Category Archives: heileen

Hey look! I have a Thanksgiving bundle too!

Thanksgiving superbundle

Actually it’s not even a normal, regular bundle. But it’s a SuperBundle! ™ 8)

What’s in it? Well, there are the two Heileen games (two visual novels with over 80k words combined), Summer Session (a very fun and replayable dating sim) and Bionic Heart (a fully voiced dark-sexy-creepy sci-fi visual novel with 24 different endings). So as you can see, there’s a game for every taste!

And what about the price? it’s just the price of one single game. Yes, four games for the price of one!

What are you waiting? Go check the offer now!

Superbundles like that are said to be seen only once in a human lifetime. You should really take advantage of it now 😉

(Don’t worry, tomorrow I’ll make the usual friday cat blog and will get back to writing like a normal indie developer)

There might be an Heileen 3

pirates!Yep…discussed with the artist Rebecca who is totally busy doing webcomics until this December, but there might be a 3rd chapter of the Heileen series. But really different from the previous games! I don’t want to anticipate too much but while it will have a strong visual novel element, it will also mix with other kinds of different gameplay.

I’ll try to be vague but I have to spoil something so if you haven’t yet played the game, maybe don’t read below 😀

The premise would be that at the end of the 2nd episode, you would end up in the pirate ship with M. Then you would wander around a mysterious caribbean archipelago to find out the missing companions from the first episode. So it would be a sort of “find all the remaining characters”. But it’s not just that: the game would have a bit of RPG (I might even include a VERY SIMPLIFIED version of Planet Stronghold combat) and some adventure parts (use object X on target Y).

For now is all just pure fantasy since I have nothing written down yet, but if this happens it might be:

  • fully voiced – this mainly because the game would have MUCH LESS text, so in this case it might be possible to voice it all. But don’t worry the story would still be intriguing and full of plot twists like the previous ones!
  • multiple endings – well, this is almost a classic. However, the multiple ending part would mostly be in the final part after you have regrouped with everyone
  • simulation – you would need to travel with a ship, you could play the evil pirate or good trader as you want
  • RPG – as I said I might include even some very short combat. After all since I coded all that combat system I need to reuse it in more than one game! 🙂
  • adventure – in some location you would have to use items and solve some simple puzzles
  • strategy – I was thinking it could be cool some sort of meta-game like Risk. Nothing that would affect the game/story TOO much, but a bit yes (you could either try to win it or ignore completely)

so yes a rather unique combination as you can see. I like a lot the idea/setting and the kind of resulting gameplay could be quit interesting. If this goes on the game might be done probably by next summer, depending how other projects evolve in the mean time!

Heileen 2 voiced


Yep, finally the voiced version of the game is out, after almost 3 months of delay 🙂 you can find more info and download the voiced demo at the official page

Everyone that bought the game before can simply log-in to my server (not BMT one) and redownload it. The link is on the purchase email 😉

Now going to explain a bit my choices when doing the voiced version. As you might know (at least those who reads my twitter or blog) there were LOTs of troubles when voicing the main character, Heileen herself. In the end, I decided to leave her unvoiced. Several factors influenced my choice:

  • after trying 2 voice actress that both gave up on the project (mostly because of the length) I started to think if I would ever find one that would finish the job
  • even if I found one, the game wouldn’t have been finished before next summer (or even later)
  • leaving the game unvoiced was like leaving a “unfinished” game on sale, and I didn’t like that!
  • there are many mainstream games (Dragon Age, Mass Effects and probably some less known japanese VNs) who leave voluntarily the main character unvoiced

So even if my initial idea was to have the game fully voiced as Bionic Heart, I decided to go this way. I think you’ll agree with me that the actors involved did a great voice acting job, so I want to thank them all, in sparse order:

  • Ayu Sakata – Ebele, Marie
  • Steven Mane – Elias, Marco, Adam
  • Lucien Dodge – Black, Morgan, Otto
  • Morgan Barnhart – Lora, Juliet and Heileen kid (which unfortunately had to cut, since the main character won’t be voiced)
  • Erica Mendez – Magdalene, Marcus kid
  • Dan Conlin – Robert, Jack and some minor male characters
  • Mauri “Darkblade” Majanoja –  John, Jonathan

As you can see, quite a large cast 😉 Doing the voices was a great task though, and I don’t think I’ll repeat the experiment anytime soon! For sure not for games with lots of texts, because it’s really time consuming !

What’s next ?

Well, today got an email from Kim, the girl doing Heileen voice that assured me she will resume working on it once the finals at university are done. So I’m still confident about a late January / Mid-February release of the voice add-on for Heileen 2.

Then, the Flower Shop game is nearing completion, I’m programming the farm-sim minigame, which is turning out rather difficult (I want to make something decent to play). Deji, the game main artist, is drawing the final screens and they’re really beautiful, probably the best ones I’ve made for any of my games so far 🙂

The RPG game Planet Stronghold project is on hold for the moment, since the character artist disappeared, right when I needed some more characters to start building the main system of the game (doing missions, selecting the party, and so on). However the backgrounds are being done right now, and the sketches looks promising.

Lastly, I have a top-secret project going on for my Winter Wolves brand. Really topsecret since nobody knows about it (not even my most strict collaborators). It involves a VERY original art-style, which I think was never tried in a computer game before, and a interesting couple of… special detectives. I am trying to find the right artist for this, and I’m still experimenting with some prototypes etc to see if the result could be interesting.

More info coming soon…

Heileen 2 demo out

No, it’s not the fully voiced version yet, that one is coming out probably in January 2010! Making all those voices takes time 🙂

Anyway, now beside the full game, there’s also the unvoiced demo so everyone can try the game to find out more what it is about. A big thank to all the people that bought the game without a demo when was in pre-order!

So you can go to the official page: http://www.tycoongames.eu/adventures/heileen2.php

Or just use those direct links:
http://www.tycoongames.eu/downloadgame.php?id=Heileen2Trial.exe (Pc)
http://www.tycoongames.eu/downloadgame.php?id=Heileen2Trial.zip (Mac)
http://www.tycoongames.eu/downloadgame.php?id=Heileen2Trial.tar.bz2 (Linux)