Time for one of my favorite characters (ahem and not just because she looks incredibly hot, I swear) of Amber: Ruby the vampire! Here’s the introduction:
Despite her age in human years, Ruby is regarded as extremely young for a vampire and still clings to her humanity because of that.
Despite these things, she and her brother are well respected in the small vampire community that live in Icesilia. Her word carries a lot of weight and she’s not afraid to use her influence to get what she wants. Outside of vampiric politics, Ruby finds herself fascinated by Amber and strikes up a friendship with her after a few chance encounters.
Over the years, she finds it harder to resist the urge to feed of mortals and so asks Amber to find a way to return her to human form. Such a request is not without its perils but she knows without a cure she will soon lose what humanity she has left.
Ruby is an extremely outgoing person who enjoys flirting with members of any sex. As a human, she was a dancer and she still shows signs of that in the way she moves and acts.
Despite her pretence of aloofness, she actually cares a great deal about those whom she calls friends and will do anything for them. Her fear of becoming as monstrous as the legends say drives her to avoid drinking blood and often only on animals when the need becomes overwhelming.
Animals barely sate the need, however, and she often turns to Amber to help her resist the true hunger for the warm blood of mortal men and women.
As you can see from her intro, she looks like an interesting character. Her endings are great, even the “dark ones” are somewhat cool 🙂
I am very proud to announce that my new RPG/Dating sim “Queen Of Thieves” is now officially out for desktop platforms! You can check the game official page and download a demo here: http://winterwolves.com/queenofthieves.htm
Like always, a Steam and mobile release is planned, but will come in the next months (hopefully before Christmas, though not sure).
Better late than never
This is the first game of my series called “Better late than never” ™. Haha jokes apart, it’s one of the many games I announced back in 2011, that for a reason or another were delayed until now.
To be honest, to make a good RPG, you need at least one year of work just for the design, skill balancing, enemies, encounters, and other mechanics. So it’s only late by 4 years 😉
This game was intended from the beginning to have a more “casual/accessible view” on the RPG world. Sure, there’s the Nightmare difficulty mode which it’s still, well, a Nightmare to play. But in general the approach is more similar to Loren than SOTW. Following the majority of complaints, I have designed this game so that:
there’s no time limit. You can grind as much as you want. The final boss battles are designed for a party level 30, but you can grind up to level 35 if you want!
there are more rock/paper/scissor mechanics. There’s guard skill like in the past, but now there’s also a skill that can break the guard. You can cast fire spells to a target, but if you hit it with melee, you’ll get burned effect. And so on.
the party is fully healed after each fight, not like SOTW
there’s again a skilltree system, with two different skill trees (offensive/defensive) for each sister
there’s a lot of characters to romance: since you can play as all the three sisters, and each can potentially romance two characters each, there’s a total amount of 6 straight + 6 homosexual romances, for a total of 12!
There are also a couple of new features that I’ve introduced in this game:
the inventory has 5 slots, 4 armor and 1 for a weapon. Less than Loren and SOTW.
in addition to this, the armor pieces are only aesthetic: instead you can socket gems in them to add stats. So you can customize your character’s appearance AND the bonus stats you get from each piece of armor.
there are some new starting conditions: like Ambush that lets you move before enemies, or (based on the story choices) in some battles one of your party members might start injured, etc.
there’s no front/back row. This to make the battles last less than before.
except for a couple of fights at the end, there’s no game over. You’ll always manage to escape the battles if you lose.
So as you can see, definitely a more casual/user friendly approach. I dare to say that between the ones I’ve made, this game is the most appropriate for people new to RPGs.
However as I said don’t be fooled: if you play even only in Hard mode, the fights won’t be a walk in the park! If you’re not familiar with RPGs you should play in Easy mode. Or if you don’t like RPG at all, maybe play in “visual novel mode”.
That’s all for now. I hope the game does well, since it’s well written, has nice art/music, interesting gameplay and I enjoyed doing it. I really like doing RPGs, even if they’re really time/money draining, and generate stress anyway (lots of testing is needed).
it comes with a 10% launch discount. I think it’s fair, since it was originally released on my own site at beginning of June, so 3 months have passed 🙂
As usual those who bought direct, will be able to redeem a free Steam key from tomorrow at this URL:
In other news, I have been working like crazy on Queen Of Thieves recently, and I did a lot of updates on the beta, which is at really good point in my opinion. You can find more info about the game and play the beta demo visiting my forums here:
Please note: the game is content complete, and I’m only doing tweaks to the RPG gameplay right now. If you’re only interested in the story, and you plan to play it in “VN Mode”, you can safely buy it now, since that part has been finished and working since July 🙂
