Category Archives: development screenshot

Game art styles

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After posting my last sketch about my upcoming mystery / detective game Vera Blanc, I got some comments from people about the artstyle.

Everyone seems to love the new style, and I’m a bit relieved since it was a bit a risk to move away from manga style (even if many said that Heileen was a mix between manga and american comics).

Note that I will still make manga games too in future, but I also wanted to try a more realistic / comic style.

Especially since in that style women looks better IMHO 😀

Click on the image on the left to zoom in and look at the colors… only at the colors, eh! 😉

I played with saturation level based on suggestions of Jake, and indeed seems that it looks better to me too. I wanted to obtain a sort of comic look, but before the image was less saturated than the one I posted above, and while was ok for a printed comic I think this new version fits more a computer game.

That’s just an example of what kind of fanservice you can expect from this series – yes, if things go well I plan to make a series of games. Another decision I had to take, which scares me, is to have multiple artists work on each “episode”.

Like in comic books, where each episode would be drawn by a different artist. I had to take this decision if I wanted to release each episode at 4-5 months of distance, rather than 1 year 😐

I hope players will understand my motivations!

Regarding art, if I had the money I would make all my games looks like the picture on the right: that’s a new screenshot from Planet Stronghold game, probably the most expensive I’m making so far in term of art and coding (and I hope it will do well!).

Just for fun, I also wanted to post an image of one of my first games as indie: Universal Boxing Manager (see below).

Ok, it’s true that simulation/strategy games usually don’t need great art, however is fun for me to see how I started, and how the quality of the art in my games changed (in better of course!) over the years… 🙂
universal boxing manager pc / mac game

Who is Vera Blanc?

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In the picture on the left you see a sketch for another project of mine in progress right now.

As I said several times, I always start many projects at once because is normal that there are some “dead moments” between a production of art, voices, programming and so on. So it’s always a good idea to have another project standing by when your main one is on hold. Or simply to “do something different”. Working always on the same thing can get tiring sometimes even if you love your job like in my case 🙂

This game is going to look very different from everything I’ve done so far. First of all as you can see, it doesn’t use manga art-style. I love manga, but I like also the other comic styles (american, etc), so I decided to try making a different game. I hope people won’t buy my games only because they’re manga! :p

About the gameplay: it will be a detective/mystery story. I’m still planning it so I can’t exactly tell much about it, but there will be some mini-games inside it, similar to the recent Spirited Heart update. There will be also a scheduler, and a very simple RPG element in it (some skills to pick at startup that will influence the story slightly).

The cute blonde on the left is Vera Blanc, and she is gifted with some special powers… while the guy on the right is Brandon Mackey, his partner during the investigations. In this image they’re hand in hand but actually in the game they’re not a couple: it was a wrong sketch made by the artists but is so nice that I wanted at least to put it in my blog!

More info about this project coming soon. Now time to get back to add some more enemies in Planet Stronghold…

Moving forward with Flower Shop and Planet Stronghold

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The Flower Shop game is near completion. The farming sim is 100% done, and the game is being tested. Fixed some minor typos, and adjusted some gameplay elements, but in practice we’re waiting for 3 missing backgrounds and the beautiful (even if I haven’t yet seen it) main menu from Deji.

Also, I’m finally moving forward with my other game Planet Stronghold. I got a new artist that’s going to do all the enemies in the game. Below you see a sketch of one of the first enemies, a robot-terrorist that we could call “RoboAnt-06”. (this because it vaguely resembles an ant!)

Then she created small variations of the base model, each one with a different weapon. In Planet Stronghold the combat will be focused on damage type, there are 5 in total: energy,explosive,armor penetrating, acid, psionic. Below, a screenshot of the in-game battle showing the new robot that replaced my ugly 3d renders of the first WIP screenshots 🙂

Note how the left arm of the robot has a different weapon. The one on the left has a gatling cannon firing armor piercing ammo, while the one on the right has a powerful laser cannon! I also got 10 new shiny backgrounds for the game that will show in future screenshots (yes I gave up on the idea of using pre-rendered 3d backgrounds).

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 🙂

Leveling Up

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I’ve been playing Fallout 3 on Xbox a lot lately. A thing I’ve noticed is that leveling up is done in the JRPG style, and not in the old AD&D one. For those unfamiliar, let me translate: JRPG usually have FAST leveling up. It means that you will level up quickly and constantly during the game, opposed to the AD&D system, where leveling up is a real “event”. I still remember the old SSI games based on the AD&D rules, the early levels were even acceptable, but then… going from level 10 to 11 was a real pain 🙂

To be honest I was a fan of the AD&D. Until recently. I mean, is cool that every level up is something unique, that brings new perks/features to the character. But on the other hand, I really like constant reward to the player. In Fallou 3 (but also in other games like Everquest 2) for example you can experience points by just discovering new locations. Or every trap/lock that you manage to disarm/unlock without a key. Beside of course completing quests and killing enemies!

It’s cool to see the EXP bar whenever you do one of those steps. It feels “right”. It’s like the game is telling you “YOU RULE”. I fell in love with it, and I am going to implement something similar to my VN/RPG game Planet Stronghold. There won’t be a full 3d virtual world, but I’ll fill it with many quests and also will make sure there are places in which you can use the various non-combat skills.

Speaking of which, two new screenshots: the skills screen, and the quests screen. They should both be final, no more change to skills 🙂