Category Archives: roommates

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

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.

The importance of custom soundtracks

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My dog Skipper in his usual begging face

In the past, I used to have royalty free music in my games. Partly because I couldn’t afford to hire musicians, partly because I didn’t think that having original music was so important.

But one day, I saw this quote by Friedrich Nietzsche on a website:

Without music, life would be a mistake.

And I immediately jumped on my seat and realized how wrong I was!!! 😀

Jokes apart, it wasn’t such an enlightening moment but pretty close. I used to have theme songs in some past games (Always Remember Me for example) but wasn’t until Heileen 3 that I decided to have a full custom soundtrack. And when I saw how much people appreciated that, and the possibility to download the music tracks (along with other bonus stuff) in the “bonus content” version of the games, I realized that indeed before I made a big mistake.

So what does this mean? it means that, always keeping an eye on budget, I’m going to have full soundtracks and in certain cases even theme songs for all my future games!

For example, you can hear a snipped of Undead Lily theme song below (is weird and scary but because of the game theme):

and Roommates will have a custom theme song + full soundtrack as well (can’t post a preview of that one though, sorry).

Seasons Of The Wolf

One of the early scenes of the game. Althea, Shea and Vaelis meet Riley for the first time

Is this game going to have a custom soundtrack? Yes, and also a theme song! Speaking of the game, I’ve finally started coding the game story itself as you can see from the screenshot above. Is still the early battles and I’m tweaking a lot of things, but I’m making progresses fast.

Short news

I know many people are eagerly waiting for Nicole & Roommates. Nicole writing is finished, though I still have to get the last scenes from writer. Some art is also missing which should be done in a week or so. I really hope to have the game finished for Halloween!

As for Roommates, there are only a few backgrounds and some CG scenes left, but most of the work is done. Will take a while only because the game is very long so needs time to be coded, but it’s at good point too.

One last news, I’m also thinking to redo Loren soundtrack, because is one of my biggest games and sucks a bit to have royalty free music in it (even if the tracks I picked were particularly good). So on the next game update you might hear a very different music 😉

Looking at the bright future

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My cat Gilda is looking at the future with optimism

This year was a bit of a rough year for me (though obviously, it could be MUCH worse in general!). The main problem was all the events that happened in real life, and that influenced this year releases (or lack of).

The year is not yet over: but if I compare it with previous years, in 2012 by now I was about to release Loren’s expansion after releasing the main game. In 2011 I had already finished Planet Stronghold, and other cool games like Always Remember Me.

Sadly, it seems that this year I’m going to miss the “release of a new RPG” milestone 🙁

Anyway, the future looks brighter! Read below.

Nicole status – almost done!

Nicole seems very close to completion: I have all boys route finished and the mystery path done by 60-70%. There are still several scenes missing, and also some art, but I think worse case in October the game should be out with all the promised content and gameplay changes (if you’re curious check my forum thread here: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=39&p=19101#p19101).

Roommates update

Yesterday I also got all the backgrounds for Roommates! Even if I’m considering adding a couple more. The new “steamy beach sex scenes” (which aren’t porn, but very hot!) are at good point too, about halfway done. If things go as planned it could be out around Christmas or early next year 🙂

Undead Lily and the return of CCG

There has been a recent interest/return of CCG, which stands for Collectible Card Games. I also have some cool memories of one of the first games I made, several years ago, called Magic Stones, which was indeed a sort of mix between a RPG and a CCG.

Together with Roommates writer (who will write Undead Lily too) we started brainstorming the creatures list for Undead Lily.

A sketch of the Sylph creature

There are going to be 12 base creatures for the 6 elements, plus other cards (spells and some extra combo creatures). Writer counted 114 different creatures cards, so there should be a good variety!

Some of the creatures include: Griffon, Harpy, Mermaid, Shark, Ifrit, Salamander, Giant Mole, Purple Worm, Tree-ent, Giant Ant, Ghouls, Vampires, and more. I’ll post more previews as I get them.

Obviously I’m talking about a game that will be out not sooner than next year Summer or later 😉

Seasons Of The Wolf update

This week for various reasons was unable to work at all on SOTW, but I plan to get back on it next week. I was planning to have a sort of battles preview at end of month but that probably won’t be possible, since I want to redesign a bit the skills, adding a few more variety. In practice now there are 5 skills each, with 3 degree of power. So you could say 15 skills each character, but in practice is 5 unique skills each one with 3 power variants.

I was thinking instead to eliminate the various power levels, or use them only for non-scaling skills. For example, if we take two healing skills:

A) Healing Balm – heals 30% of character’s total HP
B) Minor Heal – heals target character by 25HP

For B we could have Major Heal that heals 50HP, while for A, as the character HP increases (presumably by leveling up) the spell power will automatically increase.

The writing and art production is going well, and I think that for sure in October I should be able to show something (sort of alpha version, to get feedback on the battle system changes).

Greenlight

Speaking about RPGs, in case you don’t know, recently Valve Greenlit a lot of games, and for the first time my RPG Loren Amazon Princess is around rank 85-86 in the top100. Still a long way to go, but now would be a good moment to vote for it using the link below:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92923628

No need to say that getting a game on Steam would mean I could afford to invest a lot more in my games, making them even better 😉

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva