Category Archives: Android

Planet Stronghold on Steam

As you probably are aware already if you follow me on the social networks, my sci-fi RPG Planet Stronghold is now available on Steam. Above you can see the game trailer (the info at the end is outdated though, the game is also available on iOS).

I’ve already talked in the past about the game, in particular shortly after I released it, and is fun how Steam rejected the game back in 2011, and now 3 years later there it is! They have underestimated the power of the Wolves! 😉

Jokes apart, while I still consider Loren my best game, I’m quite affectionate to this one for two reasons: was the last game I wrote completely on my own (however is better if real native English writers take care of this aspect now!) and the first RPG/VN hybrid I made, which saved me from a sure bankrupt and put me back on track to stay indie for more years.

Seasons Of The Wolf Beta

Meanwhile, SOTW beta made a lot of progress in this last week. I admit I am a bit burned out because of how many bugs I fixed and how much balancing tweaks I made!!

First of all, while the stats-derivation method was delivering really well balanced fights (as expected) it had a huge problem: since everything was based on players behaviors, I had no reference for the battle difficulties. I couldn’t tweak a battle, I couldn’t lower or increase HP, Attack, Speed of the enemies because every time they would be different for every player 🙂

So, I had to discard the system after a few updates. Oh well, I’ve tried. Live and learn!

Then started to rebalance the game again, but I forgot a small detail: the level scaling was off, so the difference of difficulty between Easy and Nightmare wasn’t big (and instead, should be VERY big). So I had to rebalance the game completely for a second time!

At one point I even took a screenshot of all the 4 difficulty mode of a boss enemy to compare the differences:

The Huge Kodiak is a boss battle in a sidequest

…yes as you can guess, I went a bit insane 😀

All of this while fixing at least 5-6 major bugs daily (in first days even 10-15!!). It is good of course, and now that I have a much bigger following is even expected, but it was quite exhausting for me. Anyway, now everything seems to be working, so I can move on coding the second Act of the game.

I’m probably going to open preorders once I have finished the second act (and is in beta) so I’m at a good point of the game.

Stay tuned because next week will resume talking about C14 Dating, the new upcoming otome game 😉

Roommates officially out + video!

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Here’s the official Roommates video trailer with theme song “My Name In Light” by Leetstreet boys!

That was the last thing missing to officially release the game Roommates. More info and download/buy links here: http://www.winterwolves.com/roommates.htm

I have also submitted the game to Greenlight, so if you liked it, please vote for it:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=233332314

The game is also available for iOS:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/roommates-visual-novel/id827116639?mt=8

and Google/Amazon appstores for Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.winterwolves.roommates
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IK44NA6

Meanwhile…

…work on the other games continues! C-14 Dating is coming along nicely, found a new writer for Nicole yuri to speed things up, but fans of RPGs will be pleased to know that I’m going to add more unique skills to my next RPG Seasons Of The Wolf, for a total of 108 unique skills!

I’m also going to remove the “skilltree” system and just make all the skills available to learn in any order, like you see in the work-in-progress screenshot below:

So in summary, combined with the more attributes (6 in total vs the 3 of Loren) the game will offer much more customization possible for the party, hopefully increasing the replayability / fun 🙂

This is the project that personally I’m working on, and I have almost everything needed (I just got the lineart of the kissing scenes!) so you can expect quick progresses in the next months. My current deadline is to finish the first Season of the game (Winter) and begin the beta-testing/preorders in April.

This doesn’t mean that the game is going to be split in parts, but simply that I’m going to begin testing as soon as I complete the coding of a part of the story (Winter in this case). Then, as testing continues and I finish new parts of the game I’ll make them available as well, until the full game is ready 🙂

Looking at the bright future

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My cat Gilda is looking at the future with optimism

This year was a bit of a rough year for me (though obviously, it could be MUCH worse in general!). The main problem was all the events that happened in real life, and that influenced this year releases (or lack of).

The year is not yet over: but if I compare it with previous years, in 2012 by now I was about to release Loren’s expansion after releasing the main game. In 2011 I had already finished Planet Stronghold, and other cool games like Always Remember Me.

Sadly, it seems that this year I’m going to miss the “release of a new RPG” milestone 🙁

Anyway, the future looks brighter! Read below.

Nicole status – almost done!

Nicole seems very close to completion: I have all boys route finished and the mystery path done by 60-70%. There are still several scenes missing, and also some art, but I think worse case in October the game should be out with all the promised content and gameplay changes (if you’re curious check my forum thread here: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=39&p=19101#p19101).

Roommates update

Yesterday I also got all the backgrounds for Roommates! Even if I’m considering adding a couple more. The new “steamy beach sex scenes” (which aren’t porn, but very hot!) are at good point too, about halfway done. If things go as planned it could be out around Christmas or early next year 🙂

Undead Lily and the return of CCG

There has been a recent interest/return of CCG, which stands for Collectible Card Games. I also have some cool memories of one of the first games I made, several years ago, called Magic Stones, which was indeed a sort of mix between a RPG and a CCG.

Together with Roommates writer (who will write Undead Lily too) we started brainstorming the creatures list for Undead Lily.

A sketch of the Sylph creature

There are going to be 12 base creatures for the 6 elements, plus other cards (spells and some extra combo creatures). Writer counted 114 different creatures cards, so there should be a good variety!

Some of the creatures include: Griffon, Harpy, Mermaid, Shark, Ifrit, Salamander, Giant Mole, Purple Worm, Tree-ent, Giant Ant, Ghouls, Vampires, and more. I’ll post more previews as I get them.

Obviously I’m talking about a game that will be out not sooner than next year Summer or later 😉

Seasons Of The Wolf update

This week for various reasons was unable to work at all on SOTW, but I plan to get back on it next week. I was planning to have a sort of battles preview at end of month but that probably won’t be possible, since I want to redesign a bit the skills, adding a few more variety. In practice now there are 5 skills each, with 3 degree of power. So you could say 15 skills each character, but in practice is 5 unique skills each one with 3 power variants.

I was thinking instead to eliminate the various power levels, or use them only for non-scaling skills. For example, if we take two healing skills:

A) Healing Balm – heals 30% of character’s total HP
B) Minor Heal – heals target character by 25HP

For B we could have Major Heal that heals 50HP, while for A, as the character HP increases (presumably by leveling up) the spell power will automatically increase.

The writing and art production is going well, and I think that for sure in October I should be able to show something (sort of alpha version, to get feedback on the battle system changes).

Greenlight

Speaking about RPGs, in case you don’t know, recently Valve Greenlit a lot of games, and for the first time my RPG Loren Amazon Princess is around rank 85-86 in the top100. Still a long way to go, but now would be a good moment to vote for it using the link below:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92923628

No need to say that getting a game on Steam would mean I could afford to invest a lot more in my games, making them even better 😉

Announcing the fantasy RPG “Seasons Of The Wolf”

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Originally I wanted to wait a bit more before announcing it, but then I got new images so nice that was a pity to not share them with my followers on the various social networks and so… I cannot be silent anymore, I must speak!

I’m proud to announce a new fantasy roleplay game called “Seasons Of The Wolf”, which hopefully will be released this Fall, or at worst next Christmas.

As I wrote in previous blog posts, the work on Planet Stronghold: Warzone (the sequel) is still going on fine, but it has become a bigger game, and the new battle system still needs to be coded and tested. So while I assure you that it will be out, I decided to start this new RPG to give something to play sooner to my roleplay fans!

Overview

A black/white sketch of Ninim

The game starts in Ninim, a village in the Northern region of Aravorn (the fantasy world where Loren and other games of mine take place). It’s a cold, freezing land, where snow and ice are present most time of the year. It’s inhabited by snow elves, elves that have white/light gray hairs and eyes, and are very skilled Rangers, Hunters or Druids (the three playable classes as main character).

There two siblings, Althea & Shea are living together with their father Morran, who raised them when their mother went missing years ago. They live a frugal life, trying to earn some money and food through hunting.

One day, one of the two siblings (will vary depending who you choose to play) finds a wolf puppy and decides to take care of her. But this decision will lead to a disastrous chain of events later in the game…

Game info

Obviously, this game won’t be as big as Loren. There will be one romance for each sexual preference, and the story will be overall shorter. The party also will have less members, 8 characters in total. The battles system is a modified version from Loren’s one. It will still be 6 vs 6, but the layout will change from top/down to left to right, also showing the characters waist-up.

This is possible because the game will use the new resolution of 1280×720 pixels, allowing more space for bigger sprites, more menu/icons and so on. It will also be designed from start to be playable on touch devices (will probably be available for Android some months after it’s out for desktops).

The game will span into the four seasons (that’s why it’s called Seasons Of The Wolf) and the party will have to travel also to far away lands, so it won’t take place only in the frozen Northern Wastelands.

The Cast

I’ll reveal the various characters of the game in the coming weeks. I can say that there’s a good variety, and some interesting classes to play, like Jariel, the Bard! 🙂

Jariel is the GxB love interest (straight male for those not familiar with the terminology)

Of course there are also eccentric characters like Rowinda, the Warlock:

Unfortunately, Rowinda doesn’t want to date anybody! She’s too busy being craaazY!

Each character has several different outfits, and there will be several CG scenes (both romance related and not) through the story.

For those who can’t wait, I am posting the characters sheets more quickly in my twitter, tumblr, facebook and in my forums 😉

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva

Category Archives: Android

Planet Stronghold on Steam

Roommates officially out + video!

Looking at the bright future

Announcing the fantasy RPG “Seasons Of The Wolf”