Author Archives: admin

Five Years and still going

Is amazing thinking that I’ve started to be indie dev 5 years ago! Time really fly!

To celebrate it, I’m preparing a small surprise: a mini quest for Magic Stones 🙂 free of course. Don’t expect a full quest like the previous one, but hey, it’s free, so don’t complain!

On other news, I’ve started working on 5 more projects! 8| crazy I know, but since now I have decided not to use Poser art anymore, I depend on artists. And usually they’re slow or disappear… so to prevent long pauses, I have started many project, so hopefully at least one artist manages to finish his job in time 🙂

Stay tuned for the announcement of the new miniquest for Magic Stones in the next few days.

Heileen: sexy but not erotic!

Hope my english is good enough to talk about this! (no worries, the final game will be proof-readed and edited by a native english speaker!).

One of the major complaint I got for Summer Session was that it was sexist,shallow, and such. I don’t agree of course, even if I didn’t write that game myself. The game didn’t contain any explicit scene (actually, not even a nude girl !) but still people complained.

In Heileen there’s going to be lots of sexy situations, but nothing you can’t actually see if you turn on your TV anytime, or you read any teenage comic. Of course the game won’t be suited for kids. But for teenager, surely. There won’t be any explicit reference to anything, just allusions and sexy situation always presented in a fun way.

Since I’m making a romance game, I don’t think I can make it cutting out completely the “eros” part. But the game won’t be erotic. There will be one scene were a girl kisses the other, but is not a passionate kiss. It’s one of those kisses where you barely touch the other people lips.

At least here, it’s common between teenager, especially girls. This doesn’t mean they’re lesbian or whatever, just that are very intimate friends.

Well… when it comes out, hopefully at end of this month, I really wish that people will appreciate my game and won’t make useless and misplaced complaint even on this one! So far all beta-testers (all girls) liked the game and none complained about it being too “sexist” or “vulgar”.

Heileen: endings and sudden death?

I’m at chapter 4 of the game. I plan to have 10 chapters total, for a very LONG game 🙂

Now I’m thinking about the various endings. Better have many of them? I mean, the more, the better? or would be better fewer ones, but with the story that really branches out?

Let me try to explain better… most dating sims just show a different ending based on the skills you raise during the game. Heileen doesn’t have a schedule/planner, but a sort of quest mode to raise points, and has some internal values to store player menu choices (but without showing him exactly how much impact had his last decision heheh).

So I was planning to have at a certain point of the game completely different stories based on player choice. For example at one point you could have to decide if to leave the ship and help a friend of yours in a town nearby, or stay in the ship. Choosing the first option would lead of course to a different end, but also to a different part of the story. I mean not just a few paragraphs but really 1 whole chapter with your adventures helping him in town, like almost a separate sub-story inside the main game.

Another thing I am evaluating is the “sudden death” – very popular in the “Lone Wolf” gamebooks, mean that your character could face a sudden death without any real warning (like happens unfortunately in real life). I am of course aware that this isn’t a good decision for a casual game, but I always liked that feature.

I mean maybe I’m a bit weird but when I was reading the death description in those books, was cool to see how the main character was ending his adventure (also because I knew I could just go back a few pages and choose another path!).

Since I plan to have a “rollback” option, I don’t think that should be a problem. It means the user can use the mousewheel to go back in the game timeline so can choose another path that won’t lead him to the fearsome sudden death 😀

Heileen first screens

I’ve finished the first 2 chapters of the game. Writing in my own native language is much faster 🙂 even if it means I’ll have to get all texts translated…! hopefully they’ll do a good job at it.

I’m really proud of the aspect of the game. The art is even better than Summer Session one. Just take a look at my screenshots below:

The fun thing is that I’m attempting a sort of new genre: dating sim (or romance adventure) from a woman’s perspective! 😀 It means that the game will have his own variety of characters and some will be more polite than others, but in general, I’ll need to put the right dose of “sex appeal” without being too explicit.

There will be also some very cute characters (two cats) and in general a more relaxing atmosphere. For now I’m not going to put any sort of scheduling mechanism, also because the game takes place for almost all its length onboard of the Cat’s Dream (the ship name).

I have added a nice feature though which is called “Quests”. In practice during the game you’ll be able to find quests to solve, that will award points. Discovering a new quest will grant you 2 points, and solving it another 3 points.

At the end of the game you’ll be awarded a score based on how many total points you scored, similarly to what happens in Sid Meier’s games 🙂

Well I’m very excited about this game even if everything is quite new for me. My first real attempt at casual audience. So far it’s a great experience and very relaxing compared to coding huge games like Supernova 2!! 😉

More plans for the future!

Ok so I said I was on holidays… 😀 but I really can’t stay idle for too long, so I had this new idea for an adventure game based on 17th century sea travels. I am writing it right now, in my native language, then I’ll have it translated. I’m still thinking if to have it translated into several more languages, since for adventures the language can be a big barrier (not everyone knows english, but still likes to play adventures or simply read stories).

The adventure will be still in the form of visual novel (so not really a pure adventure because the object manipulation and solving quests with items won’t be present). In a way, will be different from Summer Session, because of the settings but also it won’t be a pure dating sim, and also this time you’ll take the role of Heileen, a very cute but shy blonde english girl. There will be a romance, and some really funny characters. But more about that soon in future posts.

You might notice a sort of improvvise shift in my games. Well that’s true. I tried to make complex games like UBM, Magic Stones and Supernova 2. But honestly, I have to pay my bills 😀 so, for my future games I’m really taking a more casual approach. That won’t mean worse games, quite the opposite. More intuitive games, still with a good set of rules (except the adventures of course) and more attention to the graphic part.

Just take a look at the main menu background art at Heileen official site, to understand what I mean.

No, I don’t think I’ll use poser models anymore in my future games!

For those who loves RPG don’t worry. I’m going to develop another game similar to Magic Stones hopefully next year. It will contain several card sets based on races (human, dwarves, amazons, and so on). You can admire a card image of an amazon necromancer here:

The necromancer card of the amazon set

The necromancer card of the amazon set

Not bad, isn’t it? definitely better than my usual Poser art ! 😉