My cat Tofu is trying to communicate with you using telepathy! She wants to inform you that there’s currently an indie mega sale featuring 32 titles here:
http://www.showmethegames.com/sales.php
many good games for all tastes. I put both my RPGs, Loren Amazon Princess and Planet Stronghold with a 50% discount using the coupon “SHOWME“.
It will last until 18th May!
In the picture above, my cat Batman sleeping in my messy office
This year I’ve already released two games: Heileen 3 Sea Maidens, the yuri version for Heileen 3 released last year in December, and Bionic Heart 2.
But there’s no time to rest on my laurels! The show must go on! etc etc.
Roommates
So I’m very excited to announce that Roommates script is 99.9% finished (just some minor tweaks and some gameplay phrases to add). The total word count is about 130,000 which is definitely not bad. It also will have a lot of replayability, since for the first time in one of my dating sims, you can play as male or female main character!
Unfortunately, there is still quite some work to do. The game will feature a full original soundtrack PLUS a theme song for it. I’m quite excited about that, since the theme song perfectly fits with the light-comedy setting of the game 🙂
On the art side, I am expecting some extra romance CGs that between my writer and me were referred as “the beach sex scenes”. So as you can imagine they will be quite “steamy” 😉
I’m also missing all the 26 backgrounds, and the artist I picked (who already did a great job on Nicole’s backgrounds) can begin working on them only in July. So as you can imagine, the game is very likely to be out in August/September, a bit later than I expected, but at least this will leave us a good amount of time for editing, testing, tweaking gameplay and so on.
Nicole
I finished Darren’s path this week, and Kurt’s one is being proofread right now. The soundtrack is finished (with 7 different tracks) and art-wise I am missing four extra scenes for the “normal romance endings”, but artist guaranteed she can do them in one month. There’s still some other art left like the GUI and chibis, but shouldn’t be a major cause of delays.
So I still believe the game beta could be out at end of June, or mid-July at the latest. We’ll see!
…and I haven’t forgot about the RPGs!
I know that a good amount of people who follows me now is because of my last RPGs. Well don’t worry, I haven’t forgot about you: I am definitely going to try finishing another RPG soon. Planet Stronghold 2 looks like will need more time than I thought, so that’s why I’m playing around with Loren RPG framework to experiment with it, using a different layout, higher resolution (1280×720) and simpler interface which could work also on touch-based devices, as you can see in the work-in-progress image below:
For what game you might ask ? Well maybe Loren sequel won’t be the only RPG set in Aravorn to be out in the (near, hopefully) future… 😉
What last missing piece you ask? Well, yesterday for real-life reasons I had to commute for long distances, so I spent a lot of time thinking. An activity that probably I should do more often 🙂
So, I thought that making games is like making a puzzle. You need all the pieces to finish it, and like puzzles, there are pieces that fit immediately, and others that take long time before you’ve found the right spot.
Gameplay design
A bit is for gameplay design reasons. I had to experiment a lot with the RPGs, but even for simpler games (at least apparently) like dating/life sim, quite often I have to tweak the screen layout and system for days or even weeks.
For example you might remember the old look of the scheduler for Nicole from last week post. Now look at the new version below:
Much better now! I eliminated the top title and made the photos look like Polaroid so four could fit on each row, and the text doesn’t overlap the image anymore. Small changes like that might seem obvious but still take time to design and code.
The real missing parts/pieces
But the most important thing, is to have all the needed pieces/parts/assets for a game!
I am doing several projects at once (probably too many) but there’s a reason for that: in every one there’s something missing. Nicole is missing some chibis and some extra artwork. Roommates some artwork, the main soundtrack, some writing. Planet Stronghold 2 is still missing a good amount of writing, some art (the talk poses) and good part of the RPG framework, plus GUI work.
In some cases is people’s fault, in other simply the job takes time to make, or is my fault because I waited too much to hire the right person for the job or planned the project badly.
But no matter the cause, every indie is in this situation, unless you make games that you code yourself using pixel-art / poser to do the graphics. In that case you might be able to do everything on your own, like I was doing in the beginning. No delays ever except for my own, but the results were much worse, since obviously I’m not a good artist nor a great writer!
So I wrote this post to say that even if a game is 90% done, sometimes that last piece of art, music track, writing scene, gameplay tweak, might cause big delays on a game release. That’s why when people ask me when a game will be out I always use the conditional “it SHOULD be out…” 😉
This year goal
I realized that we’re already in May, so at this point, as I said to a recent interview I did a week ago, my main goal is to release one RPG this year! Since I have the feeling that with the first Loren game everything went smoothly, all pieces fit together very easily, but I didn’t notice it until I started working on new RPGs and difficulties started to arise 🙂
Meanwhile, here’s a short video of Nicole so you can get an idea of the art and writing. The GUI artwork is still temporary placeholder of course!
If you follow me from the early days you already know that I like to experiment. I like to mix game genres, or at least try new things/features in existing genres.
That’s what for example pushed me to add the Social Boss Fights in Bionic Heart 2. By the way the official video is now on youtube, see it below:
And is why I’m trying to add a simplified (it won’t be Sim City of course!) colony simulation metagame in Planet Stronghold 2:
As always they’re early work in progress screenshots, but you can get the idea of what we’re trying to do. I think will be interesting to integrate the colony sim with the RPG gameplay. While we’re still working on the details, there will be some influence of the RPG part to the colony sim and vice versa. Of course playing in Easy mode will reduce the overall difficulty, while playing in Hard mode might be interesting since you’ll have to balance both the RPG and colony building simulation aspects.
Many quests will be directly linked to the colony expansion (like acquiring new blueprints to build new building), so it will also work plot-wise. You can see now why Planet Stronghold 2 is taking so long, it’s definitely an ambitious game! 😉
At same time, I’m trying a new GUI/gameplay system on the dating sim Nicole:
instead of the game map like Always Remember Me, I’m going to try using a simplified interface, showing “pictures” that are places you can visit. Then each place will offer a variety of actions that change based on the plot, time of day, day of week, like Always Remember Me.
I’m going to try to experiment also on the plot: I thought today that rather than having a “alone ending” if you fail to romance anyone, the game will end in a different way… since there’s an abductor in the campus, the final scene will see our poor Nicole being kidnapped (of course without revealing who it is, so doesn’t spoil the fun).
More scary than the usual otome games? well for sure, but I think will be very interesting…mouhahaha 😉
Bionic Heart 2 is done!
First of all the big news everyone (myself in particular, since was getting burned out!) was waiting for: Bionic Heart 2 is finally finished!
You can get more info and download the free demo at this page: http://www.winterwolves.com/bionicheart2.htm
I am working on a small update that will enable a “HINT MODE” so that you’ll get some hints before each boss battle, though to be honest most of them are easy enough, but there are a couple of harder ones towards the end of the game (Tom/Luke and in particular Julia/Tanya last boss fight). Meanwhile, please visit my forums to get some tips and a full walkthrough.
The official game video isn’t ready yet, I had it done already by the end of March but decided to change a few things, I hope to be able to upload it next week, along with the official PR and newsletter.
Roger Steel is back
After some delays, the sneak peek of the steampunk RPG Roger Steel are back in my forums! Check here: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2961
More RPGs in the near future…
Even if the next games to be released will likely be the dating sims Roommates and Nicole, rest assured that I’m not going to stop making RPGs! Planet Stronghold 2 still needs more time, but meanwhile I am planning some surprises, including an unannounced RPG and resuming the work on Undead Lily, which was put on hiatus early last year, and while is a more light/casual RPG it should still be fun to play. More news about those projects after the Summer though!
iOS madness
A not-so-good news instead is that I’m having insane troubles trying to validate/upload the Heileen port to iOS appstore. I’ve been talking with 5-6 different people, all expert of iOS, showed them a lot of screenshots, and everyone said that “it should work” (last famous words).
But as a matter of fact, after ONE WEEK spent on it, I still couldn’t validate/upload Heileen. Now before you think I’m a dumb newbie, I really tried EVERYTHING, and I suspect is something really screwed up at Mac OS/Xcode level (wouldn’t be the first time I heard of such problems). Maybe will just hire someone to do the submission, I can’t afford to waste one week of my time just for that! 😀
So for now, I am not sure IF/WHEN I’ll be able to publish any games on iOS. Meanwhile, Bionic Heart 2 is already available on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.winterwolves.bionicheart2