’s the new card framework to test, so I’m focusing on coding/designing all the 30 base mission for the game, which would include all the enemies and various card abilities. With the coder’s help, we’ve already fixed a lot of bugs and added new features, so I’m pleased by the progress made 🙂

Once I am done with this, I’ll go back to Queen Of Thieves. But for that game I would need to wait anyway for the romance CGs and the writer finishing the routes and rewriting the robbery missions. Plus, I am using a modified version of Loren/SOTW framework so I know that one very well, and I thought was better to focus on PSCD framework testing first, since is something new and not yet finished.

So once again… I’m making a lot of progress, but for different games and on different aspects, so there isn’t one really close to being done. I laugh thinking about how many games I’ll be able to release all of a “suddenly” sometimes in the next months or next year 😀

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva