Category Archives: card games

Planet Stronghold: Colonial Defense postmortem

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So first the great announcement: Planet Stronghold: Colonial Defense IS OUT!!!!!!!
YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 😀

To get the game or try the free demo, visit this page: http://winterwolves.com/pscd.htm
Like always, buying direct will grant you a free Steam key when the game will be out on that platform (probably around March, not sure yet).

It was basically done since early January, but I wanted to wait to get some extra voices added for some cards. I think it was worth the wait, check some previews:

A postmortem aka “The Miracle”

The story of PSCD is a very troubled one. It all started back in autumn 2014, when I had the crazy idea of combining the tower defense gameplay with a visual novel. Yes you read it right: originally the game was to be a tower defense game! :O

Then for various reasons, I gave up the idea (I had to use a custom engine, learn new stuff, etc etc, doing those kind of games is harder than it looks). So, what could I do? Already the whole base plot was written by Miakoda, the game writer, and I had to find something that could fit. I had this enlightening moment: since for Undead Lily I wanted to have a collectible card gameplay, why not use it also in PSCD?

This way, once the coder had built the system, I could have used it at least on two games (more in case it was well received). I’m a big fan of making engines/frameworks and reusing them, as you can see with what I did with Loren’s framework: I reused it on SOTW (adding 31298 new features! lol) and I am reusing it in a different way for Queen Of Thieves as well.

Anyway, I had made my mind. Unfortunately, the coder couldn’t work until August on it. The situation was a bit weird last year, since I had so many games in production, and SOTW was a “relative flop” (would still be a good seller if only I hadn’t used 10 months of my own time coding it!!). I needed to get at least one game out, since as you can imagine until I release the games, I can’t recover the money I’ve invested. At some point, I can’t keep investing in new games if I don’t release anything new! 🙂

Of the other games, while they were making progresses, none was really advanced as PSCD. The other one, Queen Of Thieves, was at good point but still missing all the scripting and romance CGs and there are MANY of those 😉

That hot Summer, and the Fall/Winter rush

Seems a porn movie’s title, doesn’t it? haha nothing like that though! Summer 2015 here was insane, with temperatures over 39°C (and I live at 800m on sea level!!!). As result I couldn’t regularly work for almost 1 month and half. Then, at end of August / beginning of September, it cooled off and it all started.

As of the 1st September 2015, PSCD was just a prototype of the deck building screen.
By the end of that year, PSCD was basically finished!

I think it was an amazing achievement, to do such a game in 3 months!! Of course I already had most of the writing and art done, so I am talking about the coding part on my side, but still there were so many things that could have been gone wrong!

Thanks to some dedicated forum users (among them I want to mention Franka the master of CCG, and Troyen who is always willing to help with typos/proofreading) I was able to test the game, and I also made a very smart move adding a “VN Mode”, so everyone could play the game, even those interested only in the story/romances (and there are really some interesting ones in the game!).

The work done by Anima (the coder) and Miakoda (the writer) together with Dennis (main artist) was amazing. Without their help I surely wouldn’t have made it!

What is even more fun, it’s that this was the latest (or maybe one of the latest) game I started, and was the first to be finished! And surely not because it’s small, rather the opposite: 200k words of story (not including the DLC!), complex optional gameplay, lot of romance CGs and ending CGs!

It is also the most expensive game to date I’ve made, and I think it shows (the quality of art, music, everything put this among the best games I’ve done I think).

Conclusions

I can only draw a conclusion from this experience: if you are motivated, and work with people who are motivated/professional as well, nothing is impossible. On the opposite, if you work with amateurs/unmotivated people, even doing the simplest task becomes impossible.

I don’t know yet how the game will do in the next months: I hope well enough, since beside recovering all the money/time I’ve spent, I really enjoyed designing the cards and the gameplay in general. And I have already Undead Lily that will use this system. But I hope in future I’ll be able to do even more card games beside that one 🙂

Friday catblogging – Merry Christmas!

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In the picture above, Mirtillo and Othello sleeping together peacefully. I wonder what they’re dreaming ?

I want to wish everyone reading this blog/following me Merry Christmas! 🙂

Then, a quick status update about Planet Stronghold 0.8 (since is the game I’m currently working on). In the recent weeks had some eyesight problems, so the programming has been slowed considerably. I really hoped to have it ready by Christmas since would have made a great present… but sometimes, real-life problems get in the way and so I had to post-pone the deadline to end of the year!

I’m writing the latest two quest, regarding the Apex Rahn and Arnox races, including two boss fights. I think once you play the game you’ll realize why is taking me so long to make… because the game IS long! The part I’m writing now involves all the races, and if you side with the Empire you have to eliminate them, instead if you side with the King/Shiler you will unify them and form one single alliance.

So this part is the “core” of the game, the biggest one. If you played the demo, this part is basically 5-6 times longer than it…and you can play from two different sides, so some parts are different! That is also why the final release price will be $24.95 (so you have still one week to get it at the deal price of $9.95!). And now, for some postmortem-retrospective about the year that is about to end:

2010, The Year Of The Tiger

I admit I was excited about it (since I am a Wood Tiger in chinese horoscope). Well, my goal for 2010 was to release 5 games, and I was particularly excited about (quoting from my last year post):

And I am producing the art now for a new kind of game style that I hope will be a great success, since I like a lot writing the stories and the storyboards for it. For now I can only say that involves detectives, mystery, and a beautiful blonde girl with a French accent…

I was obviously talking about Vera Blanc, which as you might know, turned out to be a real disappointment in term of sales 😀

So, in 2010 I released The Flower Shop, Card Sweethearts, Vera Blanc: Full Moon, Vera Blanc: Ghost In The Castle. Not only I didn’t release 5 games as I had planned (even if I’m almost done with Planet Stronghold), but most of them didn’t sell well at all! So in all honesty, considering also the other real-life problems I had, 2010 was probably my worst year since I was indie. For the first time in 7 years or so, I didn’t grow my business. During the summer and autumn, I thought it was something beyond my control, the global crisis, the return of middlemen and so on (since also many other indies had very low sales during that period) but if I think about it carefully, it was my mistake for producing games without doing proper “market research”.

Vera Blanc got the most positive reviews I had for a game, on famous sites like Gamezebo & Gamertell. And it has some fans that are eagerly waiting a 3rd episode. Still, it would be foolish for me to release another one using the same gameplay system… so even as indie, you can’t simply do any game you want to do (unless it’s an hobby) but you must also identify the market you want to sell to, and make sure you have the right product. Making a good/original game just isn’t enough, if that game has a very small fan-base.

Next friday, more cats pictures and my plan for the 2011 which hopefully will be a better year 🙂

Making of Card Sweethearts

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My latest game, Card Sweethearts, is out. So I thought to make a post about the making of it, including some interesting informations for developers about a hard DRM decision I had to take.

As you might imagine taking a look at the screenshot on the right, the game is about poker. In some parts, you can even play strip poker with one of the four women you’ll encounter during the game. The game features beautiful manga art from Rebecca Gunter (don’t bother contacting her, she is full of work until next year!) and uses a custom version of the Ren’Py card-game engine that the programmer Tom made specifically for this game.

The Game

The project started a long time ago, so long that I had to look in my emails archive to find out when first I asked Tom if he would like to collaborate with me for this game. It was september 2008! The poker engine took quite some time to make (it’s more complex than you might think, especially the Poker AI of the CPU players) so around the summer of 2009 I had a finished alpha version of the poker engine, all the art for the game and a general plot idea in my mind.

At those times I had released already some other visual novels/dating sims like Bionic Heart. The problem for me in making those games was (actually it still is) the language: since I wanted this game to be humorous, I had lots of difficulties in writing it in english because isn’t my native language. So I hired a person I found on Deviantart to write the game texts.

Unexpected Problems

Sadly, that person quit in middle of the story in autumn 2009: so I was in a very bad situation, with almost everything ready except the story. Once again, I asked my precious collaborator Ayu Sakata (which at those times was proofreading Heileen 2, and started writing The Flower Shop) if she could finish the story. I really can’t blame her for not being too enthusiast about this (even if she never said that, I’m sure she was!), being a poker game with a male protagonist trying to date the girls, and end up playing strip poker with them 🙂

But anyway, she did a great job as always and in April/May we had the final beta version. Now comes the interesting part for developers: the DRM!

Why we decided to drop the DRM

As you can imagine, such a game would be very popular among the warez sites (manga, strip poker, etc) much more than my other regular games. Tom even came up with a neat online activation system, that was using a private/public key (similar to what OpenPGP does for emails) so that the product, once activated on a computer, was tied to its hardware. The user would have been able to “deactivate” the game from a computer to reinstall it to another, but still, was unable to play for example at same time on his home pc and on his notebook.

After some weeks of testing and feedback from friends, developers friends and normal testers, we decided to take the risk and drop it. Why? Well, for several reasons:

  • I’ve always promoted the idea that people would buy the game license as “personal”. So restricting the use to only 1 computer per person was against what I always did
  • There’s always the risk of server going down, preventing people from registering (even if was just one-time activation). A fun coincidence was that exactly in those weeks I was unable to play even for just a few hours Dragon Age expansion (requiring online log-in) and I remember I was extremely disappointed as player
  • The game would have been cracked anyway: so all that DRM would have accomplished is prevent a “0-day crack” but possibly piss off some people
  • The Ubisoft DRM epic fail was not too distant: I had fear of bringing my company under a bad name… once you lose the buyers confidence, is hard to get it back!
  • Ultimately, we wanted to provide a good experience to paying users, and focus only on them, not the pirates

So, we released the game using absolutlely No-DRM system. Just a download link to get the fullversion, like we always did.

I don’t know if the game has been already cracked or not (it’s out since just yesterday) but I have the feeling (and the hope!) I made the right choice. The choice of rewarding people who buy games, not punish them with absurd DRM requirements.

The Year Of The Tiger

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I just discovered a fun thing. One of my best collaborator, Ayu Sakata (Flower Shop’s writer, voice actress / proofreader in Bionic Heart, Heileen 2 and more) and I are both of The Tiger in the Chinese Horoscope. This means that this is our year! 😀
It surely started well with The Flower Shop who is getting a positive response and nice reviews everywhere.

Now she is working on editing what should be my next game (unless I manage to finish Vera Blanc first but I doubt it). It’s a manga visual novel / strip poker game called Card Sweethearts. I started this project last year, asking Ren’Py main programmer Tom to create a poker engine out of his card game system for Ren’Py.
The poker is the classic Texas Hold’em, and will become a classic strip poker (featuring only tasteful images though) when you challenge one of the four girl depicted in the title screen image below:

I absolutely like how Ayu is reworking the original game texts (written by another collaborator of mine who had to quit). Just read at Tobias description of Miko, one of the four girl you can pursue in the game and my personal favourite:
“You mean Rocco? That old guy ain’t much, but his woman Miko. Now she’s a fine piece of work. Hottest thing out of the orient since they invented gunpowder.”

Now that’s what I call really top writing! 😀

Below a in-game screen featuring the poker part. That is really fun, and is cool how it integrates with the story itself. The game will also feature a scheduler like my other dating sims where you’ll be able to decide what to do with your week.

So basically I have in production (or planned) the following games for this year:

  • Cardsweethearts – a visual novel / poker game mix
  • Vera Blanc 1 – an american comic-styled mystery game with several minigames in it (more on this soon)
  • Planet Stronghold – probably my biggest project to date, a sci-fi RPG featuring a battlesystem, many varied enemies, an inventory for each character, a training system, a map system, different weapons/armors types, with a romance/VN background and several possible outcomes!
  • a still unnamed horror/mystery game set in victorian times that most likely will be illustrated by Zyephen (the same artist of Planet Stronghold characters / enemies)
  • a sequel of Flower Shop with a brand new game (not farming sim) seen from “the girls side”
  • an hex-grid turnbased fantasy wargame similar to the good old SSI titles

It’s going to be a very busy year as you can see!