Author Archives: admin

Happy New Year and 2019 Goals

Happy New Year! Like every year I’m going to set myself some goals. Taking a look back at last year’s goals, I still have to finish Volleyball Heaven and Planet Stronghold 2, even if for this last one it was obvious I wouldn’t make in time last year.

I think it’s safe to say that unless I get hit by a bus or something, both games should be finished this year. Of course I’m also going to finish Corona Borealis since we’re at very good point.

I’m particularly curious to see how people will react to Corona Borealis in particular, since it’s going to be a “SMALL GAME” (albeit very polished!) for real this time. It will be shorter than my other games and will be priced accordingly (I haven’t made my mind yet about the price but it won’t be over $9.99 for sure).

Beside those 3 games, I might have some surprises, but even if I have some projects going on “in secret” (except for my Patreon supporters) my main goal in the next years will be to finish all the games I started, in particular Loren 2 and Undead Lily since are the oldest games I’ve announced that I still have to finish. I should also really be getting Summer In Trigue done though, luckily that’s not a RPG so I’m not involved directly into it.

Every year I keep saying that I would also do some “experimental games”, but I never find the time. I have an idea about a card/sim game that I think could be interesting, in this case it would have a really minor story since the focus would be mostly on the gameplay. I need to find the time to code it though. A good moment could be when I finish Planet Stronghold 2, since I’d need a break before jumping into coding Loren 2 straight.

Anyway we’ll see. Honestly I can’t wait to have both Loren 2 and Undead Lily finished, because I think it’s really bad, both for developers and also players, to have games in the works since so much time. It’s a mistake I’ll never repeat again in future, alongside to never make sequels (in particular keeping the same protagonists).

In summary I think a good release schedule could be:

first quarter 2019: finish Corona Borealis
second quarter 2019: finish Volleyball Heaven
before end of 2019: finish Planet Stronghold 2

However, like happened back in 2018 with Cursed Lands, I realized that if I can work uninterrupted on a game myself alone, I can make progress much faster, and the story and gameplay are much better integrated (obviously since I write as I code and viceversa). So PS2 estimate release might change greatly depending on various factors. It would be nice to have it in beta before the Summer!

Like every year, when this is about to end, will be fun to go back and see how things went vs how I planned it. There are going to be some surprises for sure.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas and 2018 review

4 Replies

Like every year, besides wishing you Merry Christmas, I am going to review the year that is about to finish. As I wrote already in the past, this was a good year (professionally speaking) for me.

Against the elements!

Haha, early this year was really me against the elements! I mean, here it’s not unusual to have snow (I live at 800m on sea level after all) BUT, this year was really crazy. I have never seen so much snow as this year since I live here (over 10 years!). To this, add some crazy winds that blow straight from the mountains to my house at over 100km/h, rain/hail storms, and some walls of my house were damaged.

But wait, that wasn’t all! My already crappy wi-fi connection (normal broadband is not available here yet) decided to go offline for weeks. I remember doing updates for Cursed Lands from December to March (that’s THREE MONTHS!) using my normal phone connection which features the superspeed of 640kbps! I was uploading the games at 25-30kb/s: a full 100mb would have taken me AN HOUR to update… for every single OS. Yes to upload 3 separate installers (Win, Mac, Linux) would have taken me 3 hours. During a beta, where you usually update the game daily. This was clearly not possible…

Itch.io to the rescue

Luckily, the year before, I started migrating my games to the new platform called itch.io. I wrote about the reasons already in a blog post back in 2017, but in this case it was really my safety net: thanks to the diff patching system, I would only need to upload chunks of 5-10 mb at time. So even with my terrible connection, I managed to do updates that would only take me 15-20 minutes to upload max, without driving me nuts.

So the result was that I managed not only to do the beta regularly but even finished Cursed Lands much sooner than I thought!

The games released

I already wrote two detailed postmortems about Cursed Lands and Love Bites, so here I am only going to add that of course I was very pleased by the result of both games. I was really surprised to have Cursed Lands finished so early this year, since I had scheduled a late Summer or even Fall release!

For Love Bites instead, I knew more or less that it would have been ready in Spring. I delayed the game release a bit because it would have been too close to Cursed Lands, but that was the only reason. It was also great to be able to release a free new character (Ashley) later this year. Once again many thanks go to Miakoda, one of my most reliable collaborator!

Conclusions

I cannot deny that it was a VERY stressing year, also because I lost a pet and had to do some house renovating works (I really coldn’t delay them any more…). But ultimately things went well. I’ve also learned another lesson which could be summarized in: believe in yourself and your ideas. I remember when PSCD was out 2 years ago, I was depressed. Now, with the art fixed, it’s steadily my 3rd-4th best selling game. Cursed Lands on release had many negative reviews, claiming writing is stupid, art sucks, and so on. I was a bit disappointed, even if by now I understand that Steam review are just a bit… “on the negative side” in general.

A “camp talk scene” of Planet Stronghold 2, Lisa trying to understand Shiler’s point of view

Yet, it sold extremely well so it’s obvious to me that I must have done something right, or at least, I managed to match the tastes of a lot of people, the “silent majority” who simply enjoys a game and doesn’t bother to write any review (even if maybe it would be positive), but that group is the main reason why I’m still in business after all these years 🙂

So, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! And don’t forget to check my usual sales both on Steam and itch.io:

https://itch.io/s/15001/winter-wolves-christmas-sale-older-games
https://itch.io/s/15003/winter-wolves-christmas-sale-newer-games

https://store.steampowered.com/pub/winterwolves

Planet Stronghold 2 Cast: Prince Cliff Neuville

Prince Cliff Neuville

Prince Cliff has very little in common with his father, King Oscar. Cliff is very tolerant about the alien races and will always seek a compromise or even an alliance over a full scale war.

He is a daydreamer; more interested in culture and the arts. Though he isn’t a skilled warrior, don’t mistake Prince Cliff for a weakling or coward. He is a cunning strategist and will react to any threat to himself or his people with maximum force.

If you chose to side with the rebels in the first game, Prince Cliff imprisoned his father and took over the colony’s command in consort with Queen Shiler. After the final victory, Shiler returned to her people and while the two continued to have a good relationship, Cliff couldn’t help but notice how quickly new Maradan towns appeared.

If you sided with the Empire, Cliff would be imprisoned at the end of the war by his own father and sent to a prison on the planet Omega. However, he disappeared as soon as he arrived and nobody knows what happened to him.

If you started a romantic relationship after the final victory, Joshua and Cliff were burdened with additional responsibilities. Despite this, they were determined to make their relationship work because they knew it was special.

Volleyball Heaven Update

As you can see from the screenshot above, this game language/theme is much more mature than my usual ones!

Since I announced this game, a lot of things happened. I will assure you though that this won’t be another “cursed” game (I’m talking of course about the canceled Nicole yuri). Also because the story is fully written already, but there are so many outfits/scenes that scripting is taking a while, and also writer is reviewing and polishing every scene.

As I already said it won’t be out this year, but next year for sure! It will be my first title with very mature themes (and not just in the super hot romance CGs but also language, etc) so I’m curious how it will do.

The pre-match show featuring the two team

Contrarily to what I said before, a “full Visual Novel Mode” version won’t be possible, but this only means that the scheduler will always be present. You’ll be able to skip the match completely with an instant result.

The gameplay will matter to reach certain achievements but in general, you should be able to unlock all the romance CGs. I also know the writer is preparing a full walkthrough 😉

Planet Stronghold 2 Cast: Philipp Koenig

2 Replies

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving for those who celebrate it. As you probably already know, I’m doing an Autumn sale both on itchio and Steam.

And now let’s talk about Philipp! For some weird reason, I really like this character. Yes he’s an asshole, he hates aliens (but in the story it will be revealed a backstory that somewhat will explain this) and tells bad jokes. But still it’s one of my favorite characters to write! His camp talk will obviously take place in the colony pub where there’s no shortage of alcohol 🙂

Philipp Koenig

Before joining the army, Philipp Koenig was once a renowned bounty hunter, or at least that’s what he wants everyone to believe. In reality, he was a treasure hunter, always looking for buried alien valuables.

His lack of social skills, combined by his passion for drinking, earned Philipp a very bad reputation. Despite his drinking habit, Philipp’s abilities on the battlefield and accuracy with sniper rifles are never questioned. However, every higher ranked officer that dealt with him earned Phillip the label as “a total pain in the ass.” He often questions orders, and he does little to hide his deep dislike for aliens.

To no one’s surprise, Phillip is a loner. His harsh manners combined with terrible jokes ensure nobody wants to get closer to him, let alone gain his friendship. Most of the team members tolerate his presence mostly because of his incredible prowess on the battlefield.

Corona Borealis update

This time I’m going to do a small update about one of my other games in development: Corona Borealis. I’m pleased to say that we’re at very good point, but as you can imagine, releasing the game during the “Christmas rush” wouldn’t be a wise choice, so we’re going to wait until new year.

In the screenshot above, this is what happens when you keep saying “Can I romance this…?”

Next week I’ll also write an update about my other dating sim, the first really yuri-only dating sim released by me, Volleyball Heaven!

Planet Stronghold 2 Cast: Rumi Kai

1 Reply

Rumi Kai

Rumi Kai originally joined the military as field medic. However, one day Lieutenant Shatz saw her psionic skills at work and convinced her to become a combat soldier. What Shatz couldn’t imagine was how mistreated Rumi would be at the training camp. The camp’s zealous scientists found out that Rumi’s psionic index was two levels higher than the maximum level ever recorded in the time of Graciela Reyes (one of the first human psionics). Thus they began the “experiments.”

Rumi was no more than a test subject, and unfortunately during her “training time” she lost her sight. Luckly, once Tom found out what was happening to Rumi, he used all his influence so that she could be released and join the regular army.

Since then, Rumi Kai has always been considered an invaluable member of the team thanks mainly to her incredible psionic skills and code of honor similar to that of the ancient samurai. She treats enemies with respect, opposes decisions that she doesn’t consider “honorable”, and sometimes can show admiration for the most formidable opponents.

Progress update

The blog posts are written every 2 weeks so the info here is not super up to date, however for those not following me on the other social networks, I have tweaked how the skill checks work. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Initially I simply reused Cursed Lands skillcheck system. That means: if you have the required value of skill XYZ, the check is successful. However I quickly noticed during testing that it wouldn’t work in this case, for a simple reason: in Cursed Lands the checks were done only for the main protagonist, here instead any member of the current team can do the check!

As you imagine this meant that out of 6 active party member characters it would be very easy to find someone with the required skill, so I decided to change it this way:

if you have the required skill level with any character, it will always be successful (100% success chance). For example, a choice requiring Stealth II will always be successful if you have anyone in your party with Stealth II
if nobody has the required skill value, the success will be percentage based. For example in the screenshot above, the check is for Stealth II, and Rebecca only has Stealth I. There will be 50% chances of success

Differently from the first game, the random number are generated in a way so that the infamous “save scumming” is not working. Even if you save before the skill check and reload 1000 times, the result for that particular check with that particular character will remain the same.

I’m doing it this way since in the first game was a common strategy to save just before a skill check and try until you make it. However on the other hand, the success percentages here will be higher on average, so you should be really unlucky to fail a check (and even if you fail it’s not a game over anyway).

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva