Category Archives: general

posts about general topics, even not related to computer games

My 2018 Goals

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Political intrigue! Hot milfs! Cursed Lands has it all!

First of all, Happy New Year! Let’s see what I hope to achieve this year.

Considering how went in the past years, this time I’ll try to be more realistic. Of course two games already in progress (Love Bites and Cursed Lands) should really be finished this year, plus some more possibilities:

Cursed Lands – I don’t know exactly when it will be out, because with RPGs is really hard to set a good estimate release. Let’s say I get all the writing by June (just a worse-case scenario). The game should be finished by Fall of this year, even considering long time to do balancing, etc. Of course as soon as I finish the second act/full moon, I’ll update the current beta version.

Love Bites – Even in this case I can’t say exactly when it will be out, but since it’s not a RPG, once I have all the writing should be a matter of weeks. I want to be a bit more optimistic and say Spring in this case.

Volleyball Heaven – like above, in this case while the writing is basically done, there’s still a lot of art to draw, and do the scripting of the whole story. So it depends on those two things mainly, plus some extra coding required. I think that Summer could be a good estimate.

Anyway just looking at the last title above, I hope you understand why I’m done announcing games: even if VBH writing was 99% finished when I announced it, it was last Summer! And the estimate release is this Summer. One year. For an almost finished game. And it’s honestly nobody’s fault, everyone involved worked hard on it, just a series of bad luck happened.

That’s why I won’t talk about the current games in progress and it was a mistake doing it in the past.

I can also say that I have a few ideas for some SHORT GAMES ™ that I could write myself with an editor’s help. Of course for my standards “short game” will probably mean at least 70-80k words lol

And then there’s Planet Stronghold 2, I didn’t include it in this year of possible releases only because I honestly don’t think I’ll manage to finish it. After all I am already doing another RPG this year, and after I finish it I’ll probably need a few months to recover. So an early next year release it’s a more likely outcome for PS2. But you never know what’s going to happen 🙂

That’s all, and Happy New Year again!

2017 and you never stop learning from your mistakes

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I’m writing the naga storylines now and yes, I’m having fun!

I decided to break my “a new post every 2 weeks” rule today, and will also do another the 5th of January to make the usual two posts where I review the year and I write my goals for upcoming year. It’s a tradition and I don’t want to stop doing it 🙂

Let’s start from what I posted earlier this year, my goals for 2017.

What went bad

Well, I did release Amber’s Magic Shop. I didn’t finish Love Bites, but at least it’s half done. And even if it’s not finished, Cursed Lands it’s at good point and I’ve personally invested at least six months of time on it (only the character creation phase with the custom portrait generator took me over a month to code). So even if I haven’t anything else finished doesn’t mean that it was a unproductive year, not at all!

Regarding my only release, Amber’s Magic Shop. The game didn’t do bad, and to be honest in current climate where you’re lucky to break even, it did much better than the average, but still… I have the feeling of a missing opportunity, that it could have been something much bigger.

I know the game got several complaints about the writing (especially on Steam) but I don’t want to talk about the writing quality itself but my own mistakes. First of all, doing a new game genre like a crafing/sim game, and having the story written BEFORE the gameplay. That was a totally stupid move and I am banging my head on the wall every time I think about it. Second and related to this, if I do a dating sim or a visual novel, there’s no problem in using external writers, but if I do a game where the gameplay is so interwoven with the story, I HAVE to write at least the storyboard myself. Otherwise, as many people pointed out, the story feels too detached from the gameplay.

Still, as I said it could have been much worse. Many people loved it, maybe I’m being nit-picking, not sure 🙂

What went well

Planet Stronghold: Colonial Defense manga version. I was unsure if to do it or not (investing a non trivial sum of money to redo almost all the art of an already released game was risky) but the reception was amazing, and the sales increased by 300% (so now are in line with my other games more or less). I’ve said it many times: you won’t ever see me do a game with non-manga art again! 😀 I also felt relieved because I thought both the gameplay and writing of that game were good, and the results of the manga version just confirmed that the main/only issue was the art style.

Roommates extra nudity/sexy patch. This time was a smart move since the costs were much smaller (the original CGs were just edited and not redone from scratch, so much less work involved) and people obviously liked the possibility to (re)play the game with optional sexy content. I might try it again with other games but depends how quickly/cheaply it can be done.

Cursed Lands. As very often happens, some projects remains are there, unnoticed, slowly making progress in silence, I even forget about them, until one day I check all the writing already done and I’m like “DOH! this game could be finished relatively soon!” and then I start working on it full-speed (also because I don’t like to stay idle as you guessed). The game is in beta and so far people seems to love it, even if of course it’s still early days. I know for sure that we put a lot of effort in it 🙂

Volleyball Heaven. Yes the game is not even in beta yet, and there’s still all the CGs to do, but I was particularly happy how the new writer finished all the story in basically 3-4 months! It’s also a very different game from my usual ones, so I’m curious to see how people will react to it. An experiment, but personally I like it. Hopefully you’ll like it too.

In Summary

Things didn’t go as planned, and I’ve learned a lot of things which should prevent me from doing the same mistakes in the next years. The main thing will be to get back writing one game a year myself with help of an editor.

This will also help me reduce considerably the amount of games I’m working on at once, because I noticed in the last months that I’m being too much stressed and health comes first.

It’s also “fun” for me to see how there’s a sort of pattern for my work which repeats almost every two years, alternating a good/lucky/productive year with a bad/unlucky/unproductive one:

2012 Loren+DLC, good
2013 Nicole, bad (not for the game, but because I just released one simple dating sim and it’s not much in a whole year)
2014 Roommates and SOTW, good (probably my best year ever since both games did great)
2015 No games, very bad!
2016 Five games!, very good
2017 One game, bad

The good news is: based on that “magic pattern”, 2018 should be a good year!! Let’s hope it is. Happy New Year to everyone!

Some good news + future plans

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Last time I said I was hoping to bring some good news, and here they are! Let’s proceed in order.

Cursed Lands

If you missed my announcement in the social media, a beta version featuring the full first chapter except the Nagas rescue mission (until the end of first full moon) is now available on itch.io here: https://winter-wolves.itch.io/cursed-lands

All the usual disclaimers apply when talking about a beta: savegames “should” be compatible, there WILL be bugs (but if you tell me about them I’ll fix them), I might tweak things (not story-related though). As of now I haven’t added a “visual novel mode” yet, though you can always try playing in Easy mode.

Meanwhile I finished coding some more stuff for the second chapter, including an epic boss fight against the Kraken! It’s optional, so you don’t need to do it, but it’s very hard and has probably the best loot reward of the whole game:

So might be worth trying, don’t you think? Especially if you like to use the two nagas characters (two items are exclusively for them).

Currently I’m waiting for the writer to send me the new texts necessary for the second chapter, however as you see from the images above, I have already coded a LOT of things: all the rescue missions, the kraken fight, a tomb exploration sidequest, etc etc. It has the biggest amount of content of all the three chapters probably. Of course being an “open world” rpg, you don’t necessarily NEED to do all those quests in the second chapter, some can be completed also in the third.

As soon as writer sends me the missing scenes I’ll update the beta again, unlocking the whole second chapter. For now, have fun with the first 🙂

Love Bites

Things are progressing well for this game too. The “half-game” beta shouldn’t be much away from now! Not sure about the exact release date yet, but should be out before Christmas, with the final/full game out first quarter of 2018.

…and Planet Stronghold 2

Haha yes you read it well! Since I am now waiting for Cursed Lands’ remaining writing, what there is better to do than start working on another RPG!? Jokes apart, yes, I think it’s a good idea for two reasons: first, I’m in “RPG design mode”, I am working with the RPG framework code, so I’m fresh / familiar with it, and second because it’s about time to finish that game (I announced it back in 2011-2012!).

As I posted in forums, I’m going to plan the ruleset, gameplay etc, still using the good old framework but once again, it will play differently from the previous RPGs. I’m planning to try having randomized items again (like in Seasons Of The Wolf, since it seems players liked it) but still have only 2-3 equipment slots each character to reduce micro-management. Anyways it’s still early days but managed to update the old character creation code with the new GUI and I think the result it’s very good:

The soldier class info screen

Choose your side at start of the story

As announced at beginning of the story you’ll be able to choose who you sided with (Empire/Rebellion) and who you romanced (if any) in the previous game.

This will inevitably require a lot of branching in writing the story so I’m doing this part myself, but of course will ask the help of Miakoda (who wrote PSCD) for editing/proofread and writing the new romance scenes. I’m only writing this first part myself since it’s going to be a pain with all the gameplay and multiple beginning/branching!

Obviously there’s no estimate release date, I’ll just work on it whenever I’m waiting for the other two games currently in active development above. But at least I’m not wasting time 🙂

Status update, codesign and other amenities

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Yes I know that I said I would talk about games, and I am going to. But first, I need to make a short deviation 🙂

I certify I have enough

Recently there has been a BIG drop of direct sales. Probably because of Steam direct, but also I suspect other factors. In summary, in last two months I reached the bottom. Luckily, sales on other platforms (mobile, Steam) while are going down (it’s the Indieapocalypse baby) didn’t totally collapse as the direct sales.

Chatting with other indies, I found out that actually my direct sales so far were much better than the average! lol, so the situation is global, even for very successful indies, there has been a great drop.

Why? Well, most people are used to buy/play on Steam, but the OS have their faults too: indeed both Windows and MacOS, now require apps to be “codesigned”, otherwise they show various warnings and it’s hard just to download the game (not even run, just download it’s difficult!). Yes you could codesign, which means you had to pay a yearly fee to get this “certification”, which IN THEORY should protect users from malicious software. A pity that in reality this doesn’t matter – because the codesign only certifies who made it, but not if there’s any virus/trojan/whatever in it (see what happened recently with a famous registry cleaner tool…).

I was codesigning my games (both on Win/Mac) but recently I am really too overwhelmed by all the stuff to do, so I am considering switching all my downloads to the itch.io platform, which seems well known to visual novel authors. The main reason it’s that it uses really great tools, on par with Steam. I will just mention two things that makes a big difference:

  1. incremental upload/download, like Steam. If I change one line in a file and it’s 5kb, both me and players only need to upload/download 5kb, and not the whole game installer (which maybe is 170mb). And for the customers who don’t want to use the itchio client, you can always download a .zip file normally. Doing beta testing with that system will be a breeze. How many times in the past I found a bug when it was almost midnight, so I simply posted in forums “sorry, I’ll update the game tomorrow”. Now I can just run a command-line tool and  do it in 5 seconds making the update instantly available! 🙂
  2. using the client, the codesign/OS warning don’t show. Since your game exe is launched by Itchio app (similarly to what happens on Steam) the various Windows/MacOS don’t show up those annoying “WAIT ARE YOU SURE!? YOU COULD START WORLD WAR 3!!” messages 😀

Of course, I won’t instantly switch, but I think it’s safe to say that for future games I’ll use itch.io exclusively to sell my games directly.

Speaking of games…

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not really happy about the current status, by now I hoped to have at least another game in beta testing or even finished. But honestly, this year was a bit crazy, also considering the terrible Summer temperatures I got here where I live, which put me KO for 2 months!

Anyways, let’s see how is the progress of the various games:

Cursed Lands – this game simply became much bigger than I originally thought (lol, a new thing!). I am still coding the various sidequests, and writer said would write the main plot missions in the next weeks/months. When those are done, the game will be very close to completion. It’s going to be another of those 200k+ word RPG games, and I have pushed to add more camp talk and CG (each love interest has two bonus CGs besides the romance CG!). Also, both Vaeril and Nuala are bisex now, and you can romance them both with male or female protagonist. So at least looks like should be worth the wait 😉

Love Bites – it’s half done: half of the game routes are fully scripted. In this case, once the writer finishes them, the gameplay is very simple (there is some stat raising but not like my other games) and it could be “put together” much faster. Depending on how things go, I think this one could be done faster than Cursed Lands. But of course depends when the writing is finished and the last thing I want to do is rush the writing of a game as you can imagine 🙂

Volleyball Heaven – luckily the writing is 99% done, but there is still a lot of artwork to draw. So in this case we’re waiting for the artist, who is working hard, but there’s a lot to do. Drawing all those hot CGs takes time, you know 😉

And what about estimate release dates? that’s the big question! Well, for all the 3 games above, I think early 2018 would work. Which means I could be in a fun situation where all of the 3 games above will be almost ready at about the same time. Then I’ll decide in which order to release them, but ideally I’d keep the RPG as last since that will require more testing.

As usual there could be some “surprises”, like games I’m not talking about much that suddenly get a boost and could even be released before the 3 above. You never know what’s going to happen! It’s the magic of working on so many games at once with different people all around the world.

Professional vs amateur freelancers

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In the image above, this is what happens if you make Tofu angry. Be careful!

I’ve always been a rather unique indie. My main peculiarity was to release games at good pace, without necessarily sacrificing quality (at least, in my intentions!). I’m not writing this to brag, but as a matter of fact. And of course, doesn’t mean that my games were more successful than those of other indies.

Why I work this way? Mainly because I get really bored if I am always working on the same thing, same game, same story. If you think that SOTW was my game with longest development time, and still it was “only 10 months” (for the base game) which is really nothing compared to how long most indie games take (usually at least one year, yes even for normal dating sim/visual novels). And in my case was a full featured RPG…!

Consider also that except for some of my first games, all my stories are at least 100,000 words long, with an average length around 170-180k words! :O

As I said, I’m not bragging, wordcount in definitive means nothing (but if it’s well written, for sure players appreciate a longer story). Many indie colleagues are ten times more successful than me making smaller games and taking much longer each one. But I wouldn’t even try it, simply because I know already that I wouldn’t enjoy the process.

So what does this has to do with the blog post title? well like many other indies, I get a lot of people who want to offer their services (writing, art, music, even coding though it’s more rare). Since I made so many games, I worked with A LOT of people in the past.

I’m only aiming to give my humble advice to anyone who want to collaborate with other indies to create games over internet. This is my opinion, but I believe it’s also valid for other indies (or even other freelancing jobs in general). So what separates someone doing it professionally vs someone doing it in their free time?

Keep in touch

There’s literally nothing worse than not hearing from a collaborator over internet. This doesn’t mean you need to email every day but, especially if some work is expected from you, don’t disappear. This is literally the worst thing ever for me, something that really can’t forgive. Of course I’m talking about weeks (even months lol) of radio silence, not days.

Believe me, it’s much better to hear even stuff like “sorry but a new expansion for the MMORPG I play is out, so updates will be slower for the next week”, than hear nothing. Of course, strictly related to this, there’s also…

Meet deadlines

This is obvious, but it’s probably the thing all my collaborators miss. I’m more lenient because I know how hard is to met a deadline myself. However, there’s a lot of difference from missing a deadline by a day or a week, or by months…

But still, if you do the point above and keep in touch, it’s still somewhat OK. “Look boss I can’t finish XYZ by end of month, but I promise to finish it before the next” etc. Obviously, if you always miss deadlines one after the other… well that’s not good! 😛

Be honest

Another seemingly obvious thing, but that many times doesn’t happen. You don’t know how to do a task or are unsure if you’ll make in time? don’t say “yes I’ll do it” and then maybe either do a bad job, or be late or any other bad outcome. Another thing to avoid is coming up with sudden expenses before talking with the other part. The writing is going to be twice long because you think you’ll do a better result? inform,discuss, not write twice the word count, and then show the bill after the work is done. This is not going to make you get more work from that person…

Conclusions

In conclusion, if you keep those 3 points above in mind, I think you’ll have a much easier life as freelancer. Honestly? even if you only follow 1 or 2 of the point above you would be already a good freelancer! 🙂

Notice that I didn’t talk about skill. First, because except coding, everything else is based on tastes after a certain minimum level. It’s better the art of Nicole, Roommates, C14 Dating, Loren, or PSCD? depends on tastes. Same for music and also writing.

But also, because sometimes someone who keeps the 3 things above in mind has more chances to get work (from me at least) than someone 10 times skilled but that’s always late, lies or disappears for months. I’m making this example, PSCD artist: you probably know that the character art was the main reason the game greatly underperformed at launch (now it’s doing well after the manga update).

Still, that artist definitely meet ALL the 3 points above. He is honest, works fast, always asks when it’s the deadline and if he cannot met it, emails me. Result? since people didn’t like his character art, I hired him to do other art: a LOT of icons for my future RPGs,  Amber’s all crafting icons, the shop builder rooms, colored all the PSCD manga CGs, and he’s doing even more work for me right now.

Speaking of skill, it’s also true that sometimes I have to stop working with someone if the results aren’t “good enough”. If I get a lot of comments like “this art/music/writing is bad” all for the same collaborators, well sadly I need to run a business so I need to think mainly about what customers say.

If you’re short on cash it’s fine to work with amateur (that don’t follow the 3 point above), just don’t expect to get anything done very quickly.

Well hopefully this post was useful for someone and wasn’t too boring! Next time I’ll talk about the games in the works and their status 🙂