First of all, my latest yuri dating sim “At Your Feet” is now officially out both on itchio and Steam!

Itchio: https://winter-wolves.itch.io/at-your-feet
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1537800/At_Your_Feet

And here’s the new video trailer featuring the game theme song (which turned out great):

As I said several times already I hope that people will give it a try even if they’re not interested in that particular kink since the cast diversity and the comedy setting makes, in my opinion, a very interesting/funny story to play!

New Kicksterter: Love Notes

Love Notes is my new Kickstarter campaign! This time you can play as male or female, and there are 4 love interests (2 male + 2 female). Each path is unique. As you probably guessed from the art style and title, it’s a game set in the same world as Love Bites, but it’s not necessary to have played the first game at all!

For more info check the Kickstarter page.

We already reached the base goal (the Kickstarter is 4 days old) but I hope we reach at least the 4 unique songs stretch goals since we’re going to use the same singer who did TFTU: Hazel and At Your Feet songs, which turned out great.

But even the bonus romances goal would be nice. The first one to be revealed is the female one, Kasumi:

She was a secondary character in Love Bites, and she is going to be a NPC too in Love Notes, unless we reach the 10k goal. And on the next stretch goal reached (4000 for extra BG/art) I’ll also reveal the male bonus romance, which I’m sure could be very popular!

I plan to do some weekly posts this month to introduce the new characters. Stay tuned.

What’s next?

So beside the new Kickstarter, what’s next? Well, for sure, Summer In Trigue. It should be out before the crazy holidays sale period. I am going to participate on the Steam Next fest in early October with a demo, and release the game shortly after.

I know, three yuri game releases in a single year (counting Hazel)? It’s a record indeed. But if you’re not into yuri, worry not, because the next few games that will come out will have all the romance options again, like Love Notes.

After Summer in Trigue and Love Notes, I’ll finally resume working on Curse Of Mantras too. If I manage it in time, it would be nice to have a short demo before end of year. If not, worse case I’ll publish some videos to show the progress.

With this kind of game is a bit weird since maybe one day you design 10 new cards. Then the next day you code and try them in game, and fix the inevitable bugs. Then another day you realize that they’re screwing up the balance, and so on.

This part is more difficult than with RPGs, since sometimes a single “overpowered” card can break the game. People who play this kind of CCG (collectible card games) know it well. It’s enough to see the frequent nerfs/patches done by big companies like Blizzard for their game Hearthstone!

Of course I’m trying to do my best to make the game FUN, more than “balanced”. I don’t mind if there are some (well hidden) tricks to make an invincible army of mythological creatures 🙂

So in summary, Summer in Trigue should be next release. Then Love Notes hopefully early next year. Then Curse Of Mantras. This almost surely means that the next ToA game An Elven Marriage won’t be out in 2022, but I guess we’ll see. Maybe a demo or beta towards end of the next year could be possible!

First of all, a short update on the two titles I’m working on at the moment: both At Your Feet and Summer In Trigue are at very good point! It amuses me that, as already happened in the past completely randomly, I’ll have two games ready at same time lol!

Anyway, the plan is to try releasing both before end of year, and keep working on the bigger Curse Of Mantras. I might also announce a new game before end of the year too, a surprise (except for my Patreon subscribers).

And now let’s go on with the main post topic:

Today I’m talking about something that I suspect very few users know, but also not every indie does (that’s bad! but it’s OK, I made same mistake too in the past).

What I’m talking about? I’m talking about the initial concept phase which should be behind every game. Usually, when you plan a new game, there’s this initial phase which should happen before everything else.

Now this is especially true for games with gameplay, but even for pure visual novels it’s a necessary part to have a good final product. In summary: during this phase you write down all possible ideas, the game theme/setting, the goals of the game, potential hooks/marketing value, etc.

It’s a very important phase since it will determine your game overall success. Yes of course the development phase matters a lot (a good idea is worth nothing if it’s badly executed) but a bad idea is bad and no matter what you do, it won’t work.

But as I said, it’s not just about the idea. It’s about everything: the mood/setting, the art style, the writing/story. For VN or story based games those things are super important!

Some real world examples from my games:

Loren The Amazon Princess – when I first started working on it, I had this hook in mind. You don’t play as the main character, but as her sidekick. You’re not the main hero, you start as a simple amazon slave. Then of course there are a lot of other ideas but the main ones where those, and I believe it was very original, and appreciated by players.

But for Loren I also took a very important decision early in the game development. I was unsure which art style to use. At the times (back in 2011-2012!) I knew only otome artist with a beautiful but “too cute” style (Always Remember Me for example). So I did some tests with a western comic art-style. But, remembering how people didn’t like it in Vera Blanc, I decided to keep looking. It took me MONTHS to find the right artist, and luckily I stumbled into that very skilled artist who did Loren and several other of my fantasy games, a perfect mix between manga and western art, with cute faces but realistic bodies.

Those two things above, together with good writing and a simple but funy RPG part, made the game’s success. And we did a LOT of testing / planning for the RPG framework as well!

Loren development took about 10 months, but I actually spent about another 6 months before the game even started to plan the characters, story, art, RPG rules, etc. And that probably was the most important work.

Amber’s Magic Shop – in this case, things didn’t go as smoothly. I made the mistake of doing the story first, before planning carefully the gameplay. The resulting game was that the gameplay and story felt too much disconnected. Many people still liked it, but I felt like I could have done a much better job with some more careful planning. In that case I got too much worried to finish the game without too many delays, a mistake I won’t repeat in future. Better delay a game and do some other smaller game meanwhile to keep fans happy, than rush a game out.

Make a spreadsheet / flowchart / plan!

In my early stages I was just doing games “on the flow”. There is nothing wrong in feeling inspired and following your inspiration to write or design/code. BUT this shouldn’t be the first thing you do.

First you should make a plan. How does the story unfold? What are the basic classes of this RPG? what are the mechanics of this collectible card game? Of course, when you get to actually work on it you’ll surely do many changes “on the fly”, not planned. That’s normal. But you should still have a main plan to follow otherwise it’s going to be a mess. And doesn’t matter if is a complex game or a simple dating sim. Plan everything ahead! Might seem wasted time but trust me, it’s not.

Conclusions

The two example above, Loren and Amber, are just two of my over 30 games. I could talk about each one in detail and how in some I did things properly while in others not. But this post would become way too long! If you’re a player, now you know a bit more how things work behind the scenes, during this initial planning stage. If you’re a developer, and you’re not spending enough time doing the concept phase, you should reconsider it, because every extra month spent doing this can result in a much better game in the end.

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.