Category Archives: dating sims

Get ready! … or not

Max is showing an iron-logic here!

This weekend I had planned to start the Roommates beta testing… but as always, that bastard of Murphy had to remind me of his laws! I had a light flu since 5 days, but was slowly getting better up to last Tuesday when I was feeling almost normal. Then, Wednesday was a total fail 🙁

Suddenly it got worse and now I’m coughing and I turned into a sort of giant gelatinous cube. A gelatinous cube can’t work, right?

However, I could have fun with the Ooze girl! One of the many avatars of Undead Lily (work in progress)

Anyway, I’ve decided that as soon as I get the missing activity images, I’ll do a last minute check and then start the beta. Roommates is such a big game that I need to do a good / long public beta testing anyway, so don’t want to wait anymore.

While I can’t announce it now, stay tuned because I might start it in the next days! 😉

Meanwhile work on other games goes well. Soon will be able to announce a certain otome game about an archeologist, with some introductory posts by a guest blogger 🙂 and also, I got more help for coding SOTW, this way the game will be done faster!

One last news, I added the bonus content (wallpapers+OST) on Steam as well, so if you want you can get it here:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/275240

2014: New Year Plan

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My cat Mirtillo sleeping in an unusual way 😀

2014! Happy New Year!

I’m going to change completely my way of working. From now on, I’ll only make games in my native language, Italian.

Heh, good joke uh? 😀

The real plan

OK jokes apart the real plan is:

1) Release Loren on Steam. This is going to happen soon ! Took a bit of time to the coder to implement the achievements on all the OSes, but now everything works. The DLC Castle Of N’Mar will also be released, a few days later.
2) Finish Roommates. The game is long and the writer Michael tested it a lot, but I really think the best solution is start the preorders and the public beta testing, this way thanks to the awesome users in my forums the testing will go much faster. In the next weeks will fix all the issues found and code the scheduler, which will be similar to Flower Shop one.
3) Finish Nicole Yuri version – though this mainly depends on the writer to be honest 🙂 my job in this case will be to motivate her!
4) Release another otome game that for now I’m still keeping “under the hood”, but that I’ll announce in the first months of this year.
5) And of course, finish Seasons Of The Wolf and Planet Stronghold 2. Both games are quite big, but this time I shouldn’t be distracted by other things and will make sure to motivate and help the writer and coder appropriately 😉
6) At this point we will probably be in late 2014. Depending on the situation, either start working on Spirited Heart 2, Undead Lily, Loren 2 or something else. In this case is impossible to make any kind of prediction since there are too many factors and people involved.

Better integration with the story

Looking back at past year, one thing I didn’t do properly was to support the writers more. This doesn’t mean telling them exactly what to write line by line, but (for those who needed/wanted it of course) be more involved in the process as they write.

Some writers are happy to work on their own at their own pace with minimum need of my support/feedback: but in any case I need to check what they do to make sure that the final product reflects my vision and most importantly players’ expectations, and that works with gameplay.

And also I need to integrate the story more with the gameplay, though probably this can be done only by planning better the whole thing from start and writing a good amount of draft/storyboards myself, so will need more time for this.

Always Remember Me on Dailyroyale.com

If you missed my Christmas sale, you can still get a good deal for my game Always Remember Me at http://www.dailyroyale.com/! Expires in the next 2 days (approximately, there’s a counter on the site).

I have many other interesting things going on in the next weeks, stay tuned 😉

Roommates update

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As wrote in previous post, the next game that will be out is Roommates. My trusted writer Michael is reviewing the whole script scene by scene to make sure everything is OK, but because the game is LONG, that will take some time 🙂

Meanwhile, I’m setting up everything else, like the contents of the bonus version:

A preview of the wallpaper you’ll get when ordering the bonus content version of the game

Wallpapers, original soundtrack (including the theme song “My Name In Lights”) and more.

Even if is a dating sim, this game is quite different from Nicole.

First of all, the scheduler is more similar to the one I used in my games of the Flower Shop series. You can’t visit each location and choose an activity like in Nicole, more like you plan your week and then press play to see what happens.

The contents are also different: Nicole was more family-friendly, while this game is more like my early titles (Summer Session for example) where there’s a good amount of comedy and sexy references, as you can see from the screenshot below:

Isabella trying to explain her views on Anne (work in progress texts)

Some of the CG scenes are quite hot to be honest, not like the Loren uncensored ones, but rather hot. I think that during the beta will ask users feedback to see if is better to make a censored version of those as well 😉

Finally, a good news (for those who don’t know it already): you can play as male or female immediately, no need to wait for an extra version. I am still thinking to allow people to purchase the two versions separately, since I am not sure how many people like to play with both genders.

In any case each version will be cheaper, like $15, with the possibility to get both for $25 instead of $30. So pricing similar to my other games, or cheaper if you want to play only as Anne or Max. Of course, you’ll be able to “upgrade” anytime in case you change your mind 🙂

The Show Must Go On

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As you probably know already if you follow me on the social networks, last Monday had to take one of the toughest decisions so far of my life, put to sleep my cat Leon who was sick since 2 weeks without hopes of recovering.

It was a very sad moment, but I forced myself to think that without my help, that cat would have lived a much shorter life. He was 8 years old, and is one of the many I rescued time ago.

an image of Leon a few weeks after I found him, as you can see from the mucus coming out of his nose he was quite sick

If I was able to take care of him for all those years, paying for his food and the medical cures, was also thanks to people who buy my games. Thank you! 🙂

The Show Must Go On

I want to think about positive things now. The show must go on, and there’s nothing better than some scenes from my upcoming comedy title Roommates to cheer me up!

Isabella giving life lessons to (poor) Anne
Dominic seems slightly annoyed at Isabella…
Rakesh should really follow Anne’s advice…!

I don’t know yet the exact release date of the game but shouldn’t take much longer, first quarter of 2014 for sure! Stay tuned for more news on the next games in the coming weeks.

Happy Halloween

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My cat Gilda is wondering how high she must jump to catch them…

Happy Halloween to everyone! This was an incredible week for me.

First of all, Nicole is officially out (but you probably already know this). In any case, I just want to remember that you can grab the free demo here: http://www.winterwolves.com/nicole.htm

The game was very well received and if continues this way it could become my most popular otome game so far 🙂

But the real news was the approval (finally!) of my RPG Loren The Amazon Princess on Steam! 😀 it was a bit shocking to be honest: not because I wasn’t expecting it, at the pace they’re greenlighting new games I knew it would eventually get in, but I thought it would need more time.

Anyway what does this means? my life is changed? I’m going to retire? Nope.

Steam gives a very big exposure but I’m an old indie (ahem) and I know well that you must not get too big expectations, and that if your game doesn’t match Steam audience you might not even earn that much. In other words if the game is good, will probably do well, but there are a thousands other factors that can influence the outcome.

Here comes my decision to take it easier and wait to release it. From now until Christmas will be an insane rush to release new games, top AAA titles, and so on. The biggest amount of money you make on Steam (as well on any other platform, including your own site) is at launch. So if I launch the game together with 3-4 new titles, and maybe one of them is a big AAA title, and then a week later there’s the Thanksgiving/Christmas sale, it could pretty much screw up everything.

Also, I want to polish the game a bit: I’m redoing the soundtrack to have only custom music, will put the latest version there, I want to include achievements and possibly use the DLC system for the N’Mar expansion.

So as you can imagine is a lot of work to do, since I need to learn everything from scratch and the last thing I want is to rush things!

Ah before I forget: I’ll also add a “censored version” for all the romances. So the game available on Steam will be playable by everyone and not require any age ratings. I was forced to take this decision because getting an official rating (ESRB, PEGI) is out of discussion for a small indie like me (too expensive, too much paperwork). The best way will be to buy the game from my site so you know you can play the “naughty version” if you want, and still get a free steam CD-key 😉

In short, Loren will be on Steam but very likely after Christmas, since I think that is the best for my game 🙂 Meanwhile, maybe some other titles will get in… both Planet Stronghold and Spirited Heart are close to the top100, so you might go and vote for those games as well:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92939065

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93093446

Next week, will talk about the Roommates and SOTW status/progresses… stay tuned! 😉

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva