Category Archives: beta demo

Summer In Trigue – Shiori

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shiori

Today is Shiori’s turn to be introduced! But before that, two things:

  1. The new beta for Dead But Alive is ready, with Mike and Carl romance added. For more information check this forum thread: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=3668
  2. I wanted to announce a special “End Of August” sale I’m doing, with discounts from 25% for Seasons Of The Wolf and its DLC, and 50% for the remaining games.
    For technical reason this time the discount is not automatic, but you’ll have to use coupon codes during checkout:
    CVOU000I1 to get the 25% discount for Seasons Of The Wolf and Bad Blood DLC
    CVOT001A6 to get the 50% discount on all other games

    As the name says, the promo sale will run until the 31st of August!

And now, let’s proceed with Shiori’s intro by the writer:

Shiori is a Japanese woman in her mid twenties, and someone who has had a rather interesting life. Though much of those “interesting” parts involves things in her youth that she’d prefer never happened, her current life is very much to her liking. Thanks to a fairly large inheritance and some success in her photography career, she is able to indulge in her hobbies and travel frequently. And her most recent travels have taken her to Trigue for an extended stay.

Shiori can be a bit sarcastic and blunt at times. She is fluent in Japanese, English, and French, and takes great pleasure in the fact that she knows insults and curses in multiple languages. Indeed, she specifically learned just the insults and curses of seven additional languages. She is quick to speak her mind when provoked and has no qualms with being incredibly harsh when she feels it is deserved, but she is also usually willing to forgive and give someone a second chance. Or even a third chance, or a forth chance. This willingness to forgive has gotten her in trouble before, but she still tries to practice it.

She is very competitive, and loves playing games against other people. She favors video games for this, but also loves card games and board games. Regardless of format, such games sometimes give her a chance to try out her many foreign curse words. Another interest of hers is food and cooking, but since she is a fairly skilled cook, this one does not
result in her trying out new curse words. Well, not usually.

Shiori is very found of animals, though her frequent travel interferes with her ability to have pets. She especially likes birds, and finds crows and ravens in particular to be beautiful, intelligent creatures that she feels have an undeserved bad reputation. Part of her reason for going to Trigue is she hoped to observe a species of crow native to the island.

I like this character in particular because she has some secret hidden, related to her past. You’ll need to wait for the final game to know what is it! 😉

Dead But Alive – Beta

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Told you the game beta would start soon, didn’t I? 🙂

You can view more info about the game and check some more screenshots at the temporary page here: http://winterwolves.com/deadbutalive_southernengland.htm

While I have a download link for the demo in the page above, remember to check the forums. Indeed, like in previous beta testing, we’ll post in forums patch/updates as we fix bugs/add features (like the new male romances). The game’s official forums are here: http://winterwolves.net/viewforum.php?f=46

Finally, some useful info about the game:

  • As already said, the game is Windows only. Sorry about that!
  • The demo is quite big (355mb). We tried to compress it as much as possible but the game is in full HD, and it has various little characters animations…! So wasn’t possible to reduce the size lower than that.
  • Like Loren, the game by default is censored. However, if you go in the game installation folder and remove the censored.txt file… voilà! 😉
  • During the combat minigame you can press F1 to get some quick help. If you don’t like it, you can pick auto-combat. You can also change the difficulty of the combat in the game options.
  • Since the game wasn’t made in Ren’Py, there is no rollback or autoskip feature. There’s the possibility to skip the dialogue up to the next choice using the CTRL key though.

That’s all for now! In the next days I’ll also put up the poll in forums for the two extra male romance options 🙂

“Bad Blood” SOTW DLC is in beta

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greatwolf

I’ve decided to open the preorders and put the beta version of the DLC for download in my forums! For more details, you can check this forum thread:
http://winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=3610

In short: the only missing thing right now are the ending scenes. There are 4 scenes, one for each romantic couple, plus another one (can’t say what because… spoilers!).

Speaking of spoilers, for those who have ALREADY finished the base game, this video illustrates the contents of the DLC:

Unfortunately like with Loren, I can’t really make a “demo” of the DLC, but I hope that the video above will help people to make their decision. In general, I think if you liked the characters and the story you should like the DLC too.

The DLC focuses more on the story and characters relationships, with several lines and even scenes that change depending on your love interest. Because of that we thought to add a menu at beginning of the DLC, so that once you played the story to the end, you can replay choosing the starting conditions quickly with the menu (without the need to start the game from beginning or keep a lot of different savegames).

Of course, there are still battles, and thanks to the main metagame of “rebuilding Ninim” also some strategy. Let me know your thoughts about the difficulty: I am not sure that in the current beta the game can be beaten in Nightmare mode… 🙂

If everything goes as planned I should get the missing images by mid-April, so that’s when I’ll release the DLC officially.

Work on the other games goes on as planned. I keep getting weekly updates for more or less all of them. I definitely want to have one of the dating sims in progress out during the Summer 😉

shiori_sybil

Also, Roger Steel writer made a very interesting post in my forums with an update about the game itself: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3612

The bad news is that it won’t be out soon, the good news is that it will be much bigger and very similar in gameplay to Loren, with even a greater emphasis on choices and relationships. People who want, will be able to play it in pure visual novel mode, using choices to raise skills and fighting battles automatically 🙂

PSCD – Meet Rigel

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rigel

Time to introduce another PSCD character. He’s the BxB romance, albeit not one of the heroes (he has no skills in battle).

Name:  Rigel A. Luvene
Nation of Origin:  Australia
Service Branch:  Mechanic/Imperial Vehicle Maintenance

Description:
Among the newest arrivals to the colony, Rigel is the assigned mechanic for the colony’s vehicle hangar.  Say what one might, Rigel is considered the best mechanic ever.

However, not everyone viewed Rigel’s arrival with pleasure, for Xavier saw the sable-haired man as a threat to his position.  They soon became good friends when Rigel showed Xavier how he could get a 11% acceleration boost in his hovercycle, and extend his jumps by 20 meters.  Soon, other people started to show up, making Rigel the goto person for modifying their vehicles and weapons.

Rigel is considered a bit aloof since he spends most of his time in the vehicle bay.  Despite Rigel’s obvious skills, reported mechanical mishaps have increased over 50% in the colony.  Some of the more cynical attribute this to owner sabotage, hoping Rigel will appear to repair the ‘broken’ vehicles.

When he can be pried away from vehicle bay, Rigel can be found avidly watching the hovercar races in the bar.  Some of the few arguments he’s gotten in have been over just who the greatest hovercar driver is; Rigel will go to his grave believing it is Candace Shatz, three time winner of the Death Valley Rally.

This doesn’t mean Rigel eats, breathes, and sleeps oil.  Rigel can often be found out among the dunes, the stark beauty reminding him of his earthly home.

Latest news about the other games

As you probably know, Seasons Of The Wolf is going the final testing stage, but is complete since a week. You can play it all and read all the story and unlock all the romances/achievements, even if is still in beta.
For how long will keep it in beta? I am not sure, but perhaps it could be released next Friday, the night of Halloween! That would be cool 🙂

However I’m not in a hurry at all, I want to test it well to make sure that when I officially put it live on my site will be (almost) bug free. Which for such a big game, isn’t an easy task 😉

C14 Dating is also going very well. Deji (main artist) is doing a great job drawing some animated chibis for the schedule activities. Below you can see a WIP of the game GUI done by Therese Yucamco (who did the GUI of Nicole as well):

Activities Window.f4v_snapshot_00.24_[2014.10.08_09.27.30]

Is taken from a gameplay video so the quality is not the best, but you can see already how cool it is! 🙂

I’m working also on other projects of course, but I don’t have any significant progress to show you this week. Stay tuned for next Friday!

PSCD – meet Mizuki

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mizuki

Time to met a new PSCD character: the hot japanese hacker Mizuki!

Name:  Mizuki Tsukino
Nickname:  Null
Nation of Origin:  Japan
Service Branch: Imperial cyber Defense
Specialty:  Overclock

Description:
At one time, Mizuki was considered the greatest threat in cyberspace.  No target was safe when her avatar, a neon dragon, appeared wreaking havoc on corporate, criminal, or government networks.  Not bad for a woman yet to see seventeen summers.

However, despite her almost superhuman talent, she was eventually captured.  In a secret court, she was offered two choices:  either assist the Empire with her formidable computer skills, or spend the rest of her life in a primitive cell with nothing but rats for company.

It is in military service Mizuki encountered the challenge she craved.  Whether it was outwitting the Robobrains in their own cybernetic hives, or adapting to the Vauses’ fluidic thinking, Mizuki found her skills matching, or exceeding their own.  This earned her the nickname Null, since her presence was never detected, let alone suspected.

While she is the mistress of the digital world, Mizuki is less sure of herself in what she terms the meat world.  After all, how can you trust what you can’t control?  

This isn’t to say Mizuki isn’t loyal.  She’s had numerous opportunities to escape, covering her absence electronically, but when her comrades spilled blood for her, leaving was the last thought on her mind.

Seasons Of The Wolf last Act/Season coming soon!

endings
You can see a sneak preview of the ending CGs above

This week I’ve worked on the last act, though as you may know if you follow me on twitter, I had already finished the main coding last month. So I am just retesting everything, the battles, the enemies (there are some really tough boss fights!) and in general that all the endings unlocks the intended way.

Speaking of the endings I’ve commissioned new CG images for them, using a different artist, since the original one couldn’t make it in time. I’m rather happy about the result 🙂

I believe I will release this last act/season this weekend or maximum early next week, I’m just waiting to see if I get get some last missing images (but the game works already anyway). Keep an eye on the forums to know when is ready!
In any case, not much left to wait, to see the conclusion of the story. Do you remember the wolf pup in the first season? Well… 😉

Some general considerations: as I’m approaching the end of this project, I have learned several things:

  1. that doing such LONG (really, SOTW is the longest game I’ve EVER MADE!! lol) RPGs it was a real massacre. I’ve worked on it 1 year, of which almost 8-9 months full time which for me is a lot! Think that I was reusing Loren’s engine, so in theory I only had to do the story and stop, but instead I’ve added countless new features!!
    So, this game better sell well, MUCH more than Loren, because otherwise it really wasn’t worth it. I liked doing it, but since I run a business I need to take that into consideration as well.
  2. the longer the game, the quicker I lose interest. The last months of coding were really painful. Don’t get me wrong, I still put 100% of efforts like I always do (that’s how I am made). But sometimes it felt really a chore 😀 This is something personal of course, I know many other indies who prefer to work on a smaller amount of titles and take more time with them. For me, after a while, becomes frustrating since I keep having new ideas about new stories or gameplay 🙂
  3. I’m not sure if players really appreciated the efforts. Don’t get me wrong I got great support from fans as always. But it seems (might be just an impression) that players would have preferred less fights, less complexity and more story/scenes. Sort of the opposite direction I went with SOTW, so as you can imagine I’m a bit worried! But this only a theory for now, I’ll need to see once the game is out.

Because of such considerations, and based on how SOTW will do, will decide how to take the challenge to make the future RPGs. If  I see that all the insane effort I put to make the gameplay of SOTW so detailed didn’t make the game more appealing to players, I think will need to do things differently.

But in general, I might do things differently even if SOTW did well, just to rest a little 🙂 Playing Banner Saga, and other indie RPGs, showed me that you don’t necessarily need to have 8+ characters with 15 skills each, huge battles 6 vs 6, and so on.

In summary there are other ways to make a story-based RPG interesting without the need to make it long, super complex or add a lot of features.

Also, I might for once do what basically most other indies do: reuse the same engine WITH SMALL CHANGES (not what I did with SOTW!!!) and make smaller games (of course, at lower prices as well). Not necessarily everyone wants to play huge epic RPGs, sometimes is refreshing to do something small. Small is beautiful! etc etc 🙂

OK better stop my ramblings here otherwise you think I went crazy while working on SOTW! …which actually is not completely wrong…! 😀