Category Archives: development screenshot

Almost done

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Today got the last missing background of Heileen 2! So the art is completely finished. In the two screenshots below you see Jack as woodcutter (what!? yes!) and a friendly group of pirates who seems to be interested in our heroine Heileen… 😉

I’m reviewing several parts of the game to add some cinematic effects (zooms, pan, etc) and reviewing the plot (is easy to get lost with so many choices!) and everything seems good. I also finished to put all the male voices inside the game, so I’m only missing the female ones and then the game could be considered ready to beta-test and then release.

It’s a bit discouraging that it will probably coincide with the pre-Christmas period: however I’m not sure yet, the game might even be delayed to January. Anyway, I’m still going on with my other projects, and hopefully if I can find the time I’m also going to do a decent update to Spirited Heart (nothing special, but I promised I would do one!).

How to do perfect (or almost) gameplay balancing

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If you check at the bottom of this post you’ll see a sort of spreadsheet page (and indeed, it is!) and you’ll wonder what the … is that.

It’s my system to do perfect gameplay balancing! In games like RPGs, where you have lots of skills/stats, is really hard to balance properly games. There will always be some classes/races with better attributes than others. This is inevitable, but there are some tricks you can use to at least try to make a balanced game.

In what consists my method? simple, I take a spreadsheet program (Openoffice in my case) and I lay down the stats needed in row/columns like in the example below. Then, I use the SUM function to sum all values in rows/columns. The result should be that all totals are equals: it means that if I have a class with more Willpower, there will be another with more Wisdom, and so on. But in the end if you sum all values they should be all equals, grouped by your RPG system (in my case races/elements).

Hope I managed to express myself well. If you’re making a complex game, just try it, might save you some time! Of course there are still lots of things to balance inside the game itself but this should be a good start.
balancing

Renpy SFX

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I managed to do a very simple “special effect” in Renpy, but I’m so enthusiast that I want to post it in my blog! look below:

Nothing special as you can see, but still better than just showing the card with no effect at all. In this case, based on my choice during the dream, I ended up being too proud of myself (and my poor special effect!) 😀

I have already some voices and new one should come today or tomorrow, so I will be able to post a more interesting video teaser of Heileen 2 soon!

Some stats & staying focused

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First of all some stats on Heileen 2 so far:

The game contains 3862 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 34649 words,
for an average of 9.0 words per screen.
The game contains 41 menus.

almost 35k words isn’t bad at all. Considerin I’m only doing “step3” of the dreams with the tarot cards, and have yet to introduce the final chapter where you’ll see which ending you’ll pick (there are other endings that can happen before it too). My estimate is that the final game will be around 50k words. The first one was around 40k, but this one has much more variety, and more than 3 endings!

To explain better I made this flowchart in case anyone is interested.

flow

In practice this repeats for each dream: first you make inside the dream the choice that can lead to a Virtue or Sin result. Usually the cards have powers which can influence the real world (I don’t want to give out too much detail), so for each result you’ll also to pick between 2 choices (sometimes even 3). Those latest choices will influence your relationship with the other characters in the game (mainly Ebele and Robert for most part of the game except in the ending).

As you can see the possible combinations are really a lot! 😀

In last period, also because of really poor sales (a global slump though, so probably related to poor economy, recession, schools starting again, etc) I started looking to other possibilities for an indie dev like me, for example other platforms (iphone/XNA) or other game types (browser based, MMO, online games). However all those new things would require a big investment of my time. I started with iphone/XNA but after a few weeks of programming I was completely burned out, and still far from seeing any results. If I compare this to programming normally on Pc/Mac with or without python there’s a big gap. So for now, I’ll focus only on developing more classic downloadable games for those open platform, hoping that people will support my efforts a bit more 🙂

Deus Ex Machina

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falsejohnI just finished writing the beginning of chapter 3 of Heileen 2. In a subplot branch you can be saved by what is defined as “Deus Ex Machina”. A sort of divine intervention, something beyond the human possibilities, that saves you from a desperate situation. This is actually also an ending, the PRIDE one.

Exactly, each Sin / Virtue will have an ending. I’m sure the most sought will be the Lust one 😉

There will be also other endings even if in theory all endings could be associated to one of the 7 sin/virtues… but for some the association will be quite obvious.

In the image on the left you see John dressed in a unusual way. But he is really John or…someone else?

In the image on the right instead you can seequestscreen the quests screen, completely new, for Heileen 2.

There will be MANY more quests, and the total maximum possible score will be 100! (so now that I think about it better, there will be 20 quests total since the max score you can get per quest is 5).

This screen will list the Active quest, the Completed and also the Failed ones.