In the picture above, my cat Othello who found a bizarre spot to relax in my home. He seems caged but in reality he is relaxing in that pose!

As the title says, since I have no relevant news of my various games work-in-progress, today want to make some ramblings about those three game categories: visual novels, life / dating sim and roleplay games, since are the genre of games I made the most in the last 3-4 years (since I discovered Ren’Py in practice). In the end I will assign a percentage to each skill required to make them (is just for fun, remember!).

• Visual Novels are rather easy, coding-wise. The main focus is the story, without any doubt. By story I mean: the basic setting/idea (which personally I believe is the most important thing), the characters and the style of writing. I put the style of writing as last thing, because even if I think a good writing is important, I think it’s not as important as the game idea and characters. You can have a good writing, but if your visual novel uses a very common setting (high-school…) won’t be as much interesting as a more uncommon/original setting. An aspect most VN developers ignore though is the visuals/soundtrack. I believe nice visuals will make the gaming experience much more interesting, even if is true that the main focus should be the story. A nice soundtrack, or even better, atmospheric sound effects would help even more to get into the story.
  So in summary: visual novel = 60% story/writing, 25% art, 10% sound/music and 5% coding
• Life or Dating Simulation are already much more complex. No matter how much branching your visual novel can have, a dating sim will be more painful to code. Take my latest game Always Remember Me: there are lots of gameplay factors to consider. Difficulty balancing can be solved by adding a difficulty setting at start of the game, but making sure that each scene plays in the right order it’s not easy as it seems, and making sure there are no easy cheat/way to win by raising a statistic requires lot of time and testing. I grouped life with dating sims because usually are very similar. Almost all dating sim I’ve seen have much in common with life sim: a calendar, several statistics, several action/location to visit to improve them, character relationships and more. While not as complex as RPG, life sim can still be quite hard to develop, even with a powerful tool like Ren’Py. Writing is important, but in general life sim have much less texts (in some cases even A LOT less) than visual novels. Art and music are always important, but since there is also the gameplay element, they are LESS important than in a visual novel where the user will be staring at the screen reading for most of the time. In life sim the UI/interface is much more important than beautiful animated backgrounds.
  My conclusion is: dating / life sim = 20% story/writing, 20% art, 10% sound/music, 50% coding
• Roleplaying games are probably one of the most difficult kind of games to code! they have everything life/dating sim have (statistics, relationship, skills, location to visit, actions to perform) but in addition they also have a complex inventory (life sim can have inventory, but easier stuff) and obviously, the combat! I remember when I was younger, I almost ignored the story in RPGs and played them only if they had a well developed combat system. Now I pay more attention to the story but still I believe that MOST of the players care only about combat and exploration, and skip most of the writing. Art is important, but probably is the kind of games where it matters less. If you look at the various RPGmaker games or Spiderweb ones, you can clearly see that having a top quality art is NOT needed to be successful in this field. Is more about the ruleset, the battle/level up system, the skills, the quests, maps and so on. Clearly having ALSO a better art, will help, but is not an essential requirement. Same for story/writing, is enough to see how many successful action RPGs are there!
  I’d say that a good RPG = 5% story/writing, 15% art, 10% sound/music, 70% coding.

Please note that I am talking only about 2d games, so 2d RPG too, since 3d RPG are of a completely different league!

This justifies in part why took me so long to make a RPG game like Planet Stronghold vs the other kind of games. And also why I’m probably going to focus on life/dating sims in future, with some RPG hybrids from time to time. Ideally I’d like to make a life/dating sim every 2-3 months and a good RPG every 6 months (or perhaps more). That’s why I put the Loren princess game on hiatus for now, since I wouldn’t have been able to do a decent job while doing so many other projects at same time (lazy artists aside! lol).

Cinders visual novel

The picture you see is from a upcoming visual novel game from MoaCube, the debut title of a new development team friend of mine. They’re new in the visual novel world but they’re well known in the casual market, and the art style is quite unique. I’ve seen it in action and the attention to details is amazing, lots of particle effects going in the background. I cannot comment much on the story because the version I tried was early alpha but as the title says, is going to be based on the Cinders fairy tale.

For more information, check the game official site: http://moacube.com/games/cinders/