As the blog title says, Volleyball Heaven beta is finally out! You can find more info here: https://winter-wolves.itch.io/volleyball-heaven

The final gameplay and themes

As said before, the game was turned into a plain visual novel since the gameplay system wasn’t working, so there was no point in adding it if it wasn’t fun to play. Also, this game is very different from my past ones, including more mature themes and strong language, so be warned. This not to say that there aren’t many funny situations or moments, but there is also some kind of content that you’ve never seen in my games before.

So far from the initial comments I got people seems to enjoy it, and of course let me know what you think about it, if it’s something you’d like to see more, or not, in future games.

The end of an era

I just wanted to go back for a moment about my previous blog post…! Planet Stronghold 2’s reception was very good, and currently it’s my RPG with highest review score on Steam! This makes me very proud as you can imagine (also because I wrote it all myself).

However, what I wrote in past blog still remains true, and it’s not only about the market and potential sales but the burn-out aspect. I am going to simplify things but I will still add RPG elements or mix between visual novels and other gameplay genres (sim/strategy/cards etc).

The Curse Of Mantras will be my last game to have a huge cast, but at least the card gameplay is easier (not by that much, but it is) compared to RPG gameplay.

For example if I had to redo PS2 today, I would:

• make the main plot shorter lol, obviously
• not have 12 love interests but 4-5 max
• choose a starting romance or start as single and romance new characters only (and not the madness of breaking existing romance to pursue new ones etc)
• have RPG gameplay but much simpler, more casual, less fights or quicker fights

The only thing I’d probably keep is much of the branching, but as said a shorter story. With all those changes, the game would have probably took me 6 months (because I am fast and work hard!) instead of 12 months, and I probably could have priced it more accordingly to today’s market.

Mine are just suppositions anyway, because this market changes so quickly that even us devs don’t really know what’s going to happen. It will be interesting to see my upcoming games like a match 3 / puzzle quest style game that I hope to announce on next month’s blog post!