Time for another character introduction: Samuel. He is one of the homosexual romances playing as Alex.

Name:  Samuel Bellamy
Nickname: Doc
Nation of Origin:  England
Service Branch:  Imperial Xenobiological Service
Specialty:  Eco-Engineering

Description:
Ever since he was a child, Samuel had a deep love for animals, and his parents encouraged this behavior in their son.  As Samuel matured, this interest widened into a fascination with alien life, and it came as little surprise when he graduated with top honors in Xenobiology.

Numerous organizations vied for Samuel’s attention, but he settled on the military, figuring this would give him the most exposure to alien life.  This proved prescient since while he was out in the field, a disease struck the expedition he was on.  The group’s doctor was among those afflicted, but Samuel was able to synthesize a vaccine, and  earning the nickname ‘Doc’. This incident also brought a measure of unwanted fame to Samuel.  For two years running, he was voted ‘Hottest Biologist.’

Samuel was assigned to Planet Stronghold because his knowledge has allowed humanity to adapt to various alien environments.  This serves his own purpose for it allows him to research forms of life entirely unknown to humanity at large.

If he could be said to have a flaw, Samuel really prefers wide open spaces to civilization.  Given a chance, he can often be found out in the wild, recording alien lifeforms in their natural habitats.  He feels truly at peace when he can be one with nature.

Playing games is important

Yes you heard me well: is important to play games! Especially if you are a game developer like me 🙂

I have less and less free time now (especially this year with everything happening all at once, Steam, iOS ports, etc) and as you can imagine, when I have some I prefer to spend it with my wife, pets and doing outdoor activities.

However I still try to find the time to play for a few hours a week the new games. Because that’s the equivalent of “research & development” of other industries.

Some practical examples and games that inspired me while I designed and coded my upcoming RPG ToA: Seasons Of the Wolf:

– Guild Wars 2: from this game I grabbed the ideas of “solve all quest in an area” and “discover all locations” and so on, to get bonus EXP. From this game I also wanted to implement the idea of stat-derived enemies (no matter your level, all enemies would be a challenge) but after only a week of testing I realized that it wasn’t a good idea 😀
– Diablo 3: it’s nothing new, the random items I mean, but still while playing this game I thought that would have been cool to use random items with tiers even in my games, alongside manually created ones. I implemented it and people loved it 🙂
– XCOM and such the idea that the battlefield and environment should have a bigger impact. I implemented it in a limited way because didn’t want to risk breaking the balance too much, but I’ve added elemental conditions and some special ones (tunnel sewers where 2handed weapon do half damage, underwater where fire magic doesn’t work and ranged weapon do much less damage). I also implemented the damage penalty when hitting Thief class with Warriors. However the ideal would be to have a full tiled battlefield for this to work better. Maybe in future! 😉
– Everquest 2 and another MMORPG I can’t remember now, the idea of offering items as reward for quests. Again it was nothing new, but just playing those games reminded me of this feature which was missing in my previous RPGs.

So if you’re a game designer, try to find the time to play a few games. Your own games will benefit from it!

SOTW update

Rowinda’s flashback quest is totally… crazy ! (what you did expect?)

Work on SOTW is proceeding not really smoothly – I decided to adopt the latest Ren’Py to take advantage of a rewrite of the screen language which makes the super-complex game like mine run faster, but since is a beta… has issues. I’ve had old save games compatibilities broken already 3-4 times, even if somehow every time was able to keep the ones I use to develop the game. With the latest update though, they broke as well… so I have to go back to a previous version, because otherwise I can’t even work on the game myself lol. Needless to say, this is very frustrating, though obviously is not Ren’Py fault. I guess I was spoiled by the fact that in the past it always worked without problems! But is normal for a beta program to have such issues.

I should have the new tileset I need for Act 3 at end of month, so I estimate that all problems considered, the next act could be ready for beta-testing around mid or end of October.

The final game release *might* happen in time for end of year, since for the last act I already have all the  art I need and I’ve already coded almost all of it. I’ve also commissioned some extra ending CGs from another artist (using the same one wasn’t an option, he wouldn’t have made it in time) and they’re turning out very nice!