Category Archives: heileen

Heileen 2: some screens and info

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Time for some WIP screens for Heileen 2. In the first one you see the “Card Selection” menu. Every night, you’ll be able to retire in your private place and dream using one of the 7 cards.

The second screen shows the interactive map of the Island. You can move in several locations and solve quests in a non-linear way. I decided to switch from a more traditional (linear) gameplay, to this new system after all the positive comments I got about my other game Bionic Heart. I’ll also put several endings even on Heileen 2 even if I’m not sure yet how many there will be. At the moment, I have 10 planned for sure, maybe more in the final release!

Projects summary

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It has been a busy week!  I organized and worked on all my currently active projects, and they’re many!  The summary is:

Bionic Heart – Today got some new voices for Bionic Heart, so we’re almost finished with it. I’m really looking forward to this release! I already sent out the beta demo out to some people and so far got very positive responses.

Planet Stronghold – I asked Deji if was possible to do some digital coloring of some old sketches another artist sent me. He is talented but he doesn’t have any digital tablet so isn’t able to do digital stuff…! I also found a character artist, she does an interesting realistic/soft-shading manga art, I think would work well in a space game.

Tower Of Destiny – Just got the new build of engine from the programmer. With it I should have enough to start creating the game maps. I’m going to add a graveyard to that town map I already posted before. Once it’s done I’m going to post another video on youtube 🙂

Heileen 2 – I’ve just commissioned new art. The game will feature some really nice art, and some small nudity too. If I have to label a game under 14 for the content, then it better be not just for the texts/description! Everything will still be of course very raffinate and soft like in the first episode. Will post more screenshots, and when the voiceover by sakebento is ready a short video maybe.

The Flower Shop – I got Marian sprite, and is really cute. I want to post shortly a sort of summary with all the characters in the game, like I did for Heileen and Bionic Heart (“The Cast”). Deji drew some really cute girls, hard to pick one…! 🙂

and there’s still another mysterious card game I’m working at which made great progresses recently too! I’m going to officially announce it when I have made a video or taken some screenshots.

Announcing Heileen 2

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I’ve realized that while I announced the game on lemmasoft (a forum for visual novel fans) I never announced that I started working on it in my own blog 🙂 shame on me.

I don’t want to spoil too much the game plot, but will be based on a set of tarot cards that Heileen finds in the island where she shipwrecked together with… other people 😉 She will be able to use those tarot cards to dream and revisit some special moments of her past. At moment of writing I plan to have 7 episode for each card. Since each card represent the capital sin / virtue, it means 7 x 7 = 49 “ministories”. In the background though there will be the main plot of the characters and their journey to try to leave the island, and the result of each dream will interact with the real world in a fun and cool way 🙂

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Gamasutra articles about my games

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So it looks like is a two out of two. Both my games Summer Session and Heileen were featured on gamasutra by Emily Short (originally part of her ‘Homer in Silicon’ column at sister site GameSetWatch):

Summer Session – Refining Simulation into Narrative

Heileen & The Art Of Game Storytelling

Obviously I’m quite proud of that, even if the article about Heileen doesn’t really speak too much well of the game (but in a constructive way in any case). I really love telling stories, but of course my biggest barrier is the language. Anyway, I’d be also happy just to outline the main plot and have other native english writer do the rest, like if I was a director 🙂

I’ll be surely doing an Heileen 2, even if don’t really know when, probably next year. I’m about to release Spirited Heart at last, after 2 months of crazy delay for translation problems (a lesson to learn…). So I’m a bit late on my planned 4 releases this year: however luckily Ewan Grantham (the writer/programmer behind College Romance) is doing right now the first chapter of a space trilogy that I’ll publish this year, which sounds very interesting and will keep the number of games released higher (even if they aren’t written directly by me).

Right now my plan is:

mid-end of April release Spirited Heart
May/June first episode of Space Trilogy
July/August release of Bionic Heart
September/October release of a mysterious card game… 😉

but of course I know already that this schedule will be messed up completely in the upcoming months, so let’s say that I’d be happy to release at least 3 more games this year 🙂

Heileen: ready to sail?

So today officially put the game on sale. If you want to try it, click here to get on the download page.

it has been a fun experience to me writing this game, hope people will like playing it as well. Note that the game is a visual novel, so if you’re not familiar with the genre, this could be a good occasion to start with it.

I also made a promotional code to launch the game: enter the coupon BIPZ0509T in the discount code field on the order page to get 30% discount on price, is valid for first 50 orders.