First of all, my Kickstarter for “At Your Feet” ended. It didn’t go as well as Hazel but I knew it (risky/niche topic, non fantasy, etc). When I announced it, I told some indie friends privately that I’d have been happy if I did half of Hazel, and well it did slightly more than half!

I still hope that people that didn’t pledge will give it a try once is out, because I’ve already started doing the storyboards and there will be a lot of funny/sexy scenes and the cast is very diverse, it was since the Heileen times that I didn’t have such a varied cast! The chubby latina, the black athletic girl, the goth/alternative girl and a classic blonde “femme fatale”.

Apart for following the KS, in last month I also did some planning / work on the new upcoming games. Let’s see in detail:

ToA: An Elven Marriage

I’m still of course in the early stages of coding/design, but I added a new important feature to my RPG framework. In Planet Stronghold 2 I already added the possibility to compare and equip items from the loot (showing after a battle victory) but now I have added an even more important time-saving feature. You can see a screenshot of it below:

Yes, now you can instantly sell, from the loot screen, all the “regular” items – which you would probably sell anyway with a few exceptions. Maybe not realistic (how can the party sell instantly items if they’re not near a vendor?) but for sure time saving. I originally implemented this for my own testing but then I thought it was such a good idea that I’m going to leave it in the final game.

I’ll go in more details about this game in a future post.

The Curse Of Mantras

I’m at very good point with this game, I decided to add, beside the regular battles, 3 “final battles” against Mantras, if you unlock a special alternate ending (won’t spoil it more, already said too much!). For this, I needed a new “element”, which is the Cosmos with its associated cards. And they needed a special new card border as you see below:

Why I am doing this? Well because balancing this game is going to be tricky, since differently from PSCD is not linear at all, you can choose in which order fight each element battle, and while you might stumble into some more difficult fights, it’s mostly a matter of collecting “valiant souls” to upgrade your existing cards or maybe fight another elemental realm first.

And instead, fighting Mantras will always happen at end of the story, so I know exactly what kind of cards the player is going to have (all of them! lol). And I neded some powerful ones for the AI to be a real challenge.

Various unannounced games

I can’t talk about those but I made progress also with many other games. By progress I include planning, doing storyboards, commissioning preliminary art, etc. Maybe one day I’ll write a blog post about the “planning stage” that is very important. Even before announcing a game, I usually do some tests to see if it’s an idea worth pursuing or not. If it’s a new gameplay type, I do various tests, like I did for Loren and PSCD, and they can take months before deciding if to go on or not. So I am planning a lot of stuff but I won’t talk about it publicly until I know I’m going to finish what I started!

Conclusions

The plan in the next months is to finish At Your Feet, Summer In Trigue, and have a beta of Curse Of Mantras out. ToA An Elven Marriage won’t probably be out this year, but should be definitely out next ! Stay tuned.