Category Archives: dating sims

Happy Thanksgiving + Promo Sale

First of all, to all my Americans followers, Happy Thanksgiving! 🙂

I am doing a sale on itch.io: https://winter-wolves.itch.io/
And of course on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Winter%20Wolves

Every purchase on itch.io comes with a free Steam key. You might have also noticed that I started pre-orders there for both Cursed Lands and Love Bites. Usually I don’t like to do pre-orders much, but in this case both games are in a very advanced state (as you know if you read the previous blog post) and since some people asked, I thought to do it.

Some news

In the image above, one of the animated intros of the various vampire boss fights

And now some updates:

  • We’ve decided to use the same artist who did the PSCD manga version to do the romance CG of Volleyball Heaven. So you know what to expect… HOT STUFF!
  • I’ve finished coding the four “vampire lieutenant boss fights” for Cursed Lands. Each boss fight can be won peacefully using social talents. Or if you want, you can just exterminate them all and get the achievement of “vampire killer”! Expect a beta demo featuring a good amount of the game story next month.
  • I’ll make a beta build of Love Bites as soon as both Viktor and Sabrina routes are fully finished (only the romance CG and a few minor scenes left). Maybe I’ll announce it even in next blog post.

That’s everything for now, but hopefully next time I’ll have some more good news 🙂

Love Bites and Cursed Lands update

First of all, I made an updated version of Roommates with completely optional “nude romances CG” currently in beta testing. More info/details in my forums here: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=4078

Now let’s talk about today’s post: 7 months ago, in April, I made a post with the same title. You can find it here if you’re curious: https://www.winterwolves.net/blog/2017/04/love-bites-cursed-lands-update/

So, after all those months, how are things now? I already posted an update in previous blog, but today I’m going to go deeper.

Love Bites scheduler and romances

As I wrote back then, this game has a scheduler but no stat raising. The relationship bar is increased simply by spending time with each character, it’s not influenced by the choices. The things I said in that blog post are still valid, but using the image above I want to explain how the different endings work.

Originally I wanted to keep those values secret, but after thinking more about it, was pointless – since a game must not be hard by making people guess which choice will increase what variable 🙂

So in summary each character has two possible… let’s call them “variants”. Viktor for example has Social and Nerd. Sabrina has Artist and Huntress. Nadia has … wait, I don’t want to spoil the fun!

Anyway, with your choices in the dialogues, you’ll influence the character (for example by making Viktor more sociable, or on the opposite by pushing him to take advantage of his nerd side). Those values will determine, at end of the game, which ending you get (beside the romance ending and CG which are fixed). Probably better call it epilogues, more than endings.

Here’s the mystery of those hidden variables explained!

Cursed Lands romances and bonus scenes

I already posted a few on twitter, but here I’ll post a male and a female one to be fair!

Leena in a very… suggestive scene beside the campfire 😉

Vaeril trying to get through a forest and, ops, his precious dress is scratched open! Well, considering he’s a druid he’s in good shape, don’t you think?

What are those bonus CG? Simply said, after the big success of Amber pin-ups, I decided to add some more for this game. As you probably should know, the original artist is the same who did Loren art and sadly he doesn’t work for me anymore. So I had to use someone else, but that has a style similar enough I think. In any case, the result is good in my opinion.

Those CG are used in two ways: to illustrate a scene already in the main romance story, or to illustrate two bonus scenes when the player is a couple with the love interest.

Indeed, a big difference vs all my previous games, it’s that in this one if you want you can sleep with more than one character in the same playthrough – yes, unlock the “final romance CG” with more than just one  character. Of course, this is not without consequences ! In this case the usual “jealousy scene” will trigger and you’ll need to pick one love interest.

After you choose the love interest, all other romance routes are blocked, but as “reward”, you get two more bonus scenes with him/her, as couple (another thing that was missing in my previous games).

Plus of course there’ll be the ending epilogues which will change based on this (and also on other choices in the game but that I can’t reveal because are big spoilers!).

The game script as predicted it’s already 200,000 words now, with many boss fights missing and all the endings/epilogues yet to write. I wouldn’t be surprised if the final script will be around 230-250,000 words. Yes, another SMALL GAME ™!

In conclusion, I really hope that you’ll enjoy both games when are out, because as usual they’re big, with lot of content, very replayable, and we’re putting a lot of efforts in making them !

Status update, codesign and other amenities

Yes I know that I said I would talk about games, and I am going to. But first, I need to make a short deviation 🙂

I certify I have enough

Recently there has been a BIG drop of direct sales. Probably because of Steam direct, but also I suspect other factors. In summary, in last two months I reached the bottom. Luckily, sales on other platforms (mobile, Steam) while are going down (it’s the Indieapocalypse baby) didn’t totally collapse as the direct sales.

Chatting with other indies, I found out that actually my direct sales so far were much better than the average! lol, so the situation is global, even for very successful indies, there has been a great drop.

Why? Well, most people are used to buy/play on Steam, but the OS have their faults too: indeed both Windows and MacOS, now require apps to be “codesigned”, otherwise they show various warnings and it’s hard just to download the game (not even run, just download it’s difficult!). Yes you could codesign, which means you had to pay a yearly fee to get this “certification”, which IN THEORY should protect users from malicious software. A pity that in reality this doesn’t matter – because the codesign only certifies who made it, but not if there’s any virus/trojan/whatever in it (see what happened recently with a famous registry cleaner tool…).

I was codesigning my games (both on Win/Mac) but recently I am really too overwhelmed by all the stuff to do, so I am considering switching all my downloads to the itch.io platform, which seems well known to visual novel authors. The main reason it’s that it uses really great tools, on par with Steam. I will just mention two things that makes a big difference:

  1. incremental upload/download, like Steam. If I change one line in a file and it’s 5kb, both me and players only need to upload/download 5kb, and not the whole game installer (which maybe is 170mb). And for the customers who don’t want to use the itchio client, you can always download a .zip file normally. Doing beta testing with that system will be a breeze. How many times in the past I found a bug when it was almost midnight, so I simply posted in forums “sorry, I’ll update the game tomorrow”. Now I can just run a command-line tool and  do it in 5 seconds making the update instantly available! 🙂
  2. using the client, the codesign/OS warning don’t show. Since your game exe is launched by Itchio app (similarly to what happens on Steam) the various Windows/MacOS don’t show up those annoying “WAIT ARE YOU SURE!? YOU COULD START WORLD WAR 3!!” messages 😀

Of course, I won’t instantly switch, but I think it’s safe to say that for future games I’ll use itch.io exclusively to sell my games directly.

Speaking of games…

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not really happy about the current status, by now I hoped to have at least another game in beta testing or even finished. But honestly, this year was a bit crazy, also considering the terrible Summer temperatures I got here where I live, which put me KO for 2 months!

Anyways, let’s see how is the progress of the various games:

Cursed Lands – this game simply became much bigger than I originally thought (lol, a new thing!). I am still coding the various sidequests, and writer said would write the main plot missions in the next weeks/months. When those are done, the game will be very close to completion. It’s going to be another of those 200k+ word RPG games, and I have pushed to add more camp talk and CG (each love interest has two bonus CGs besides the romance CG!). Also, both Vaeril and Nuala are bisex now, and you can romance them both with male or female protagonist. So at least looks like should be worth the wait 😉

Love Bites – it’s half done: half of the game routes are fully scripted. In this case, once the writer finishes them, the gameplay is very simple (there is some stat raising but not like my other games) and it could be “put together” much faster. Depending on how things go, I think this one could be done faster than Cursed Lands. But of course depends when the writing is finished and the last thing I want to do is rush the writing of a game as you can imagine 🙂

Volleyball Heaven – luckily the writing is 99% done, but there is still a lot of artwork to draw. So in this case we’re waiting for the artist, who is working hard, but there’s a lot to do. Drawing all those hot CGs takes time, you know 😉

And what about estimate release dates? that’s the big question! Well, for all the 3 games above, I think early 2018 would work. Which means I could be in a fun situation where all of the 3 games above will be almost ready at about the same time. Then I’ll decide in which order to release them, but ideally I’d keep the RPG as last since that will require more testing.

As usual there could be some “surprises”, like games I’m not talking about much that suddenly get a boost and could even be released before the 3 above. You never know what’s going to happen! It’s the magic of working on so many games at once with different people all around the world.

Volleyball Heaven – Introducing Emily

Last but not least, Emily. Originally was supposed to be a “secret route”. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned doing many games, is that those secret routes remain secret for maybe a day… 🙂

So I thought was pointless to keep it secret. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be secret / bonus stuff to unlock! Right now artist is working on an awesome MILF character who takes part in a completely optional sex scene in the game that you can unlock 😉

And now let’s introduce Emily! If there’s time I might tweak her hair style since maybe looks a bit weird right now, but otherwise I think she’s good to go.

Emily Madison, 28

Born in the Maritimes and growing up with her Métis mother on the Canadian western prairies while her Indigenous father, a residential school survivor, worked on oilfields, rigs and ships, rarely returning home, Emily Madison has always prided herself on her self-sufficiency, discipline and focus. As a hardworking and dedicated student, Emily’s athleticism and drive took her to the verge of representing Canada in the Olympics until a training injury wrecked her dreams.

Since coming to terms with her sexuality as an undergraduate, and after a couple of brief unsatisfactory affairs, Emily recognized that her happiness lay in a committed long-term relationship. Her first such relationship lasted until she graduated, and the second took her to Asgard College, where she took up a scholarship to study sports medicine, recognizing her days at the pinnacle of competitive sport were over.

After gaining her doctorate, Emily was offered a position as junior lecturer and encouraged by the College’s commitment to developing a semi-pro college beach volleyball team – building upon the town’s boast of being Beach Capital of the World – set about founding the Asgard Valkyries on top of her other academic responsibilities. The first year proved to be a disaster on several fronts.

Despite their deep and longstanding personal differences, both Marksons proved to be elite players and easily won places on the team, as do Rika and Lana. But the Marksons’ mutual antipathy, Rika’s overriding desire to prove herself as an investigative journalist, and Lana’s personal issues combine to leave the team on the verge of imploding, consequently dealing Emily’s reputation and fledgling career a heavy blow.

In a final humiliation, her partner ends their relationship into which Emily had invested a lot of emotional energy to take up a position on the West Coast. At the beginning of the new academic year, Emily finds herself in an uncharacteristically fragile emotional state, with personal responsibility for a dysfunctional team, and her competency under question.

Into this maelstrom, Kayla arrives. Let down by Lana, who had briefly taken on the team captaincy lacking other suitable candidates, Emily sees in Kayla a final chance to help relaunch the team and her reputation. Feeling guilty but unable to see any other way out of the predicament she finds herself in, Emily gives Kayla the captaincy and can only watch in trepidation as the young woman struggles to combine the unwanted responsibility with her academic workload… and all the while, trying to keep unwanted yet powerful feelings from leading her astray, with life-changing consequences for all concerned.

Volleyball Heaven – Introducing Jade

The writer and I refer to this character as “the ultimate babe”, and you can probably guess why 😀 Jokes apart, I really like the character design of Jade, one of my favorite of this artist together with Shiori of Summer In Trigue.

And now, everything you need to know about Jade directly from the writer:

Jade Markson, 21

The most traumatic period in Jade Markson’s childhood occurred when her parents adopted Zoe after her cousin’s parents were killed in a light aircraft accident.

The cousins had never been close despite being the only girls in their generation of Marksons, and Zoe’s sudden unavoidable presence turned her life upside down. The only comfort Jade could see in this tragedy was that while her caregivers were busy dealing with the constant fallout of Zoe’s latest escapades they effectively ignored her and let her do as she pleased.

Jade had always been a reserved, quiet and studious girl, most content when drawing elaborate costumes and imagining herself the natural daughter of a simple artisan couple who would one day show up on her fake parents’ genuine marble doorstep to reclaim her and take her back to share their humble existence.

Never comfortable being the heiress to what Rika refers to, with only a little bitterness, as ‘the magic Markson kingdom’, and painfully aware of the moral, ethical, and personal compromises that have to be made in building and maintaining great wealth, Jade retreated into her comfort zone, trusting few would value her for herself as opposed to her wealth, her beauty, and the position into which she was involuntarily born.

When she enters Asgard College – which her family helped found and where her father sits as a regent, with the pretension that it would one day become known as the Harvard of the Gulf – she is resigned to the fact that Zoe will be there too. Their joint presence at the young campus symbolizing that even the local elite see Asgard as every bit as prestigious as the northern Ivy League institutions.

Athletic and sporty, she is virtually press-ganged into the Asgard Valkyries when few other college women are willing to play alongside Zoe, who is not only difficult to get along with but whose outspoken brand of activism has given the whole team an unwarranted reputation in this socially conservative state.

When Kayla arrives on the scene, she is unsure what to make of the rough-hewn young woman. Being a friend of Lana’s, Jade is not expecting much of her. But when Kayla is unexpectedly drafted into the captaincy and as the consequences of her decisions play themselves out over the course of the year, Jade realizes that this extraordinary woman might change her life even more profoundly than Zoe did over a decade before.