Monthly Archives: February 2016

Love Bites – introducing Brandon

intro_brandon

As promised last week, now it’s the turn of Brandon. And he’s not hiding anything either! (well technically he is, but let’s keep this blog “clean” :D)

Brandon Lawrence
Age:  22

The older half of fraternal twins (Kaitlyn is his younger sister), Brandon is a recent graduate with a degree in criminology who’s just now starting to take the first steps beyond university.  

Given his physique, most people assumed he played football while in college, but Brandon would explain that lifting weights actually helped him graduate.  His friends would teasingly say that he must be a straight A student then.

Long term, he’d like to attend law school, but that takes some serious money, and Brandon was feeling a little burned out with school anyways.  So, he managed to line up a job, but it won’t start for another three months.  

As a result, Brandon is currently living at home and hopes to find enough work in the summer so he can afford a place of his own.  

However, all is not as good as it seems.  Though everything seems to be going well in his personal life, Brandon has started to notice odd things happening around him.  Whether it was the young lady who didn’t cast the shadow…or the elderly man whose eyes gleamed in the dark.

Brandon isn’t sure whether he is seeing things, or he might be the victim of an elaborate prank.  Either way, he can’t let it dissuade him from fulfilling his short term goals…

Other games update

C14 Dating “private testing” continues, I just talked with the writer/coder and they are aiming to finish the 1st March! So it means that shortly after the public beta in my forums will begin. As always check twitter/forums to know about any news.

In the last two weeks I also started scripting myself Never Forget Me, the sequel to my popular game Always Remember Me (my very first otome and dating sim game!). I’ll talk about it in detail in a future blog post, for now here’s an… interesting screenshot!

eddyamy

Everything is going well, but I’m taking the opportunity to make a list of art missing as I script it, so even if I finish the scripting, I’ll still need to wait for the artist to do the new art. I expect the game could be out around this Summer, of course depending how the other things go.

I’ve been thinking a lot about future games (I mean, after I finish all the ones in progress now) but I’ll talk more in detail in a future blog post 🙂

Love Bites – introducing Kaitlyn

intro_kaitlyn

Here’s the first introduction, Kaitlyn. Why is she in underwear? Well in the announcement post I already showed the two other outfits, so I thought to do an innovative thing: “intro underwear”! Now the cool guys introduce their story characters in underwear, to show they’ve nothing to hide ;D

I will do the same also for Brandon (the male protagonist) but not for the love interests 🙂

All right, now let’s see what the writer has to say about Kaitlyn, the female protagonist of this game:

Kaitlyn Lawrence
Age:  22

Kaitlyn, the younger fraternal twin of Brandon, just graduated with a degree in chemical engineering.  She was fortunate to procure an entry level position at a pharmaceuticals company, but her new job won’t start for a few months.  As such, Kaitlyn’s trying to earn what she can while staying at home, so she could have her own place.

It isn’t that her parents minded her presence, but Kaitlyn wants to spread her wings, and show that she can make it on her own.  Ultimately, she wants to be her own boss, but that dream is much further down the line.

Now that she’s out of school, Kaitlyn would also like to relax a little.  Especially during her last year of school, she had to give up much of her free time in order do as well as she did.

Kaitlyn is now wondering whether all this studying was good for her, though.  Lately, she could swear she is seeing things, things which might be tricks of an exhausted mind.  For example, as she was getting a cappuccino, Kaitlyn thought she saw a ghostly figure in the mirror behind the barista, but a quick rub of her eyes showed nothing there.

Kaitlyn doesn’t know whether there is something more going on, or she is just more observant of the unusual lately.  Whatever the answer, there are more important matters she must devote her time to…

Other games update

Good news, C14 Dating beta should be ready by end of this month, and the final release not much far away (of course depends on how many problems people will find during the beta testing!).

Meanwhile Heirs & Graces and Never Forget Me (Always Remember Me sequel) are already being scripted. The former has all the story and art done (but still missing the music), while the latter is missing a few scenes and some artwork. For both I still need to design the scheduler/stat raising part though.

The Queen Of Thieves got all the yuri scenes scripted but I need to review them all, and it’s still missing a few art and scenes as well. My idea is to release Heirs & Graces and Never Forget Me first, and then work on finishing this game since doing a beta testing of a RPG is always a complex/stressful thing to do, and I need to be 100% focused on this task only.

Announcing “Love Bites”

I’m very proud to announce that I brought together two awesome people: Rebecca (the artist behind my early titles like Heileen and Bionic Heart) and Miakoda (PSCD writer) to make a new game! 🙂

I am quite excited about it. I don’t want to reveal too much about the story, since involves supernatural. Also, the full game title (or the subtitle if you prefer) is longer… but if I posted it now, I would give away some of the surprise. So for now I’ll just call it “Love Bites” 😉

Some more information: it’s going to have a classic dating sim gameplay, with a calendar, several places/activities to do, and of course love interests. It’s going to have both male and female protagonists, and have both straight and homosexual romances. There will be 2 male and 2 female love interests and you’ll be able to romance all of them with the male or female main character.

Are you already excited? I am! In the next weeks I’ll introduce the cast of the game. For now, here is a preview of the two main protagonists:

Yes two red-heads 😉 The cute dog Kaitlyn is carrying is Nick (even Brandon can carry him of course). It’s based on one of the pet I used to have (unfortunately he died back in 2011):

Nick

I already put several of my cats in games (Black of Heileen, Othello in Bionic Heart, Nina in Always Remember Me, Remi in PSCD) but this is the first dog!

Other news

This week also got a good news for yaoi-lovers: the writing of my first yaoi-only dating sim Heirs & Graces is finished! It still needs to be all scripted, coded, it’s missing some music, etc so it won’t be out shortly, but very likely will be the next game to be out after C14 Dating.

I also finished the last part of the Queen Of Thieves “robbery missions” and asked artist to do some tweaks to the sprites. I need to review all the scenes now, integrate them in the game (so if you visit the blacksmith with the right characters, you’ll meet Mary-Ann, etc) and make note of some missing backgrounds. Still a lot of work to do but having finished the coding is a big milestone.

I also got to play a first beta candidate of C14 Dating and it’s looking AWESOME. I am really eager to start the preorders which might happen very soon, even this weekend, so follow me on social media or read the forums to know more 🙂

Currently I’m looking at this release schedule (which of course could totally change based on cosmic-events, as you well know):
– end of this month/next month: C14 Dating beta
– April/May: Heirs & Graces beta
– June/July: Queen Of Thieves beta

will be fun in a few months to go back to this post, and see what REALLY happened 😉

Future card games and update

Future card games

dancing

So about 10 days passed since I released my card game PSCD. It was my first card game, and as you can imagine I was unsure about the results. If I compare it to my latest game, the RPG Seasons Of The Wolf, I can see that PSCD revenues are about 3 times less.

But it’s NOT bad as it sounds! First of all, SOTW was based on an existing world, so many players who liked Loren could potentially like that one as well (especially since I now I am implementing a “VN Mode” for it as well!) and was a RPG. It was also $25 vs $20.

Regarding PSCD, since it has also a story, and many of my players buy the games for the story, I won’t have any real data until the game is on Steam where a bigger audience will judge it (even those who aren’t much into stories but like more the gameplay). It will probably be around March.

Anyway I was saying that even if the sales ratio remains the same, I need to take into account a very important thing: time/money spent. As for money I spent a bit more on PSCD than SOTW (but not by much) but regarding time…! I spent 10 months coding SOTW back in 2014, while I spent 3 months (and not even all of them full time since I was following other projects) doing PSCD.

So this means that even if PSCD keeps selling at 1/3 of SOTW, it will still be a better ROI for me 🙂 Yes because as you can imagine is better for me to work 3 months on something, than 10 months.

This means that I will probably be doing more card games, besides the already planned Undead Lily. As always I’ll use the same base engine, but probably modify the rules a bit, since I like to experiment every new game I make.

C14 Dating update

Now to the best news of this week: it looks like that C14 Dating might be out very soon! I don’t want to say any date yet, but really I think maximum next month the beta should start. The final release depends on the beta as always but since it’s not a complex-gameplay game, it shouldn’t take long. Currently the coder is finishing/testing the various minigames like the one below:

c14minigame

Queen Of Thieves update

Progress on Queen Of Thieves have been made this week as well: all the otome CG images are done, and I almost finished coding the last part of the robbery mini game. While there’s still some writing left (and probably some more art/adjustment needed), even this game looks like could be ready for this Summer 🙂

otomeromances