Category Archives: best of

2016 The year of… many games!

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Reading last year’s blog post, and comparing the situation with this year is… funny 🙂 In a good way though! In that blog, I also made a sort of prediction (to be taken with a grain of salt) of what I expected 2016 to be.

It’s interesting for me to look back at it, and see how things REALLY went. Let’s see:

  • January (end of it) – PSCD base game:  The game really came out in January! Good start.
  • February/March – C14 Dating: once again, success! C14 Dating was released in March 🙂
  • March/April – PSCD DLC (which will be 1/3 of base game so not so small!) : in this case, the DLC came out in June. However I also decided to cut the story made for it, but added a free play mode. So yes, failed this deadline, albeit not by much.
  • May/June – Never Forget Me and/or Heirs & Graces: Successfully released Heirs & Graces in June! Never Forget Me as you know was released in November as well!
  • July/August – Queen Of Thieves (this depends mainly on testing so it’s hard to give an estimate, but I really hope will be out by next Summer!): Well, the game was basically done in July/August, but  decided to wait until September and was a good move since I polished it and fixed a lot of obscure bugs.
  • Fall – the CURSED GAME and/or Undead Lily: haha nope! The writer focused on Roger Steel first, while the cursed game… wait. I must not speak of it! It’s not canceled though 😉
  • Winter – Summer In Trigue: writer took a sort of “sabbatical year”. I honestly was so busy releasing the games that I couldn’t use my traditional electrified spiked whip to “motivate”…

In summary, it was great. I managed to met a LOT of deadlines and in my kind of work, it’s something really uncommon! 🙂

And now presenting the…

Winter Wolves 2016 awards!

Haha I did this a few years ago, and now I want to do this again, FOR FUN! All the writers, artists and musicians that worked for me did a spectacular job. But like everyone, I have my own preferences, so I want to do this again. Of course your opinion may (and should!) differ!

Basically will make a sort of ranking for my own games in five categories: writing, art, music and gameplay. Once again, it’s based only on my tastes, it’s not a ranking of popularity/success/WHATEVER. Just my personal opinion! And my opinion is not so important, since I tend to make games based on users feedback.

Best writing

  1. Heirs & Graces
  2. Queen Of Thieves
  3. Planet Stronghold: Colonial Defense
  4. C14 Dating
  5. Never Forget Me

This has never been tougher than this year! As always depends on tastes and interests. For example if you like archaeology, for sure you could put C14 Dating first! 🙂 Anyway for my specific tastes, I really liked Heirs & Graces, because of its “originality” and the bittersweet overall story. The happy/funny and the more serious/sad moments made the whole story really good.

Queen Of Thieves was worth playing just to read the scenes in which the sisters fight with each other. I never laughed so much reading a story before. Ah, and also Thalia. One of my favorite characters ever! Apart this, the rest of the story was also very well written I think.

PSCD was awesome, and my inner geek and sci-fi fan was very satisfied by the insane world building job. I liked in particular the tough choices and the consequences, and also the “political intrigue” parts. The romances were great – maybe not for everyone for the numerous sexual jokes, but personally I found them very funny.

C14 Dating is something you play when you want to relax. There are some moments of tension, more serious ones, but overall it’s a relaxing experience, one of those stories that you know will have an happy end, and I think in a moment like this, we need those 🙂

I put Never Forget Me as last, but only for a reason… since I wrote the storyboards myself, I didn’t want to seem presumptous by placing that one higher. I think the writer did a good job though, the scenes were a mix of funny but also touching moments. If  I hadn’t written the storyboards myself, probably I’d have placed this higher, because the married life is a topic that interests me.

Best artwork

  1. C14 Dating
  2. Queen Of Thieves
  3. Never Forget Me
  4. Heirs & Graces
  5. Planet Stronghold: Colonial Defense

This was a tough call as well. I really love Queen Of Thieves art, in particular the character design. Those sisters are lovely. Oh and Arianna! Arianna… is totally hot, cute, sexy, awesome. However, Deji is really great. She is without doubts one of my favorite manga artist. The sprites are adorable, and Joan is a masterpiece. I’ve never seen a cutest character in a game! You just want to kiss and hug the screen whenever she shows up.
Never Forget Me art was the “usual”, I think perfect for an otome game. Heirs & Graces was well done too, the costumes in particular were really well done. For PSCD, yeah I know, the uncanny valley effect sometimes shows, but I liked it anyway. The alien art are the best ones I’ve seen in games!

Best music

  1. Queen Of Thieves
  2. C14 Dating
  3. Heirs & Graces
  4. Never Forget Me
  5. Planet Stronghold: Colonial Defense

I think Queen Of Thieves theme song is one of the best of all my games. The soundtrack is also very well done. C14 Dating comes second, and I really liked the unique feeling and instruments of Heirs & Graces. Never Forget Me soundtrack is really good, and the theme song it’s also perfect for this kind of game. PSCD is last, but just because the others are so good. Even its music and theme song were great 🙂

Best gameplay

  1. Planet Stronghold: Colonial Defense
  2. Queen Of Thieves
  3. Heirs & Graces
  4. C14 Dating
  5. Never Forget Me

Told you this depends mainly on tastes, right? Well, I love card games, so for me is natural to say that PSCD had the best gameplay! However, even reading various reviews, it seems that the gameplay was universally acclaimed, even by people who normally don’t play card games. That made me happy 🙂
Queen Of Thieves had many innovations in the battle system, and I think the catacombs were really fun. I probably wouldn’t redo a randomized missions again in future games though.
Heirs & Graces and C14 Dating are very close. I put Heirs & Graces first just because I like more the scheduler+skill checks approach than C14 Dating minigames, but I know many players really enjoyed those minigames, so once again depends on tastes.
Never Forget Me had some innovations in the scheduler, like the goal-based system, however it essentially was simpler than the others, so seems fair to place it last for gameplay.

In conclusion, I think this year I made very different games, games for all tastes! I don’t know if I’ll ever repeat a year like this (also because many games were in the work since a while, that’s why I managed to release so many).

Probably not. Also because the next games are almost all RPGs…!! and will of course take a while to finish each of them!

Next blog post will be my first of 2017, in which I’ll try to predict what will happen. One thing is sure: I won’t release 5 games in 2017!!

Merry Christmas and Best of 2011

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In the photo above, my cat Othello sleeping peacefully in a basket with a cushion 🙂

Merry Christmas to everyone! To celebrate, from today until the 25th December EST timezone, you can get a single game from the whole Winter Wolves catalog for 50% off, using the coupon “XMAS“.

And what about the title “Best of 2011”? Well in the last week I’ve seen around internet lots of “Best of…” by almost all sites. The fun thing, is that they talk always about the same games! I don’t want to argue about Minecraft or Skyrim being the best games. However, I want to remind that there are small niches, who don’t care at all about those two games, and there’s nothing wrong with it!

Personally I TRIED playing Minecraft but I quit after 5 minutes. I know many other people who did the same. Does it means that it sucks? Of course not, but while that game entertained lots of people, there is a minority (a niche) that maybe preferred to play other kind of games, maybe one of my games.

So of the games I have released this year, I want to make three “Best Of”. I talk about my games because sadly this year I was so busy with work and real-life stuff that I really didn’t had time to play accurately ANY other game (including AAA titles) so I cannot judge anything.

Best Art

1. Planet Stronghold
2. Winter In Fairbrook
3. Always Remember Me
4. Love & Order
5. Spirited Heart Girl’s Love

The first two places are very close. However, while in Winter In Fairbrook the character art by Deji is lovely as always, the backgrounds are definitely worse than Planet Stronghold ones (they also had a different budget, so it’s normal!). Always Remember Me has slightly better backgrounds than Love & Order (and same character artist) while Spirited Heart Girl’s Love had the beautiful characters drawn by Meago, but it was an add-on, so it mostly reused the old game art.

Best Writing

1. Spirited Heart Girl’s Love
2. Winter In Fairbrook
3. Always Remember Me
4. Love & Order
5. Planet Stronghold

Ok I know that everyone loves Ayu’s writing. I do too 😀 But I think that Aleema writing on SHGL was a bit overlooked because of the game theme (yuri) which is much less popular than WiF one (otome). I might be also biased because obviously I like more yuri than otome 😀 Anyway, was a close call and depends on tastes. Always Remember Me writing was nice I think, while Love & Order was good but definitely short and not well developed in the romance scenes. Planet Stronghold…<coughs> I know, that’s the weakest point of the game, but the sequel won’t be written by me, I swear! 🙂

Best Gameplay

1. Always Remember Me
2. Planet Stronghold
3. Love & Order
4. Spirited Heart Girl’s Love
5. Winter In Fairbrook

Well, there are no doubts that Planet Stronghold has the most complex gameplay, however I think that even Always Remember Me life simulation system, with the map and time of the day was not bad. A close call really, but Planet Stonghold probably was too much niche for most people. But again depends on tastes!
Love & Order wasn’t bad even if maybe a bit too much repetitive. The last two places could be considered a tie, since they were using the gameplay of the original title without much innovation.