Category Archives: dating sims

Inspiration is everywhere

Being indie is a creative job (obviously) assuming you’re trying to make your own games and not cloning others 🙂

The last weeks finishing Loren Amazon Princess have been quite stressful, and it’s fun because in theory there wasn’t any deadline set in stone except for the one self-imposed by me – but I always do that 🙂

Anyway, it was stressing! So while I’m working on the expansion, I decided to take it easier and work only half day on that, and in the other half day do more creative tasks like writing the storyboard of the new scenes for the other games, or “monkey” tasks like creating the icons, banners, preparing the HTML pages of the future games.

This is something I always do, even if the game in question will be out maybe next year – in the moments where I am too tired to code or write I do such tasks that still needs to be done anyway, but require no brain work. So when the time comes, I have them done already.

Also, last week I went to IKEA shopping with my girlfriend and curiously, I got the inspiration for Bionic Heart 2 main menu image! I know, inspiration is really bizarre and comes when you less expect it.

You might wonder “what the frak” IKEA has to do with the sequel of my sci-fi horror/romance game Bionic Heart? Nothing, but there was an image that inspired me, the one in the SOLMYRA picture, which you can see below, and on the right the sketch made by the artist for the main menu image following my indications:

of course, the copyright of the left image belongs to IKEA and the artist who made that image, Deborah Azzopardi. On the right you see my vision – the beautiful and deadly Tanya who seems to say “silence”, with her robotic finger covered in blood (once the image is finalized and colored, it will be more evident!).

Speaking of Bionic Heart 2, I’m getting the various characters remade with the new art style. I made an interesting comparison of the old vs new version of the same character, except for Luke since he never appeared on the first game:

I particularly like the new Helen and Tina, but to be honest I like all the new versions of the old characters 🙂 Maybe the only one that looks worse, or at least different, is Tom. But he’ll have a very different role in this sequel!

On the other games front, I made progresses on Queen Of Thieves, Heileen 3, Roommates and Nicole. For this last one I’m probably going to rework the plot adding more scenes and also more characters, since is a mystery otome game and I want to add more variety and red herrings to the story 😉

About RPGs, beside Loren’s expansion, I’m getting lots of art done for Planet Stronghold 2 and starting to think how to implement the famous steampunk / horror rpg I’ve been talking about lately on Twitter…

The Roommates game

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Those who’re waiting impatiently for Loren expansion don’t worry! We are working on it, but after my blog was monopolized by Loren for about 4 months, I decided to talk about one of my other games in progress: the dating sim set in college life called Roommates.

The setting

You play as Anne or Max and the game takes place in a house on-campus, the Latin House. Max is a singer and a rebel, his plan is to stay in school long enough to save up enough money through part-time jobs to get by without his parent’s financial support, then drop out and start a ska band. Anne a small-town girl, studious but very shy and easily embarrassed, Anne thinks that college could be the fresh start she needs to break out of her shell. Her goal is to make at least three new friends while keeping her grades up.

The cast

They share the house with several other characters:

Isabella – A flirtatious Latina with a hardcore edge, she likes to party and have a good time, no strings attached. She wants to try everything at least once. Works at the coffee shop on campus. Openly bi.

Sally – A bleeding-heart, vegan activist girl with a cheerful demeanor, she’s always picketing or putting solar panels on roofs or out getting people to sign petitions. She has a weak stomach for horror movies or anything with gore and can’t say no to strays, even when you’re technically not supposed to keep animals in your dorm room. Works on the college farm.

Rakesh – A chill Indian exchange student that doesn’t let much get to him, he is an artist that believes that everything has the potential to be a canvas. Unfortunately, he doesn’t always remember to ask for permission before making things into art, leading to some disasters involving other peoples’ personal property. The male bi character.

Dominic – The RA (Resident Advisor, basically the person who makes sure people in the dorm aren’t breaking major school rules) and a former child prodigy, he considers college serious business and disapproves of most of what the wilder members of the house would consider fun. His rule is iron-fisted, but his ability to keep everyone corralled is probably the only thing stopping the place from burning to the ground. Works as a Teaching Assistant for the lower-level Physics classes.

Plus there will be more secondary characters that will have a role on the story.

Gameplay

The game is divided into three quarters, with two big breaks (Winter and Spring breaks) and each quarter is made of 6-7 weeks. During each week, some events will trigger and you can choose if to participate to the event or skip it (to save energy for job/studying).

There are 8 different endings in total, each ending is made of a scene CG + kiss CG, sneak peek below:

Max will be able to get an ending with Anne, Sally, Isabella or Rakesh (BxB)

Anne will be able to get an ending with Max, Rakesh, Dominic or Isabella (GxG)

Current progress

The art is at very good point, missing only the backgrounds and the secondary characters. The writing is still at the early stages (first weeks) but since it’s a big game will take a while before is finished. The setting is light-comedy with LOTS of fun moments. Think something like the tv show: How I Met Your Mother, to be clear 🙂

The big change of my future visual novels and dating sims

I am in process of switching to a custom engine made in Monkeycoder language that will allow me to simultaneously release the games for Pc,Mac,Flash/HTML5,iOS and Android (and in theory PSVita, if I really wanted to, but I doubt it). However, it still needs to be finished and tested and will need some more time. But at this point I am thinking to create all the future visual novels / dating sims with the new engine, instead of doing them in Renpy to have to recode them again.

I decided to take this route because at this point seems obvious that none of my games will ever appear on Steam, the only way to make good money with visual novel / dating sims (or any other indie game to be honest). So to survive I am trying this new route that at least gives me more exposure through web and the various appstores, and still grants my usual direct sales as before 🙂

That means that the imminent new releases this year will mostly be the RPGs, including Loren expansion and Planet Stronghold sequel, since for those I can’t use monkeycoder yet, building a RPG engine takes a lot of time! Speaking of Loren expansion, you can see a promo image below:

That is all for now. Have a good weekend!

The relax week

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As you know if you follow me on twitter, after Loren RPG release I decided to take a break for a week. Break from coding, but not really a total break from work 🙂 During this week both good and bad things happened:

Good things

In the first week of release, Loren is the best selling game I’ve ever made. However I must not forget that it is also the most expensive and the one that took most time, so I haven’t even recovered costs yet, and sales are starting to decrease already (that’s normal).

Of course, just a week means nothing, will have to wait at least one month or perhaps 2-3 to judge better, but so far the early results are somewhat reassuring and I don’t exclude the possibility of making more deep RPGs like this one in future.

We’ve started working already on the expansion that should be out sometimes in the next 2-3 months, depending how much content we decide to put in it 🙂

Also, the press release outcome wasn’t bad as I thought: I said last week that my PR was mostly ignored. Luckily, I spoke with a veteran indie, Chris of Arcengames, who enlightened me about how PR actually works. It’s uncommon, if not very rare, to get press coverage for a game after just one PR. You need to chase journalists, send follows up, and so on. He stated it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

So I followed his advice and sent some review codes to some journalists, and while I cannot be sure when they’ll do it, they said will review the game. This include two of the biggest review sites online, so if a review appears in those sites that would be pretty good 🙂

I made good progresses also in the other games. I got new texts for Queen Of Thieves, Roommates, Nicole. I got new art for Nicole and Planet Stronghold: Warzone. Below you can admire the Marada Knight, one of the new enemies:

And this is Kurt from Nicole game, one of the 3 dateable boys:

One last thing, curiously Bionic Heart is my best selling game on Android. I would have never thought about that, and while Android sales in general are very poor due to the rampant piracy, it’s interesting, since on desktops that game definitely doesn’t outsell Heileen or Spirited Heart.

Combined with the many ports of Flash games I’ve seen, I’m thinking that Android is a mostly male-dominated market, while iOS is more neutral or even more female oriented.

Bad things

Of course, also some bad things happened. First of all, I realized how wrong I was to commission a J-pop song for a RPG. Basically, lots of people don’t like Loren theme song, and even those who like it say that is out of place. I’ve now removed it from the main game menu (you can listen it in the credits screen) and I’m thinking to replace the trailer in the game page as well, since I’m quite sure it was hurting sales.

Even if I have already commissioned Heileen 3 song, I’m thinking won’t make theme songs anymore in future, since that money could be better spent in making the game bigger with more art or texts.

Another bad thing was the reaction of some people to the game art. I realized that as a straight male, I simply cannot understand if a female outfit is too skimpy/sexy, so from now on for the games that need to appeal both genders, or only female players, will ask the feedback of female friends.

Right now, the artist is redoing most sprites of Amber, the main character of Amber’s Magic Shop, because as my writer Aleema suggested, her outfit was completely wrong for an otome game! And beside Amber is supposed to be an alchemist and I haven’t seen one with such outfit in any game yet 😀

Of course I plan also to have games with more adult themes, like Bionic Heart 2 will be. Lots of fanservice and sexy outfits, horror/mystery, betrayal and blood. Well, like most tv series airing on TV lately, no? 😉

Getting covered

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I’m not talking about getting coverage as indie, but getting the characters of Loren RPG covered! As you can see below, was enough a spell by Apolimesho the Archwizard to give a proper cover to those excessively undressed fantasy heroes:

…no exceptions…

Jokes apart, I decided to put more cover to some characters based on customer’s feedback. Initially I admit I wasn’t much convinced, I kept thinking “well, I’m an indie, so I should do what I feel right”. However some friends and my writer Aleema convinced me that having an OPTION (because you can still play the game without any cover of course!) was not a bad idea. For example some users in my forums mentioned being quite embarassed to play the game on netbooks while traveling in public places, or when some family members were asking what they were doing…I pictured the scene in my head:

– “What are you doing, son?”
– “Hi dad! I’m playing an awesome indie RPG game!”
– “Oh! RPGs? You mean those games with mages, swords, dragons and… wait. What is that? Boobs!?”
– “…” (covers face in shame)

So, since there was already an option to skip the ending romance scenes, we have tied it to showing covered characters, but you can conveniently toggle it on/off with 2 mouse clicks 😉

I also got the battle voices, and made a very short video showing some of them:

I know I know that now the question is… when the next version will be out? the one with the voices? the one with many bugfixes? the one with the full plot/romance implemented?

Well, while I cannot say for sure, it should be out this weekend! As usual follow me on twitter or Facebook to be updated in real-time 🙂

Bionic Heart 2 prototype

During some pauses in Loren development I started prototyping the dialog system for Bionic Heart 2. My goal is to make a sort of RPG-style dialog system, similar to those seen in classics like Fallout: some choices will be tied to specific skills and on the left will be displayed a sort of scheme of the dialog, showing the various possible paths (icons represent a choice that needs a specific skill).

I’m still in the early design stages though, and since Loren has full priority I’m working on this only during the pauses. I know, working on another game when you have a free moment is a bit weird but… 😀

By the way, speaking of Bionic Heart, I made the port to Android even of that game. You can play the demo here.

Androids, drakes and college

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva