It’s time for me to give an update and more details on this game! First of all, here’s the title screen (work in progress but the logo is final):

But who exactly is marrying, you might ask. Well I don’t want to spoil too much, but since it’s the premise of the game, and you get to know it anyway during the first scenes of the story, I’ll tell you just this time!

The marriage is between Lydia, the princess of the Moon Elves (and one of the love interests of this game), and High Cleric Marian from Lakshun, the capitol of Paqwana. The game begins with Saren or Elenor being summoned by Apolimesho, who explains how such a marriage is very important, since it’s the first marriage in years between an Elf (albeit a Moon Elf) and a member of the Human Empire (Paqwana is part of the Empire).

As you can imagine, a lot of people don’t like this marriage, and they’ll do everything in their power to make it fail. In addition, a certain familiar succubus is looking after our team…

The RPG gameplay

Regarding the gameplay, I couldn’t of course reuse a previous system, I had to do some changes! Even if the core system remains the same. There are some interesting variants though: let’s see them together.

First of all, the front/back row system is back! This was a very popular request and I agree it makes the battles more strategic. They might not be as cool looking as if they were seen in first person (Cursed Lands or Planet Stronghold 2) but since Loren had this system I thought it makes sense to do the various spin-offs using it.

The battles will still be turn based, with movement order determined by skills and attributes. The four elements + dark magic of Loren will be replaced by 3 main resistances Elemental, Debilitation and Mental) each one with 3 sub-categories. This because differently from Loren there will be other kind of magic (more about this below).

The biggest change though will be the overdrive system: it’s a value represented by 3 stars that slowly fills up as you fight battles (deal damage, heal, etc). Each character has a special overdrive skill that is very powerful and can change the tides of battle, but using it requires one overdrive star.

This means that people might want to save them for tougher battles, adding some more strategy overall. Of course everything is still work in progress and during beta I’ll tweak this new system better.

Regarding the playable classes, another very popular request was being able to play as magic user and I’m happy to announce that yes, you’ll be able to play as mage if you want!

There will be four playable classes: Warrior, Thief, Mage and Warden (sort of healer magic user).

Like in Cursed Lands there will be items that can cast spells or give skills like the “Book of Nightmares” above.

New resistances and stuff for nerds

And now some stuff that will be interesting mostly for the RPGs nerds 😛

I’m still balancing the various skills, spells, resistances, etc. but I have decided to try moving away from the elemental+dark resistance, to use a different system. The various school of magic will still exist of course, but now the resistance is based on the actual effect/damage type.

There will be 3 main damage types: Elemental, Debilitation and Mental. They should cover almost everything.

In Loren, in practice every spell was dealing some form of elemental damage. But moving forward I also plan to have different stuff, like spells that impact target’s emotions, feelings, etc.

Some examples:

• a Fireball will still obviously inflict Elemental damage
• the Stinging Swarm spell will inflict Debilitation damage
• the Dark Magic spell “Brain Shatter” will inflict Mental damage

And so on. I think this system is better because allows different spells/damage types and resistances and also makes more sense for some spells. Then for each damage type there will be 3 debuff resistances, as shown below:

The armors will give defense and protection against one of the 3 main categories, while the jewelry will increase resistances against some of the debuffs. The resistance of the armor will reduce damage:

An armor with 50% Elemental resistance will reduce the damage from a Fireball from 20 to 10.

But for the debuffs it will be a percentage to determine if they trigger or not (maybe I’ll use it to reduce the length instead, still need to do some tests).

The romances

Also for those who missed the news, I’ve managed to find an artist to edit existing CGs so that both Lydia and Nathir can be bisexual romances! Which means the following:

• as Elenor, you can continue Rei’s romance or start single and pursue Lydia or Nathir
• as Saren, you can conitnue Myrth’s romance or start single and pursue Lydia or Nathir

So there will be two straight and one homosexual romance for each playable character, much better than originally planned! 🙂

Each romance will have one “couple” love scene, plus 1 “pin-up” image, which means the love interest will be seen in first person, so he/she is alone. As you know unfortunately this artist doesn’t work for me anymore so I cannot do any changes (it was already hard to find someone to edit the romances good enough to make Lydia/Nathir bisex!).

Adult content

For my newer games I’ve started offering optional adult content. For some older titles though, I have all art ready (I did it years ago) so in those there can be more erotic texts, but unfortunately the images cannot be changed (would need to get them edited again and I don’t think the result would be good).

This means that for this and the other 3 Saren/Elenor spin-off games, and Curse Of Mantras, there won’t be adult content. Nudity, yes, but nothing as explicit as my recent titles like Hazel or Planet Stronghold 2, to be clear.

That’s all, I hope this post has answered many questions that people have been asking me more or less privately!

From time to time I like to talk about being an indie developer in general, like this time. I’m hoping that at least some people find these posts interesting!

So what is the topic of this post? In practice, I try to explain what I consider the best approach to be an indie developer regarding development schedule, based on my past experiences. Let’s proceed in order.

The main goal of every indie is to first stay afloat (which is not so easy as it seems) and then hopefully make a profit. To do this, you need to release new games (DOH!).

Now comes the more interesting part: what is the best strategy? In my first indie years, I had no long term plans at all. I was just making whatever game I wanted, often deciding on impulse. Those were very different years (talking about years pre-2008) and I wouldn’t advise it unless you’re just doing it as hobby.

In more recent times I tried very different strategies: both taking my time to deliver the best game possible, like I did with SOTW, Planet Stronghold 2, and start several projects at once like I did for example back in 2016 when I released 5 games in a year!

Let’s see both approaches in detail.

Releasing a big polished game every few years

This is what most indies are doing to be honest. They take their time, polishing the game, doing a lot of testing, adding new features, getting feedback, etc etc.

I have tried doing it several times in my indie career. But every time, I can say it wasn’t worth it, from the commercial point of view.

Seasons Of The Wolf took me around 10 months fulltime (12 if we also include the DLC). It wasn’t a flop at all, however it definitely wasn’t worth all that extra time.

In more recent times, I did almost the same thing with Planet Stronghold 2. This time, once again it wasn’t a flop, but it performed way worse than SOTW (but that’s also due to the “sci-fi curse” and reason why I’ll never make a long sci-fi game again).

In summary: the longer the game takes to make, the higher it needs to sell. It’s that simple. It doesn’t even matter how much money you spend up to a certain point – because it’s your own time that matters. I have my own way to calculate ROI (Return Of Investment): I divide the game earnings by the months I worked on it and that is my “virtual salary”.

Example: let’s say a game earns me $10k and took me 5 months to make, my virtual salary is $2k.

So, if the time you work on a game increases, the revenues need to increase as well. As of today, I got better ROI from TFTU: Hazel than Planet Stronghold 2, despite the first being a much smaller game, plain VN, and yuri only. That says a lot I think…

Let’s make super quick games ASAP!

That’s what you might think after reading this post so far. Well, that’s not true either! The games need to have a certain quality, or in case of VNs, have a good base idea, and good writing/art/music. Then, they can be even short. But they still must be quality products.

There’s also another factor to consider: game price. If you make a game which is 50-60k words long, you can’t ask $15-20! My RPGs are usually $20-25, and even if I had a few complaints (users always complain about price) in general they sold way more than my cheaper games, which means that for the vast majority of people, the price was fine.

A good thing of small games is that you can test ideas quickly, see if a new game world works, get quick feedback, not lose enthusiasm because you don’t still need to work 8 months on it, etc etc.

Also, there’s a psychological aspect to take into account: some players when they see cheap games, they think they’re automatically bad, and maybe are reluctant to buy them at all.

The formula of success

As you see, it’s not so simple to pick what kind of game to do. My advice is to mix both small with long games. Because both the things below are true:

• releasing a game every X years is bad because people always want to play new games and they might forget about you and so on. Also a new game release is always a big marketing boost.
• releasing bad games (rushed, done quickly) can lead to a bad reputation and in future people might be wary of trying your new games, even if they might be better than what you did in the past

So the formula of success, in my opinion, is to release 1-2 short/medium games a year, and maybe a bigger game every 2-3 years. The short games still need to be of good quality (good idea, writing, art, etc) of course.

This probably applies only to VNs developers. For “regular games” already releasing 1 game a year is a sort of miracle (most indies doing any kind of game but VN take 2-3 years to make one!).

Sounds hard? Of course! Being a full time indie developer is VERY HARD (especially in today’s crowded market)!

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.

Last year I mentioned I wanted to go back doing a comedy game. And not just comedy but also a “crazy” one. So I had this idea, of a yuri dating sim in which the main character, the latina Emma, has a foot fetish.

I’m serious, it’s not a late April’s fool. It is real (those following me in social networks already know it’s true). And before you ask: yes, women can have it too. I did research it before deciding to make this game!

The Kickstarter game page is: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterwolves/at-your-feet

The game has 3 love interests: Victoria, Lucy and Natalie. You can see a better introduction in the Kickstarter page.

I know that this is a very “risky” game, mostly because it’s completely different from anything I’ve done in the past – my games always had some humor, in some cases even extreme humor like Roommates, but such a crazy starting idea? lol

But in the end, I’m doing so many other “serious” games in the next years, like Curse Of Mantras that I’m working on now, or ToA: An Elven Marriage, that I really wanted to do a game with a light mood, something to relax and have a moment of escape from the reality (and I think we need it now!).

And now after such a crazy announcement, I suppose people could have some questions, so I made a sort of “Question & Answer”:

You’ve given up with otome or yaoi games?

For smaller games, it makes more sense to make them yuri or otome. If I look at my last 10 games, 7 out of 10 have otome, and both the bigger games mentioned above (Curse Of Mantras and ToA: An Elven Marriage) have all romances, so…

Also, my future new Kickstarters will have more romance options again.

What if I’m not into feet?

This kink is very particular, but for those not interested in feet and that are looking for sexy content, the game will of course show also other parts of the female body.

For those instead who’ll play it for the story/romance and not the sexy part (the game can be played in a censored way) I think with such a weird setup the story could turn out to be rather funny, with some embarrassing moments, but also with cute ones.

So in summary, I think it should still be worth playing even if you don’t like this fetish at all.

Why have you decided to do such an absurd game?

Simple: I wanted a break from insanely huge games, complex coding, serious epic stories, from a big cast of characters, especially considering that I’m working not on one, but on two such games at the moment (both huge and both with a more serious/epic plot and complex gameplay).

And so I wanted to do something silly and different. It would be easy to pick a “safe” genre like otomes, do romantic stories with cute art, and have a guarantee amount of sales. Nothing wrong with that strategy, I did that too in the past – BUT sometimes I want also to try doing something different!

That’s why everything considered, I was happy how Volleyball Heaven turned out (and judging by the reviews, people liked it). And why I liked C14 cast with all their disabilities, and so on. From time to time, I want to try new things. Remember that Loren was one of those “experiments” and it turned out it was a good idea.

So please forgive me if sometimes I come out with something silly/crazy as this game 🙂 But don’t worry, it will be the exception and not the rule! lol

Before talking about the topic of this post, an announcement: Hazel is now available on Steam as well: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1394550/Tales_From_The_UnderRealm_Hazel/

Also Steam keys have been added to itchio, so if you bought it there, you can grab your free Steam key now. And now, let’s get back on the topic of this post!

So in past months I began working “seriously” on this game. And I felt sick again lol! I thought that after 10 months of break from Planet Stronghold 2 complex coding, I was good, but as the first inevitable bugs/issues popped up, I started to feel bad.

I thought what to do with this game. Since I already have all that heroes/creatures cards art, I wanted to use them. But if I said I couldn’t do anymore games having both supercomplex gameplay AND long story, there was a reason!

While coding it, I was also unsure if people could like the setting or not. With my fantasy games, I am more or less sure that there’s a fanbase. But something totally new and also a bit “crazy” like this setting? I have no guarantees. So probably this was also influencing my mood as I was coding it.

Maybe I found a solution though!

The master plan

At first, I thought that worse case I could have done the gameplay part only, and sell it as pure gameplay game (with the romance CG as rewards). Many games on Steam do this now, in practice combining gameplay+sexy stuff. However for sure most of my fans wouldn’t like it, since are used to read a story.

So I had this idea: I’ll first work on the gameplay part. Implement and test all the cards and meta-gameplay like upgrading cards. And then have a beta. This way, any potential early bugs or issues will be solved. Ans so, once I’m done with the gameplay part I can focus on the story only, which is rather complex too.

During Planet Stronghold 2 development I had both to take care of bugs AND a complex branching plot, and it’s definitely an experience I don’t want to repeat (or better, I CAN’T repeat otherwise I need to go on theraphy lol).

Splitting the two things, coding first, and story later, will make everything easier. To be clear: the beta will be a sort of pre-order, since there’ll be a lot of gameplay. Not the whole game, but a good amount of it. Probably not the final 2-3 battles, but almost all cards should be there.

And after the base gameplay is well tested, I’ll likely do a KS to gauge potential interest in the story. I have already brainstormed all the storyboards but depending how the funding goes, I’ll make the game shorter/bigger accordingly.

Yes, because the story is going to be a bit particular, different from what I’ve done in the past, even from PSCD. How to put it, it’s more “risky”.

In short: each character died and the game takes place on a sort of after life/limbo. You’ll do battles and discover the past of each character thanks to some special device. So the vast majority of the story will be each character telling their backstories, and you (the protagonist) will interact with the narrator with the usual VN-style choices.

There will be a few scenes with the various character talking to each other of course, but the majority of the story will be about each character’s past.

I am going to do it like this, because this setting otherwise would be too hard to write. In a fantasy game you have existing lore, backgrounds, locations, etc. Here I’d need to start from scratch and also, taking place in a limbo, there isn’t so much that can be done.

I’m writing ToA: An Elven Marriage (the next Saren/Elenor game) in my “spare time”, and I feel it’s much easier for me because there’s already a lot of existing lore, characters, places, and so on. It’s MUCH easier to do! It almost comes naturally. Instead for CoM I’d have to spend hours just on planning each scene.

And since I don’t want Curse Of Mantras to become another super-huge game, I can’t even do too much world building! Just think that there are 12 backstories to write (10 love interests plus the two protagonists) and even assuming “only” 10k words each story, that’s already 120k just for the backstories part (even if it will be the bigger part for sure).

Anyway, this is the plan. We’ll see how it plays out!