Category Archives: C14 dating

The Queen Of Thieves – Tomas Jingoli

This week is the turn of another secondary character, one of the “bad guys” (very very bad!), General Tomas Jingoli (I foresee an interesting boss fight with him in the game).

General Tomas Jingoli, the ‘Kin Killer’

Born the bastard son of one of the noble families of Ahkra, Tomas was cast out as an embarrassment along with his servant mother. He was raised a peasant well aware of his noble origins and how they had spurned him. It made him angry and that rage simmered within him for all of his young life. Leaving home as an adult, he joined a mercenary company passing through the city and left to fight across the world in more battles than he could count.

He returned many years later to find his father’s family out of favour with the latest ruler of the country and he saw an opportunity. Entering the castle, he pledged allegiance to Raul and promised that he would cleanse his family of all disloyal members. He failed to mention that he was a bastard son and not an actual son of the Jingoli family, but such facts he deemed unnecessary to what he planned to do.

Entering the estate of his father, Tomas roved through the manor and slew everyone he came across. None could stand against and in the end every member of the household, servant and noble, laid dead at his feet. His display impressed Raul who immediately appointed him as the general of his armies and ordered him to pursue the Queen of Thieves that the Jingoli family had previously failed to stop during her latest robbery.

Tomas is utterly consumed with the hatred and rage that fed him his whole life. Even with the object of his hatred dead, he cannot let go of the anger inside him. Every slight, real and imagined, has to be answered with lethal force and it has led to the point that even his most trusted men live in utter terror of him. Despite that, no one would dare cross him and so, for now, all of Raul’s soldiers are completely obedient to Tomas Jingoli, the Kin Killer.

PSCD update

For those who don’t read the forums or follow me on twitter, I made more updates on PSCD. You can already play several missions/scenes beside the free demo now 🙂

As always the best way to download the demo is from my forums: http://winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=3745

Besides the main plot missions, I have also added over 16 NPC missions. They’re specific missions with one of the various characters present in the game (including Remi/Alicia), as you can see from the screenshot above.

You’ll get 3 random NPC missions each time, so not all at once like in the image (it was a test I did during development). They’re mostly for the gameplay-fans, though there are also some small scenes in each of them (but really small, not like the team talk ones).

So far everything seems on schedule, the theme song is done (and it’s beautiful, can’t wait to show it to the public) and the video trailer is already being made. Barring unforeseen circumstances, the January 2016 release of the final game seems definitely possible 🙂

After the base game is out, I’ll probably take a break and publish one of the dating sim (very likely C14 Dating!) and then get back to work on the DLC. After that, I’ll resume working on Queen Of Thieves, and other games (depending on their advancement status).

Speaking of C14 Dating… have you seen how beautiful the new CGs are?? no? here’s a sneak preview:

Queen Of Thieves – Fredrick

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And now time for another male interest introduction: Fredrick! Read what the writer has to say about him below:

Fredrick Holtzer

Fredrick has been a lifelong resident of Ahkra. He was born in the town and expects to die there. His family has been living in the area for generations and he has some pride in that. Even when things might be better elsewhere, he has rather stubbornly refused to move on.

He currently runs a rather successful shop selling all kinds of goods. The middle classes and even some nobles frequently patronize his establishment leaving him relatively well-off compared to many others under the rule of Lord Raul. His success has made him rather unpopular with his fellow merchants but he cares little for that. So long as those that count him as friends like him then he cares little for those he is not friends with. He does not make real friends easily, however, so there are few that have a high opinion of him in Ahkra.

Most consider Fredrick a troublemaker who has no respect for the rules of business. He scoffs at such attitudes, attributing them to jealous rivals who struggle to grow even as he becomes more successful with every passing year. That is not to say he believes himself superior. He just believes in taking risks and reaping the rewards. Sometimes those risks do not work out but he does not let that destroy him like so many others. No matter how badly he is put down, Fredrick will get back up.

More progress on the robbery missions

Another week has passed, and made progress both on PSCD and the robbery missions of PSCD. The screen below is the main screen you’ll see when doing your night raids with the three sisters:

I am quite satisfied by the results, since there are several mechanics and they seem to work well together. Beside running the shop normally during day and earning a few money, during night you can:

pickpocket people: merchants is the safer district, but if you try to pickpocket nobles or even military people… you could get in trouble. Failing at pick pocketing will start battles, some with specific goals (stop the noble from calling for help for example)
explore: you will spend time to find new targets to rob. But even after you discover one, you won’t know much about it
and that’s where gather info comes useful: you can spend time eavesdropping or a little money to bribe people to gain more info about the chosen target: how big the house is, how many floors, how much money/gems, level of the encounters, etc
finally, choosing start robbery will start the robbery mission itself 🙂

I like the freedom you have, since you can choose to start a mission even without getting information, but maybe the target won’t have much money, or the enemies inside will be tougher than expected, and so on.

Regarding PSCD, I made a video of the current status of the battle screen:

For more info check my forums here: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=3724

Last but not least, all the romance CG ending for C14 Dating are done! It means that the game should be out soon 🙂

May update!

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Time for a big update on the progress of the various games in the works! Let’s start:

C14 Dating

Deandre asking a tough question to Melissa… 😉 the new GUI interface is still not implemented in the build

Writing for this game is finished since last year, but now even the scripting (which means adding all the various characters on screen, their facial expressions, the musics, etc) is at a very good point. What is really missing now are the romance CGs, which the awesome Deji plans to make next month. Fingers crossed, but MAYBE in July we will be able to start digging-ahem I meant playing this game! 😉

Queen Of Thieves

I’ve made more progress in coding/designing it. I’m not going to talk about it in detail anymore here, since during development things change so quickly that would probably be a waste of time (for example several of the features in previous blog post have been changed once I’ve tried them “on the field”!).

If you’re interested, check the forums: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewforum.php?f=32

Regarding the writing, I’m happy to report that the first draft of all the yuri routes is finished! the plan now is to finish the missing otome part and review what is already written, to match the yuri part which is generally longer (so even the otome will be around same length).

The new casual outfits for the three sisters 🙂

Regarding art, I should be getting some NPC soon, together with some fixes for the yuri romance characters. There are still the romance CG to do, and several other minor stuff (icons, tilesets, etc) but in general it’s at good point too.

PSCD & Undead Lily

Those two games should have a good amount of gameplay in common (both card-rpg based). As you know, PSCD writing is done, art is almost finished too even if I still need to design all the cards. For Undead Lily, the artist finished all the cards and is remaking the images in the new style. For example, here’s Aquaria and Magma:

Please note: the images above are only sketches, so not final images, which will be much more detailed. But you can already see the big quality improvement 🙂

Each character will have a covered/uncovered outfit, and to make my customers happy, you’ll be able to set for every character in the game the outfit to be used ! 😉 It will be an option page full of buttons, considering there are 14 characters in the game!

As you can see, a lot of progress have been made in May. I daresay… may it continue next month! 😀

Digging you – a preview of the otome C14 Dating

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It’s still a work in progress screenshot, but looks already good!

So… puns aside, I’m really digging how C14 is coming out! In case you missed my earlier posts (from past year) you can read more about the game here: https://www.winterwolves.net/blog/category/dating-sims/c14-dating/

In summary: it’s an otome dating sim set in the archeology world. And it features a cast of REALLY diverse characters. There’s a boy with a prosthetic arm, another with a cochlear implant, the nerd boy, and so on.

The main story is already over 140,000 words! And the writer and the editor are still tweaking/editing some later scenes 🙂 so it will be another very big game, featuring a lot of scenes and funny/cute/interesting moments. If you’re interested in the archeology world you’ll love this, and if you aren’t… you might become interested after playing it 😉

What is mainly missing are some sprites, the ending CG images and a few things here and there, like some GUI buttons, a few minigames to tweak/balance and so on, but overall it is in a very advanced state, as shown by the screenshots.

The weekly schedule screen, with a lot of different activities showing as animated chibi!

Now I know what you’re wondering… when it will be out? Well I don’t want to say anything to not jinx it 😀 but it shouldn’t really take too long (talking about the beta, the official game for sure won’t be out before this Autumn).

I hope you’re excited as I am to see this game finally out!!

Queen Of Thieves update

This week I’m also trying to come up with a new battle layout for this new RPG in the works. The idea was to make it more user-friendly, maybe even “mobile-friendly”, and simplify the interface. So far I’ve made this:

As you can see if you’re familiar with Loren/SOTW battle interface, I removed the battle log at bottom, and you can toggle it on/off with a button (the “L” button). If the log is turned off, you would see the selected character stats there.

The idea is that I already display almost all the info directly on the portraits: attack (sword), defense (shield), hit points (heart), SP (star). The only stats not shown are speed and critical which aren’t so essential, since the movement order can be seen on the right, and critical is a percentage of doing double damage but can be seen in character’s screen.

The skill or effect description would show on the left too, in the frame below the one in which the log is displayed.

If you have any feedback/ideas about it, I’ve made a thread in forums: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=3624 to discuss 🙂

2015 releases plan, and Loren vs Seasons Of The Wolf

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This is a fun mockup image I made a while ago to promote SOTW 🙂

It’s the first post of the year! I imagine people’s main question will be: which games will be out next? since I don’t know myself, and after the big fail of last year (I announced like 5 games but I finished “just” 2), I’ll just say which ones should be definitely out this year (not tomorrow though! could be even Summer or Fall! but still technically 2015).

2015 Possible releases

– Nicole yuri: the game is at a good point. I don’t want to say “first quarter” officially, but it should be really out by April/May max!
– C14 Dating: even this game is at good point, missing some extra outfits and CG scenes, but not much else. I don’t think will be done before Summer though.
– Queen Of Thieves: much depends on the yuri routes writing. This game should be smaller than others (for story’s length) so I think could be out this year!
– PSCD: story and art are at very good point. All depends on the gameplay. I have some ideas but need to make experiments first. I include this on the list even if might be out very late this year!

So that’s it. As always, remember there might be more, or different ones finished. For example, SOTW DLC could be out, depending how much extra art is needed (will be more focused on story-relationship than battles). But as I said I only wrote about those that should be really out this year.

Loren vs SOTW

Back to the title, those who follows me since long time might remember that when I finished Loren, I did a “Loren vs Planet Stronghold” post.

Here I want to try doing the same analyzing the various aspects of Loren and SOTW. Before I start I want to say that personally I don’t think one of the two games is better or worse than the other, simply they’re DIFFERENT 🙂

Story

Many people complained about Loren’s story to be clichè. I think 99% of stories ARE clichè nowadays 🙂 Anyway, with SOTW you cannot really say the story is clichè. Still most people liked the first two chapters, there are many mixed feelings about the third (for some being too open is good, for others bad) and many felt the ending was a bit rushed (the DLC should fix this hopefully).

I still think that SOTW main story is better than Loren’s. SOTW 1 – Loren 0

Characters

Hehe this is quite an unfair comparison, simply because Loren has so much more characters! I read some reviews about SOTW saying that the “characters aren’t memorable”. What? Rowinda isn’t memorable!?! Chalassa? Krimm? Riley!?

Ok Jariel might be too much “classic good elf”. Althea and Shea’s personality aren’t well developed for gameplay/plot reason (since you can play as both). Still is true that Loren’s characters are awesome. Draco? Mesphit? Karen? I could go on… 🙂

So, I’m not going to argue on this. Loren’s big cast and characters is what made that game successful, so here Loren is a clear winner. Loren 1 – SOTW 1.

Gameplay

This is another not very fair comparison since basically SOTW is Loren’s engine but greatly updated. Random items, more advanced skills, custom battle cut scenes, etc etc. And the difficulty had much more meaning. Hard difficulty is hard, and Nightmare… a nightmare 😀

But is not just that, there’s the isometric map, and several small or big improvements. SOTW is the clear winner here. The only thing some people didn’t like is the “prevent grinding” feature I added. I am not sure if I’ll keep it in future games, even if that means that the boss battles will never be balanced (because if you can grind unlimited time…). But if that’s what people want… who I am to argue? 😉

Loren 1 – SOTW 2

Soundtrack

This is a close one. I really like SOTW main menu music, and even the theme song is much better than Loren’s (hehe), but overall Loren’s soundtrack is awesome.

Listen to those Loren’s tracks:

Or those SOTW tracks:

I really don’t want to decide, but if I have, Loren’s is slightly superior in my opinion, but is a very close call! Loren 2 – SOTW 2

Artwork

Hard to say: Loren’s had a different coloring style, but more CGs. SOTW has a better (in my opinion) coloring, A LOT more variety of backgrounds, the isometric map art which I think is beautiful, but less CGs (even if the ending ones are nice, but the romance one can’t match Loren’s).

I think this one is really a draw – if you liked more romance/event CGs then Loren (obviously, since had more romances!) but if you liked more variety of backgrounds and isometric map, SOTW.

Loren 3 – SOTW 3

Longevity

Loren has shorter RPG gameplay, since has no maps and less battles, and most are optional (unlimited grinding). It has much more dialogues between characters though, even if the base game text is just slightly higher than SOTW (I’m not including the DLC).

If you like RPG combats, SOTW is a clear winner. If you like romance/camp talk, Loren is much better, again if only because of the bigger cast.

Another draw? yes, since this really depends on people’s tastes! Loren 4 – SOTW 4

Conclusion

What, the conclusion is a draw!? Really? Yes, really! And believe me is not a diplomatic solution. Even if SOTW took me a lot more time than Loren, I don’t think is vastly superior overall. It depends only on tastes. I have many people who were disappointed because SOTW was more a RPG than a “fantasy dating sim” 😉 but also many who were pleased to see that the RPG gameplay was much deeper and the difficulty better balanced.

It’s like asking: is better apples, or oranges? 😀

Of course, you might disagree with me. In this case feel free to post a comment with your opinion either here, or in the forums!

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva