Category Archives: roommates

Promo sale & Roommates video preview

Leave a reply

Back To School promo

In case you missed it, despite the newsletter and all the social network promotion I did, you can use the coupon BACKTOSCHOOL during the checkout process to get 50% off any of my games.

Doesn’t work on Cinders since is not my game, and with bundles because they have other predefined discounts. So for example if you want both Flower Shop games you have to buy them separately, using the coupon every time.

Expires Sunday 1st September!

Roommates update

Today I thought I would be able to talk about SOTW skills, but had other problems to solve this week, so wasn’t able to do it in time. However, it was a very productive week for Roommates and I was able to make the video below:


This intro video provides just a glimpse of the crazy humor present in the game!

I plan to do more videos like that in next months, introducing each character of the story separately.
The writer has finished editing 2/3 of the game, and I hired Aleema to finish it (playtesting/coding/final polishing) so I can work fulltime again on SOTW to hope to finish it before end of the year.

Speaking of Seasons Of The Wolf…

Don’t be surprised, but the game is turning out bigger than expected 😀 Why I have this Deja-vù sensation? (it happens every time, I always say it will be a smaller/simpler game and then…).

The game is already over 30,000 words, is still on the second season (Spring) and that doesn’t include any camp talk conversation.

trait traitresult
An example of a decision you’ll have to do for in the traits screen

Coding / design wise I just finished the “traits selection” screen, in which you’ll be able to choose an event from the twins’ early life that will reward them with a unique trait, and I think turned out nice to play.

As for the remaining stuff, I’m a bit behind but only because I decided to rework the skills, since there are “only” 8 party-members, beside having more attributes (as seen in last week post) I want to make the skilltree more complex than Loren, with some branching decision, so that you won’t be able to unlock all the skills but you’ll have to choose.

Luckily once that thing is out of the way, I think I can go on with the battle coding much faster since I had already redone the battle screen months ago 🙂

Back to work

6 Replies

IMG_0415Don’t be fooled by Tofu who is still playing games, now is time to work!

The past month, or better the past 45 days have been a serious blow to my productivity, because of the heat (like every year) plus some renovating works I had to do to my home. In practice, with the heat, the noise, the continuous interruptions, I just gave up… I was able to work only a few hours in the morning and answer emails, but that’s it.

As result, many many games are behind schedule, even if in practice the only one who is waiting my “direct contribution” is the RPG Seasons Of The Wolf. Luckily most of my working partners are people living in fresh countries like Canada, Belgium, Germany and so on (though I heard that the heat wave this year was all over Europe).

Anyway, it seems that the weather will cool down in the next week, and most importantly I’m finally done with the renovating works! 😀

So while I am still quite broken and stressed, I’ll gradually try to get back into “the working mood”, with the goal to release Nicole otome version by September and at least SOTW beta before end of year.

And maybe another game shortly after, since even Roommates is at good point 🙂

Status update

2 Replies

Nicole update

First of all, an update about Nicole otome dating sim, since I started the preorders already. You can watch Jeff video preview below:

he seems polite and kind, but also quite bizarre! Anyway, I got the first 3 scenes out of 10 with him and have already added them to the game. I’m waiting for 16 chibis and icons from the artist, and some extra outfits.

Worse case scenario, I can release an exclusive preview build towards mid-August with the first 3 scenes of each boy. But I honestly hope that the writer and artist will work faster, so I can skip the preview build and release the final demo at the end of August, though I think it will be harder…

Anyway, we’re finally getting close! About the yuri version, once the main game is done it will take less time since basically is only the writing to do, since the gameplay and the chibi/icons art will be already implemented 🙂

Planet Stronghold 2 update

Big games require long wait 😉 Probably not what you wanted to read, but well that’s the truth. Coder is working on the new RPG system, and I think is going very well, but obviously needs time (and will need a lot of testing too even after is finished).

Plot wise the first chapter out of four is not finished yet, because we were doing some tests with the isometric maps and other gameplay things. But I assure you that the writing quality is great as always!

So in summary… we’re behind. A lot. But I’m very confident that once the game is ready you’ll be amazed by all the things in it 🙂

Roommates update

Character artist is doing the “steamy scenes” also known as “beach sex scenes” 😉 now don’t let your imagination go wild, since is not an eroge game after all! However, let’s say that those scenes will be quite interesting!

Backgrounds are progressing well and artist said that should be ready by September. Is hard for me to give an estimate at this point, but I think the game “could be out before Christmas if everything else goes well” (writer is coding all the sprite expressions but is a bit behind).

Seasons Of The Wolf update

grand_mogul
The Grand Mogul Rafik will be one of the main opponents of the story

Things are going well both in the writing (six scenes done) and in the art (all main characters so far are finished, though there’s still a lot of work left to do).

About the gameplay and coding, I’m still behind because I was too busy with other real-life stuff, but I am confident that I can begin working on it at full speed in September. At least in this case if I have all the art and the writing done by the Fall, it will depend only on me so the game should be out before Christmas 🙂

Introducing the main characters of Seasons Of The Wolf

8 Replies

althea-shea
Althea & Shea, the snow elven twins are the two playable characters of the game

During the game, you can play as one of the two twins. Like my previous RPGs, the main story doesn’t change based on who you pick, but the romance dialogues do.

Speaking of romances, this game will have one for each sexual preference. I know is much less than previous RPGs but I had to do this if I wanted this game to be out this year. I can always release DLC/expansions adding more romances later 😉

In this game though, differently from Loren, you can choose three classes: Ranger (the equivalent of Warrior class), Hunter (the equivalent of Thief class) and Druid (the equivalent of Mage class). So as you can see there will be more freedom of choices regarding your character class.

The character creation will let you customize your character, or pick some predefined builds (for those who want a quick-start). I am thinking to allow the same choices for the other twin: you can decide his/her skills or pick some ready-made builds.

The only restriction will be that both twins can’t have same Class, for balance reasons. As much as it could be fun to have two Rangers or two Druids, I am not confident that I can balance the battles for such situation. I might still allow the option for the more adventurous players, displaying a big warning though!

While I haven’t decided yet how the gameplay will be outside the battles, I plan to have a map with more “free roaming” than Loren’s one, have randomized encounters in specific places, some opportunity to grinding using a new system which I called “leveled grinding”.

In what it does consist? Let’s say that the plot is divided into “key points” that you must reach to advance in the story, and of course we’ll have different difficulty levels.

In practice:

beginning -> until key point of the story 1 = you can level up skills up to tier 1
-> until key point of the story 2 = you can level up skills up to tier 2
-> until key point of the story 3 = you can level up skills up to tier 3
this way maybe it would be possible in Easy/Normal mode to not reach the level cap for the next “key point” but still be powerful enough to go on, while playing in Hard mode it would be recommended or maybe even needed to get past. This system would let me balance the various fights much better since I would know exactly which skills the players CANNOT use in certain battles 😉

…and the other games?

Ahem, I have a good and a bad news. The good news is that Nicole will be a much bigger game than I thought (only the otome part will be over 100k words!) and Roommates background artist has started working. The bad news is that for sure I won’t be able to release those two games soon, because there’s still quite a lot of work left to do.

If I really must give a date, I’d say that probably one of the two games should be in beta towards the end of August, but I’m not 100% sure of that… so please wait, I assure you that will be worth it!

Don’t rest on your laurels

9 Replies

Batman sleeping
In the picture above, my cat Batman sleeping in my messy office

This year I’ve already released two games: Heileen 3 Sea Maidens, the yuri version for  Heileen 3 released last year in December, and Bionic Heart 2.

But there’s no time to rest on my laurels! The show must go on! etc etc.

Roommates

So I’m very excited to announce that Roommates script is 99.9% finished (just some minor tweaks and some gameplay phrases to add). The total word count is about 130,000 which is definitely not bad. It also will have a lot of replayability, since for the first time in one of my dating sims, you can play as male or female main character!

Unfortunately, there is still quite some work to do. The game will feature a full original soundtrack PLUS a theme song for it. I’m quite excited about that, since the theme song perfectly fits with the light-comedy setting of the game 🙂

On the art side, I am expecting some extra romance CGs that between my writer and me were referred as “the beach sex scenes”. So as you can imagine they will be quite “steamy” 😉

I’m also missing all the 26 backgrounds, and the artist I picked (who already did a great job on Nicole’s backgrounds) can begin working on them only in July. So as you can imagine, the game is very likely to be out in August/September, a bit later than I expected, but at least this will leave us a good amount of time for editing, testing, tweaking gameplay and so on.

Nicole

I finished Darren’s path this week, and Kurt’s one is being proofread right now. The soundtrack is finished (with 7 different tracks) and art-wise I am missing four extra scenes for the “normal romance endings”, but artist guaranteed she can do them in one month. There’s still some other art left like the GUI and chibis, but shouldn’t be a major cause of delays.

So I still believe the game beta could be out at end of June, or mid-July at the latest. We’ll see!

…and I haven’t forgot about the RPGs!

I know that a good amount of people who follows me now is because of my last RPGs. Well don’t worry, I haven’t forgot about you: I am definitely going to try finishing another RPG soon. Planet Stronghold 2 looks like will need more time than I thought, so that’s why I’m playing around with Loren RPG framework to experiment with it, using a different layout, higher resolution (1280×720) and simpler interface which could work also on touch-based devices, as you can see in the work-in-progress image below:

mysterious RPG

For what game you might ask ? Well maybe Loren sequel won’t be the only RPG set in Aravorn to be out in the (near, hopefully) future… 😉