Category Archives: the flower shop

success and failure

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I think it’s important to set goals in life. You can be successful, or fail. But you have to set a goal, it’s too easy to just live by, without anything to aim for.

As in life, even in games is important to give the player some clear goals: in the Flower Shop farming sim, your first task is to clean the plot of land from the weeds. Initially I tested it, and was OK, but a bit pointless without a clear goal. So now I added one: clean at least 6 “slots” of terrain from weeds. The plot of lands indeed is divided into 5×5 slots, on each slot you can plant a seedling and grow something. But first you need to clean the weeds from each slot, and then you can plant the seedling.

Just adding the goal was enough to change the game, adding a strategic element. Indeed, each slot has a different “weed density”, so while some only needs 1 click to clean, others need even 3. Each click is an action, worth 1 turn (or 1 hour of game time). So, even if in the first day you’ll work 10 hours (latter only in the morning 6 hours), you still need to check for the slot that need less click to clean.

Because if you just randomly click, you’re very likely to see this screen:

with bad consequences like Uncle Sam forbidding you to call back Jill, not letting you use his truck to reach the town, and so on! 😀 Instead if you do it right, you’ll be rewarded with:

That’s enough work for today for me. Happy New Year to everyone, and may the 2010 bring fame, fortune, happiness and… flowers! They never hurt 🙂

How was 2009, how I hope will be 2010

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2009 is almost finished. How it was for me? Quite good I’d say. Considering the global crisis, is already enough that I managed to “survive” as indie another year. And in europe even, where you have also to face with insane taxation and the always poor usd value versus euro!
This year I released four games: College Romance (which I didn’t write but only produce), Spirited Heart, Bionic Heart and Heileen 2: The Hands Of Fate. Four games of that quality in a year is a very good achievement for any indie working mainly alone (with the help of external people that produce assets).
Other important things that happened, both good and bad:

GOOD
– I’ve made my first fully voiced game (Bionic Heart). Was very cool, even if a bit painful to put all the voices inside the game and manage all the voice actors. Heileen 2 should have been fully voiced too…
– I’ve learned to manage lots of people and projects at once. Even right now, I have 5 projects started!
– I’ve worked with wonderful people like Ayu Sakata, Deji, Rebecca Gunter, PyTom, Steven Mane, Daniel Conlin, Lucien Dodge and more (sorry if I don’t list you all!). This is very good since I’m building a list of RELIABLE people that I will surely use again on future projects.

BAD
– I’ve learned that writing the game in italian first and having it translated in english is a really bad idea
– I’ve also learned that putting sexy girls in a game doesn’t mean it will automatically sell 😀 you need also to make a good game!
– I’ve finally accepted the fact that none of my games will ever appear on a big portal
– I’ve been disappointed by some people that disappeared or delayed some of my projects for too long

Overall though, was a good year. In 2010 I hope to finish some of the 5 projects I’ve started! The first one probably (crosses fingers) will be the Flower Shop, since in practice once Ayu finishes to put the new character in the game and sends the code back to me, I will finish the farming sim and then… we will only need the voices!

Here’s hoping that this time there won’t be any problems with the voice actors 🙂

Then, I want to finish Planet Stronghold and Card Sweethearts, a interesting VN-Poker game that is waiting for too long. And I am producing the art now for a new kind of game style that I hope will be a great success, since I like a lot writing the stories and the storyboards for it. For now I can only say that involves detectives, mystery, and a beautiful blonde girl with a French accent…

What’s next ?

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Well, today got an email from Kim, the girl doing Heileen voice that assured me she will resume working on it once the finals at university are done. So I’m still confident about a late January / Mid-February release of the voice add-on for Heileen 2.

Then, the Flower Shop game is nearing completion, I’m programming the farm-sim minigame, which is turning out rather difficult (I want to make something decent to play). Deji, the game main artist, is drawing the final screens and they’re really beautiful, probably the best ones I’ve made for any of my games so far 🙂

The RPG game Planet Stronghold project is on hold for the moment, since the character artist disappeared, right when I needed some more characters to start building the main system of the game (doing missions, selecting the party, and so on). However the backgrounds are being done right now, and the sketches looks promising.

Lastly, I have a top-secret project going on for my Winter Wolves brand. Really topsecret since nobody knows about it (not even my most strict collaborators). It involves a VERY original art-style, which I think was never tried in a computer game before, and a interesting couple of… special detectives. I am trying to find the right artist for this, and I’m still experimenting with some prototypes etc to see if the result could be interesting.

More info coming soon…

Visual Novels in AAA games market

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No, outside Japan there aren’t any AAA-commercial quality visual novel games, of course. BUT – and it’s sa big but, the visual novel elements are starting to pour into the normal AAA genres. Some examples? Mass Effect, The Witcher, and probably more I haven’t played.

Ok, but why you say this? What exactly defines a visual novel, and differentiate it from a normal RPG game? Well in the cases above is really difficult, but I think I could say that while RPGs had NPC and quests already as a feature, the way those two games present the dialogues and the choices makes them much more close to visual novel than other games. Indeed, there aren’t simply quests: first, there is LOT of dialogue. Those games are fully voiced (well, like all my future ones) so that helps a lot. Many people don’t like when there’s much text to read, but if you present the same text under the form of a movie/cartoon, with moving actors, scenes and voices, it’s VERY different (in practice is the difference between reading a book or watching a tv movie). In those games, there are MANY choices. Both on Mass Effect and The Witcher you can influence lots of characters/factions, and in the end, really change your ending.

RPGs always had the possibility to make choices, but to influence the world/characters around you and “unlock” different endings? No, that’s more a visual novel thing, to me 😉

Both those games were huge successes, selling million of copies. Of course, it’s not JUST because of the visual novel component: but I like to think that it played a big role. Yes, you can have visual novels features in a AAA game and not bore the western gaming public: you just need to insert them into a context with many other gameplay types (shooters, strategy, simulations). That’s what I’m going to do with The Flower Shop and Planet Stronghold 🙂

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.