Category Archives: development screenshot

Good games takes time!

a classic tavern brawl in Dingirra (act 2). The “throw chair” is a powerful attack!

From the title you could imagine that this is a blog post announcing some delays on my next games. No, definitely isn’t! but erm, yeah there could be delays in the next games 😀

Don’t worry nothing big, only talking about a few extra months but I think is inevitable, as my games become bigger and more polished, I need to put more time into them. If I compare them with the ones I was making only 2-3 years ago, they all have custom tracks, custom backgrounds, higher art quality and more polishing in general. Also if you check other indies, they usually make 1 game a year, or max 2. So far I was still able to release at least 2-3 a year, and I believe of good quality.

RPGs in particular take a very long time, and wouldn’t be really fair to tell people that I can make more than one a year. Who knows, it MIGHT happen, since in practice I always work on the games a bit randomly depending how the various partners/collaborators do (if some works faster, I usually work on those games more). But that would be an exception 🙂

The good news

I have good news nonetheless regarding upcoming games:

About SOTW: I made good progresses on the main plot, made a lot of battles in act 2 up to the point where you have a full party (with Riley and Krimm joining you). Battles with full parties are VERY different from the first act, that’s why balancing was hard: I was focusing on the wrong way, I needed to balance act 2 and then if necessary fix some act 1 battles. Since the game must be balanced with a full party, not with 3 party members (for those who didn’t play it yet, in the first act you can control only 3 characters).

Vaelis and Rowinda background/personal quests are being added. The other romanceable characters already had them, but those two were missing. So Taleweaver (the game writer) is working on those. This won’t delay the game release since they can be unlocked in act 3, and independently from the main story.

About C14, because of my collaborators real-life tasks (relocating, weddings, etc) work will resume in July, but is at very good point and beta might be out that same month 🙂

Nicole yuri and Planet Stronghold 2 writing is going on very slowly, but making progresses at least.

Lastly, I have some news about Roger Steel. I will talk about it next month, when finally I hope to have also some artwork to show 🙂

One of the biggest enemies of indie devs: the “feature creep”!

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This shows starting conditions effect in a battle, useful to reproduce time-critical situations

If you look at the definition of “feature creep” on Wikipedia, you’ll read:

Feature creep, creeping featurism or featuritis is the ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, such as in computer software. Extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and so can result in over-complication rather than simple design.

Wise words! 😀 And indeed the screenshot above is very likely the last new feature I’ll add to SOTW. Don’t get me wrong, adding new features is good, and normally can make games better. But also, delay the game. Every new feature needs to be tested, both in functionality, and in balancing. In complex games like RPGs, often what started as a simple/innocent new feature can have repercussions later in the gameplay, screwing up the balance of the game, even HOURS later. So as you can see you need to be very careful 🙂

In the two past RPG I made so far, Planet Stronghold and Loren, had two very different approaches. In the first, I needed to get it done ASAP for money/time reasons, while for the second I could plan things more carefully. I’ve already compared the two games step by step in the past, but what I want to say here is that NOT NECESSARILY the game with more features is the most fun one. Sometimes, simplicity will lead to more accessible and fun games, reaching maybe a different target market, but not necessarily worse/smaller.

During SOTW development so far, I added many new features: item levels, randomized item creation/random loot, autobalancing enemies, isometric map, item rewards for quests, battlefield conditions and starting effects, and more (lost the count lol).

But I also TRIED to add some features, and then canceled/removed them because I realized that would take too much time to implement them correctly (like the skills with various levels of effectiveness) or that the mechanic wouldn’t be very clear to users (like the turn limit during battles).

In summary, even on this aspect of making a RPG (or any other complex game) you need to have a clear vision of what you want to do. A complex, detailed game? or a simple, very accessible game with a few rules? both ways can lead to a good game. What is worse is keep adding new features, without properly testing them, and as result building a worse game in the end.

Happy Easter

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First of all want to wish you Happy Easter! 🙂

Second, Always Remember Me is finally released on Steam, after a week of delay! Sorry about that.
Check it out here and spread the word: http://store.steampowered.com/app/291030

Seasons Of the Wolf update

As you know if you follow me in the social networks, my efforts now are all focused on finishing the first season of the RPG Seasons Of The Wolf. I’ve said it already but worth repeating: the first seasons doesn’t mean 1/4 of the game! The first is shorter than the others, even if now I’m adding several sidequests to make it longer. Also will feature only 3 characters, Althea, Shea and Vaelis, so no romance dialogues. But worry not, they’ll come later in the story.

Don’t be fooled by their cute appearance, ratmen encounters are tough!

So far coded two sidequests. Some were written with the help of an additional writer, others, shorter ones I’ll write them myself. Of course, will proofread them too 😉

At same time I’ve done some last tweaks to the game framework/rules. I can still do a few tweaks until I go on in season two. So that’s why I plan to make an open beta and let people play the first season: if there are some MINOR changes that can be done (not rewrite all the skills for example!) that beta will be good to find them out.

One of the tweaks is the cost of allocating each attribute point

For example, I discovered that the attribute points allocation needed some tweaks. Before was 1 attribute point to increase each attribute. But I shortly realized that this way, if you put ALL of them in Constitution (which raises HP) at the end of the game you would get 750HP which is a “bit too much” 😀

Same issues happened with other attributes as well, so I used an “old trick”, increasing the cost of each attribute increase based on the level (as explained in the screenshot’s text above).

Going back to work now, because I’m still trying to finish the 1st Season by end of month, even if won’t be easy 😉

The importance of randomness

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In the screenshot above, the new random items in all their splendor!

I’ve been recently playing Diablo3 on the PS3. I can hear a voice in my head saying:

“What? You’re playing!? Go back immediately to work on the games!”

But NO! Doing research is important for every business, so I decided to force myself to play it (also an excuse to use the PS3 for something since the recent PS+ games have been a bit disappointing for my tastes).

I played more and… I had the idea to implement random items on my next RPG, Seasons Of The Wolf 🙂

One of the strong points of Diablo has always been the use of the random element. I am not sure if other games before it used it so well. I fairly remember the first game, and how every match was different.

Obviously, since I make story-based games, I cannot rely too much on the randomness, since the plot follow a linear path, some locations must be fixed, the characters too, etc. I cannot also generate random maps or dungeon (at least for now!) so the only random element I could add was in the items/loot.

A test for the looting screen. Of course in the real game you rarely will get so much stuff!

And I must say that it works VERY WELL. Now whenever I kill an enemy during testing I wonder what item I’ll get – is pretty exciting! Of course the drop rate is not high, rather than flooding the inventory with garbage that you’d have to resell it immediately I decided to limit the amount, but increase the average quality.

In general the rare items are, rare, but also depends on the enemy. Boss enemies now will drop obviously higher level loot 😉

I decided to go with the following tiers: Rusty, Standard, Fine, Quality, Excellent, Masterwork, Rare and Legendary. Legendary is the only item that is not randomly generated, since I still want to have control over the most powerful items, so I’ll define those manually. They’ll also be unique and have a unique name.

To help the player recognize better the top items, the Fine/Masterwork/Rare/Legendary have a different color and a small letter with the initial of the word near the item icon in the inventory.

Overall, it took me a week of hard work (last weekend I worked 10h/day straight!!) but now that is working I must say that was time well spent! 🙂

I’ve seen the (green)light

In other, but no less important, news, three more of my games were greenlit yesterday! They are Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook, Always Remember Me and of course Planet Stronghold (was about time!).

I plan to release Always Remember Me next weekend, if all goes well. And the others coming shortly after in next weeks. Stay tuned 🙂

The Spring Of The Wolf

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Rowinda in her typical serious attire, featuring the Madness spell 😀

This Spring will be the Season Of The Wolf (when I’ll release the first beta of this game). So technically I have time until the 21st June 😉

Jokes apart as I said in previous post too, I hope to have the beta done by next month. The extra delay is due to some last minute decisions: as you can notice from the screenshot above, I decided to remove the skilltree system, allowing the players to decide which skill to learn in any order.

This also means that each character will have 12 unique skills, no more variations like Blizzard I, II & III. Of course, some skills are variations of others, I don’t claim that I have made over 100 skills ALL UNIQUE! 🙂 However, I really feel I have pushed the original Loren RPG framework to its limits in this game, some spells/skills are quite interesting.

The beta will include only the first Season (Winter), but at least will give people a good idea of what to expect if they decide to pre-order the game. A part of delay is also due to new random enemies that I need to do (wild animals, etc) and also to the tileset system:

SOTW will feature an isometric multi-screen map with hotspots to explore

Now don’t expect a scrollable map, but the map can be split into several screens, so I can make bigger maps. There’ll be various “hotspots”, marked with arrows:

a green arrow means that the interaction will be completely safe (like traveling to another zone)
an orange arrow means that there’s the risk of some encounters. In the screen above you can check the trap to see if you caught any wild animal, but there’s the risk of being attacked
a red arrow means that you’ll surely face an hostile encounter (wandering bandits, a monster, etc)

I’m considering if to add a golden arrow to display the current objective, but I don’t think I’ll need it since the main plot is rather simple, at least in the first part.

Anyway, I spent the last week on the new skills (still need to finish them) and also in adding hidden stuff in the map. For example a graveyard location that can be explored for a big sidequest, and subsequently also to do some good old skeleton skulls bashing 🙂

I am also going to implement a sort of limited grinding: there’ll be a simulated time in the game, so players will be able to explore, but when they reach the next key event “deadline”, the plot will advance. This way, I can make sure that the player don’t grind up to level 30 (the level cap) only in the first part of the story! 😀

That’s all for now, I have more news for the other games, but will keep them for the next weeks, so I have something to write!

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva