Category Archives: dating sims

Romance and sex in games

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Sex in games, especially in casual games has always been a sort of “taboo” topic. Which makes me laugh. Looking at the recent portals top10 you see, beside the usual cute-girly games, also some “CSI” themed games. Investigations, mysteries, secrets. Which is good of course. But with lots of blood, weapons, violence (even if clearly not splatter).

I personally have no problem with that. Even in my game Bionic Heart there are some disturbing scenes (human organs floating inside glass cylinders full of liquid for example). What makes me laugh is that while you can show that without problems to everyone (including teenagers), the parents gets insanely angry the instant you mention something even VAGUELY sexy.

I’m not talking about pornography of course! But if you have watched any tv-series in past 7 years, you’ll notice that beside violence, there are quite some sexual references. House M.D., just to make a well-known example, has PLENTY of those. But try mentioning in a game that the main character is a bisexual hot girl, and you’ll get instantly bashed as a satanic programmer 😀

Talking about romance instead, Flower Shop is full of it. I got some complaint for my previous games from some customers, saying that there wasn’t enough romance in them, and now reading the last lines of some characters I understood completely what they meant. Ayu is a great writer of course, and I’m glad she wrote this game since with my english I wouldn’t have been able to express such situations so well 🙂

The game is progressing well and soon we’ll start with the voices while we finish the farming sim and add the last pieces of art. Don’t have any official release date but I guess Q1 of 2010 could be a good estimate.

Heileen 2 status update

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Today got a bunch of new art for the game. You can see some screens on this post. The first one is a group of natives you’ll meet on the island. They look really friendly, don’t they? 🙂 The second, is the gallery screen, where you can replay the endings you have unlocked (similarly to Bionic Heart). I really love the two Heileen Devil / Angel pictures. To be honest my favourite is the Devil one!

I have only a few more BGs to get and then the game will be completed, art-wise. However there are still many missing voices. I gave lot of thought about possibly releasing a sort of “pre-order” version, without voices: but talking with several friends (customers and other developers) they agreed that wouldn’t make much sense. People wouldn’t play the game again just to hear voices, so they would just have a lower-quality experience. This means that the game will probably be done in December though 🙁 So please remember this Christmas to ask  Heileen 2 as gift!

What are “light-RPG” games?

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I remember when I was young, the game genres where very well defined: there were action games, adventure games, role playing games and so on.

As the game industry grew up, some interesting genre-mix started to pop up. For example now we all refer to Diablo as a RPG, but would be more accurate to call it Action-RPG. Actually, right now, we can find many “RPG elements” in lots of games. Very few “pure action” games remains.

One of my upcoming games, Planet Stronghold, is a “light-RPG” game. I consider it a visual novel with RPG elements, but stronger than those you can usually find in dating sims. What I exactly mean? I’m talking about quests, relationships, interactiveness? No, because many of those features were already present in my other “normal VNs”. In Heileen 1-2 there are quests, in Bionic Heart relationship and some interactive scenes, in Summer Session there are the stats/skills to improve and so on.

So to call the game “light-RPG” I knew I had to go forward and push renpy to its limits (well no, not really, is quite easy to achieve good results with it!). Indeed in Planet Stronghold there will be combat, an inventory, quests, character relationships and so on. There will be several kind of weapons based on the damage type: energy, piercing, explosive, etc. There will be 4 classes: psionic, soldier, guardian and scout, each one with special advantages.

BUT, the game won’t be FILLED by stats. You’ll clearly know from beginning what kind of gameplay you can expect from a certain class. Scouts will need lot of time to recharge but will be able to kill opponents with a single shot, especially human ones. Guardians will be tough and have lots of hitpoints, psionics duty instead will be to heal / protect others. That’s why I use the word “light”, because while is clearly a RPG game, it’s not hard to understand.

Clearly is not easy to create a game like that. Is actually harder than creating an uber-complex game like some I did in the past (Magic Stones or Supernova 2 for example). Because with this game, even a casual player should be able to pick up the game and after learning a few basics, being able to enjoy the game without getting lost not knowing what to do.

The best moment for an indie

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This is actually the best moment for me, as indie. What I’m talking about? About the period of time between a finished project, and the start of the new one.

Indeed I’ve officially finished writing all the texts needed for Heileen 2: The Hands Of Fate, even if of course I haven’t finished the game itself yet. But from now on, it is just a matter of waiting for the voices / missing art, and playtesting (but I’ve already done that a lot while writing the story). So while there’s still some work to do, nothing that really require my creativity.

Instead, right now I’m thinking about what to do next. I have several other projects going on, but some are long-term ones, or are carried on by other people (I’ve other writers working on more games). For sure the first thing will be to implement a small mini-farming game for the Flower Shop dating sim, and then… don’t know. I am evaluating several ideas right now, including some light-horror stories, an investigative one, a sci-fi team combat based game with story, and more.

It’s going to be a fun end of the month 🙂

Deadlines and commitment

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It’s scary thinking that today is already the 10th october and I announced Heileen 2 for november 🙂 But at same time is thrilling and having a deadline keeps me focused and committed to finishing the game. Not that I wouldn’t have finished it otherwise – but I have the insane tendency to always add more stuff in games. I start small, then day by day I have new ideas and I want to add them all in the game. It might sounds good but it isn’t: if you do something too big too fast, there are several side effect that might happen:

  • bugs – adding too much content/features in short time WILL inevitabily lead to bugs. And you know, nobody likes them 🙂
  • lower quality – this is obvious: adding too much stuff (in my case text or gameplay experiences) in short time means I won’t have time to test them properly and see if they impact the gameplay in a good or bad manner
  • possible delays – last but not least, it can lead to a situation where you won’t meet the deadline. Like happened with Bionic Heart for example, where I delayed the exit of 2 weeks because of voiceovers

Right now I’m still writing the final part but I’m almost done. It’s really nice to see all the various endings, all the possible ways the story of Heileen can end. BUt will it really end with this game? who knows… 😉