Category Archives: bionic heart 2

Making wrong choices

I wish I had someone like Tanya to help me out, because I would really need it.

Today I hoped to announce Bionic Heart 2 beta testing. After two months of coding/testing, would be about time!

Instead no. I have bad news. I’m at one point where I fix a plot hole, and a new one appears. I check a variable, one path works, the other doesn’t. A scene that before was fine, now plays out of order.

I’ve worked like crazy in past 3 days, I’m stressed like never before and then I came to a simple conclusion. There’s no hope to make this work. Every time I open the script I have a headache now. Writer doesn’t have time to help.

So I’m thinking what to do. It’s really embarrassing for me. Despite all the efforts, I know that I can’t make this work, unless I make some really big changes. And I’m not used to release half-broken games. Testing to find the bugs is one thing, but the version I have currently is not even to be considered “testable”. Only 3 days ago I thought I was at good point, but then I discovered that is like a house of cards, if you move a piece, everything falls apart.

It’s the first time I find myself in such situation in my life, and I’m the sole responsible of this. I should have followed more carefully the situation, instead I was busy with other projects. A wrong choice, trusting too much someone else capabilities, thinking he can do it all on his own without supervision, and that’s the result.

A pity because the story itself is really good I think.

Not all is lost though!

However don’t be afraid, I’m already thinking what to do to solve the situation. A simple solution would be to eliminate the “multiple path” feature and just have a continuous story, where if you fail the Mars or Earth path the game ends. Less cool than the original project, but probably in this case I wouldn’t have to do a total rewrite of the story, and would be faster to solve it.

Don’t worry, the game WILL be out, you will only need to be patient for a little more! I am still aiming to finish it by the end of March, even if I’ll have to rework the game structure a lot.

I’m really sorry about what happened and will make sure this won’t repeat in future.

Bionic Heart 2 preorders open

What is Bionic Heart 2 ?

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I realized that I always talked about Bionic Heart 2 like if everyone played the first game. By the way, if you haven’t, you should since I lowered its price to $9.99 and even if was one of my earlier games, the story is still one of the best I think 😉

Anyway, for those who haven’t played it, I’ll introduce the game. Warning there are some small spoilers about some endings/characters of the first game, so be warned before you continue reading!

The Story

The story takes place after the “Escape to Mars” ending. It’s the 2099 and Luke, Tom and Helen are chased by the ruthless Richard Meier IV, CEO of Nanotech and a very influential man who can bribe the entire London media and police. Tanya, a robot with the brain of a woman who died a century ago, escaped from Nanotech and wants to find out more about her past and take revenge against Richard.

Tanya provides Luke, Tom and Helen with fake ID and they board the first shuttle to the secret colony of Mars. They are safe for now, but what lies on Mars? Who are those people doing there, and why it’s kept secret?

So we have two parallel stories: on Mars and on Earth. The game is told using multiple point of views, so you’ll play the Mars storyline from Luke or Tom point of view, while the Earth one will be played by Tanya and Tina point of view.

Tina Gomez is one of the few police officers that aren’t bribed by Richard. She’s just a small ordinary street cop:

and together with her partner Robert Carson, they have strong suspects about Nanotech and want to find out more.

The game is structured in a way so that if you lose one story, the other goes on. You can have 8 different ending both for the Mars and the Earth stories, though some of them are just variants of the same ending. If you manage to finish both plots, you’ll get an extra 9 “combined endings” that are the hardest to get.

The cast of playable characters

I’ve already introduced Tina Gomez. She is very ambitious, her main goal is to get promoted and she hopes to do that by discovering what Nanotech is doing.

Luke Black was the main character of the first game. He is a good looking man in his 30’s, and apparently he’s calm, he’s rational, or at least he was until that night when Tanya knocked at his door. In the story, he’ll have several tough decisions to make. Does he still love Helen, or not? Will he be able to reunite with Tanya? He is the character with more interior struggles, one of the most complex of the whole game.

Tanya Vanic is a unpredictable character. Her new robotic body gives her superhuman powers. It will be up to her to decide how to use them. She can become a deadly killer, or only try to discover the truth behind her past. Who she was before they turned her into a robot?

Finally, Tom Sparks is Luke’s best friend. He often tells bad jokes, so nobody takes him seriously. He is secretly in love with Helen, so his plot will be mainly about the question: is worth breaking his long friendship with Tom for Helen? and does Helen love him?

What are Social Boss Fights ?

In the first game, I had some “interactive scenes” where you could move and had to choose action like in an adventure game. In this sequel, the game uses a classic visual novel gameplay with choices, except for one thing: the Social Boss Fights!

In the image above you see one of the toughest “Social Boss Fights”. Tanya isn’t in a good position 🙂

The Social Boss Fights are minigames in which you must pass a sort of test/escape a bad situation. You’ll need to convince a person about something, escape from someone, and so on. You’ll have to do that finding the right sequence of answers to give to the “enemy”, before the time runs out.

Each boss fight will have slight variations: in all of them you need to pick the right order, but in some you can choose the strategy to use, in other like in the screenshot above you’ll have a counter (structural integrity) that will go down, and so on.

In all fights, you’ll be able to see the personality of the antagonist (in the screenshot above, Julia Storm) described with 3 words, that should give you some hints on what could be the right strategy to choose.

Overall I’m really satisfied by them since are quite cool to play 🙂

All right I think now you know a lot more about the game. I’m in “crunch mode” trying to finish it as soon as possible but probably will still need a week or two!

Deadlines

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Deadlines are part of almost every job. With indie games, and in particular small/single indies like me, deadlines are usually self-imposed.

When I used to work in a (small) software house, we had deadlines and was a bit crazy. Every time, we had to do last-minute “crunch mode” which basically meant working 12h a day for the last weeks before the deadline. Not a great experience as you can imagine, and lots of stress!

Thank God, now that I’m indie I have more flexibility! But that still doesn’t mean that I can take as much time as I want to finish a proejct of course! A delay of one or more months will have both economical consequences (I need to regularly release new games to keep the cash flow) and also could damage my credibility (missing deadlines or delaying games is never a cool thing).

Even if I have to say that my followers are absolutely awesome and even when they ask me “when will be game XYZ be out!!?” they do it only because they’re eager to play it 🙂

Speaking of deadlines let’s see what could be some estimate release dates for upcoming games. Note how estimate is written in bold!

Bionic Heart 2

Is the game closest to completion. At beginning of month, everything was going smoothly and I was thinking that the game might be finished by the end of February as I originally planned. However there have been some problems, so I can already say that I won’t be able to release it by that date.

In any case, I really think that March will finally see the release of the sequel of one of my first visual novels, Bionic Heart ! By the way, I recently lowered the first game price to $9.99 to promote the upcoming release of the sequel, so if you never played it, now is a good time 🙂

Roommates

Everything is going well on this game, even if there’s still a lot of work to do! I managed to make two new “fact file” for Isabella and Rakesh, the latest two romanceable character of the game:

Writing is going steady, but still need to commission all backgrounds (though I have already an artist ready for it) and of course code the gameplay, script the scenes, and so on, so is very unlikely that this will be out before June/July 🙂

Planet Stronghold 2

Well I would be lying if I was saying that everything is going well 😀 however, this game will be a big step forward compared to the first, both in term of gameplay (a much better RPG system) and writing. Good things needs time though! At least all the romance scenes are done, below you can see a sneak peek of Joshua’s romances:

Art-wise there’s still a few more enemies to finish, and some extra “camp talk” sprite poses, where each character will be in their favorite environment (guess where Philipp will be?) when you visit them to talk. I decided to do that since talking with the characters standing up like in previous game was a bit weird!

Also showing the character in a normal life situation with normal clothes and various poses will be more realistic and also more “interesting”, for example if you go visit Rebecca at the gym, or the new hot guy Milo while he’s training… understand what I mean? 😉

A week as webdesigner

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Probably not many of you know that before going indie, I was a (rather poor to be fair) webdesigner. Many people probably think that being a webdesigner is a creative job but the reality is that after you do the 100th website, you start to have enough… 🙂

Anyway, this week I was waiting for some people to send me assets (writing, art, music, etc) so I was idle. If wasn’t Winter I would have use this unexpected “free time” to do some trips around here to relax, but since it is, I thought to finally begin the redesign of my website, something I’ve been procrastinating for too long!

You can see a “sneak peek” here: http://www.winterwolves.com/test/

It’s still largely unfinished and many links are broken, but that’s more or less how the new homepage will look, I think a big improvement over the current one.

Roger Steel: Arthur point of view

After the big reveal of Winter Wolves’ new steampunk graphic adventure romance RPG Roger Steel and the Human Element on this illustrious blog last week, Ann’s younger brother Arthur was somewhat miffed that most of the razzamatazz focused on her. He wants you to know his side of the story, so …

When Arthur Trevelyan’s sister Ann falls for the wrong boy yet again, he is asked to accompany her to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, to keep her out of mischief.

But looking after Ann proves to be a challenge even with the help of lifelong friends, Neville and Christina Mortimer.

When she is inevitably kidnapped by a new flame, it is up to Arthur to rescue her and ponder the immortal question – how can two dorky friends and six perfect strangers with hidden agendas possibly be any more trouble than one headstrong big sister?

And if you want to read more, check the forums: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2844

Bionic Heart 2

This week reached scene15, which probably won’t tell you much. For me means line 5799 out of about 11.000 so we’re about halfway coding the game, which means that it could be out around end of the month, speaking of the beta version of course! Then there’s the testing phase and because this game has so much branching options, is going to take a while…

Tanya meets with a mysterious geek boy. Who is he?

Roommates

Time for two new reports, this time Sally and Dominic (straight romances only).

Writer is working on the Spring Break scenes, featuring all characters in swimsuits 😉 Unofficial rumours says that the game plot might be finished by the end of this month: however don’t get too much excited, since there’s still a lot of work to be done, scripting, coding, testing… and all the background art to do. So a more realistic estimate release date could be this Summer!

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva