Category Archives: general

posts about general topics, even not related to computer games

The 2017 plan!

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The character selection screen at beginning of Undead Lily game (work in progress)

As already said in other places (forums/social networks) this year I am not aiming at releasing 5 games again! 🙂 However, if that happens, of course I wouldn’t mind.

The thing is, that of the upcoming games, many are RPGs. And as you know, those kind of games need a lot of time to be properly designed, coded, balanced, etc. There are also a couple of “simpler games” in the works (luckily!), one of them is Love Bites and the other is <CURSED GAME> (to not be confused with “Cursed Lands” which is another RPG!).

There are a couple more games in the works but I’ve decided to never announce or show anything about a game publicly again, until it’s almost done (just a few months left).

So depending how things go, this year you could see some sudden releases of unannounced games. I am not sure it will happen since many are still behind, but who knows!

Talking only of the currently known games in progress, I would estimate this (I’m only talking about beta versions, not final releases):

  • First Quarter: Amber’s Magic Shop. Writing is done, art is done, all is left is scripting and coding. The crafting works, I’ve added over 250 recipes, but still all the remaining simulation part needs some tweaks. I also am doing the shop-builder minigame, which wasn’t planned but seems such a good idea that I think it will be worth the wait.
  • Second Quarter: Love Bites. The art is mostly done (we might commission a few extra artwork), the writing is at good point, the gameplay will be classic dating sim plus VN mode as usual.

Obviously it could happen that Love Bites is finished sooner than Amber. I’ll give the priority to the game mostly advanced. Anyway, both those two games should be out in the first part of the year. But what about the second part of the year?

Things get a bit more complex. Beside obviously finally releasing the <CURSED GAME>, I would like to work on both Planet Stronghold 2 and Undead Lily but of course not release both! (it would be slightly madness haha)

Also, PS2 will be written by Love Bites’ writer, and I imagine that she’ll want a break after finishing Love Bites 🙂 So I think Undead Lily it’s more likely to be out first. Also remember that for RPGs, I need to spend weeks if not months for the gameplay design and testing, it’s much harder to give an estimate. With a dating sim, once writing, music and art is done, you’ve basically everything and it’s easy to say when it will be out. For RPGs… no.

Another important factor, as you might know since I often talk about it, is the “burn-out”. I definitely don’t want to risk being burned out. Last year I released a card game (PSCD), 3 dating sims and a RPG (Queen Of Thieves). Most of PSCD work and a good amount of QoT RPG design/coding was already done in 2015, otherwise would have been impossible to make so many games in a single year.

This is also why I’ve decided to switch from “full RPG” (like Loren/SOTW) to… something easier to do.

The “select companion” screen has some sort of fighting game vibe and I like it 🙂

And it’s not because it’s less work, but because redoing another RPG design (classes, skills, etc) shortly after finishing QoT was really bad for my morale/motivation haha! Doing something new/fresh will be interesting for me, and hopefully will be also fun to play.

That’s all I can say for now. As time goes on, I’ll make more updates about what’s going to happen when I’m more sure 🙂 Happy New Year!

Never Forget Me beta + Future romance games

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luis

First of all Public Service Announcement: my upcoming otome game “Never Forget Me” is now in beta. The only thing missing is the official game main menu and the theme song. Everything else is there and should be working!

For more info, check the forums: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=3937

Expected final release should be end of month or November at the latest, depending how testing goes (however being a visual novel/dating sim, most of the mistakes could be typos or other minor stuff!).

And now I wanted to talk about a topic I find interesting to me:

Romance in future games

After Heirs & Graces release on Steam, there was an interesting discussion in the community forums. To be honest, I expected a much worse reaction, considering the game topic (yaoi/gay only dating sim). I just deleted a couple of obvious stupid threads but not much.

Anyway, here’s what I’m going to do in future games, regarding the romances.

Finding an audience

The most important thing for an indie dev, is finding the audience, the niche. Either you try to make a game in a popular genre (platformer?) but in that case you have to compete against many top indies (and the chances of succeeding are small) or you can try to cater to a smaller but loyal audience. That’s what I’ve always tried to do.

The question is: there’s a gay/yaoi audience on Steam? probably, but it’s very small. It’s not just Steam though: I sell the games directly, but also on mobile. The result though, is that  Heirs & Graces did much worse than, for example, C14 Dating, on all platforms.

So if I had to make games for an audience, I would stop making BxB games completely. BUT! There’s a big but 🙂 What is my goal? I think everyone should ask themselves what is their goal in life. I did it when I went indie. Originally, I wanted to make simulations and RPGs. Recently, I still want to make RPGs but also make experiments and story-based games. And regarding the stories, my goal is:

“I want as much people as possible to read my stories”

Yes, as simple as it is, that is my goal. Not because I’m arrogant and I think my stories (and those of my writers) are good or better than anyone else (they’re good though!). But simply because I want everyone to read them.

Now in the case of Heirs & Graces, I think it has one of the most beautiful stories of all my games. The father/son relationship, the fun and sad moments, etc. Not just my opinion, but basically of everyone who played the game. And here’s the problem: many people didn’t play the game because is yaoi only. And they missed a great story. This is bad, but honestly I knew it, it was inevitable, as much as some people wouldn’t play a yuri only game, etc.

What is the solution then? Well, the most obvious solution is to make games in which you can play as male/female, and have all kind of romances! On the other hand, doing such games takes a lot more time, as you can imagine. Also, usually you can’t offer 8+ romances (since you need to write them from the male/female point of view! it’s a LOT of work) and then you have complaints like with SOTW, in which people say that the game could have been better than Loren, but because of the few romances, it isn’t 🙁

Are they to blame either? No. I can understand that as male straight player, perhaps Krimm is not my kind of romance. Or as female player, I could find Jariel just too “nice” (the DLC changes things quite a lot though!). There’s no one to blame, really.

Finding a compromise

So as author I need to ask myself what is the best thing to do. As you can imagine it’s not like I can do all games with male/female main character AND 4+ romances each gender. Then we have situations like Loren 2, Roger Steel or Undead Lily where the game isn’t ready yet after 3+ years! Doh, insanely huge games takes a lot more time to make! Who would have guessed! haha

However, I think perhaps the best way is to try, whenever possible, to have a male/female main character and at least 2 romances for each gender. Sure, there won’t be as many romances as if the game was otome or yaoi or yuri only, but at least this way there are more  chances that everyone can read my stories. My main goal.

If someone thinks that having maybe only 2 romanceable characters/combos is too few for a full price game, well they can always wait and buy the game discounted later. But at least they will read the story, as long as there’s at least one romance they’re interested in 🙂

Of course, I have a lot of games I started years ago (some even in 2011… ahem) so for those, they could still be yuri only, no straight male romance, etc. Nothing can be done about this, except finish them as they were originally planned.

But for future games, especially bigger ones, that’s what I’ll try to do 🙂

Queen Of Thieves now officially out!

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Above you can see the game official trailer!

I am very proud to announce that my new RPG/Dating sim “Queen Of Thieves” is now officially out for desktop platforms! You can check the game official page and download a demo here: http://winterwolves.com/queenofthieves.htm

Like always, a Steam and mobile release is planned, but will come in the next months (hopefully before Christmas, though not sure).

Better late than never

This is the first game of my series called “Better late than never” ™. Haha jokes apart, it’s one of the many games I announced back in 2011, that for a reason or another were delayed until now.

To be honest, to make a good RPG, you need at least one year of work just for the design, skill balancing, enemies, encounters, and other mechanics. So it’s only late by 4 years 😉

This game was intended from the beginning to have a more “casual/accessible view” on the RPG world. Sure, there’s the Nightmare difficulty mode which it’s still, well, a Nightmare to play. But in general the approach is more similar to Loren than SOTW. Following the majority of complaints, I have designed this game so that:

  • there’s no time limit. You can grind as much as you want. The final boss battles are designed for a party level 30, but you can grind up to level 35 if you want!
  • there are more rock/paper/scissor mechanics. There’s guard skill like in the past, but now there’s also a skill that can break the guard. You can cast fire spells to a target, but if you hit it with melee, you’ll get burned effect. And so on.
  • the party is fully healed after each fight, not like SOTW
  • there’s again a skilltree system, with two different skill trees (offensive/defensive) for each sister
  • there’s a lot of characters to romance: since you can play as all the three sisters, and each can potentially romance two characters each, there’s a total amount of 6 straight + 6 homosexual romances, for a total of 12!

There are also a couple of new features that I’ve introduced in this game:

  • the inventory has 5 slots, 4 armor and 1 for a weapon. Less than Loren and SOTW.
  • in addition to this, the armor pieces are only aesthetic: instead you can socket gems in them to add stats. So you can customize your character’s appearance AND the bonus stats you get from each piece of armor.
  • there are some new starting conditions: like Ambush that lets you move before enemies, or (based on the story choices) in some battles one of your party members might start injured, etc.
  • there’s no front/back row. This to make the battles last less than before.
  • except for a couple of fights at the end, there’s no game over. You’ll always manage to escape the battles if you lose.

So as you can see, definitely a more casual/user friendly approach. I dare to say that between the ones I’ve made, this game is the most appropriate for people new to RPGs.

However as I said don’t be fooled: if you play even only in Hard mode, the fights won’t be a walk in the park! If you’re not familiar with RPGs you should play in Easy mode. Or if you don’t like RPG at all, maybe play in “visual novel mode”.

That’s all for now. I hope the game does well, since it’s well written, has nice art/music, interesting gameplay and I enjoyed doing it. I really like doing RPGs, even if they’re really time/money draining, and generate stress anyway (lots of testing is needed).

But in the end, I think it’s worth it 🙂

Patreon and future blog updates

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This is going to be a weird blog post. I want to get straight to the point: I opened a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/winterwolves where I’m going to post some juicy stuff/previews, including unreleased art, or talk about the games not yet officially announced. I am also going to post in the blog every two weeks from now on.

But…why?

I know you might think I opened a Patron to get some money. That’s for sure, but it’s not just about the money, it’s also about time.

The most precious thing we have is time, and making a blog post like this one, or image previews like my famous “romance sneak peek” or “romance graph” and so on, takes time. You need to open the various sprite images, scale down, cut the portrait, put them in the grid, add a text, nice effects etc etc. One hour is gone and you don’t even notice it!

Then, there’s also other things. Maintenance for example: unfortunately running your own site needs attention. I need to update the blog/forum software, do backups, approve posts, etc. Another issue are images that gets deleted after a while. A while ago I posted all Loren 2 “camp talk” images in forums, but the original hosting places deleted the images, so now they’re not available anymore (I’ve reposted them all already in the Patreon).

What I’m trying to say is that by using Patreon to post such things, I’ll eliminate a lot of problems and issues that keep me busy, and at the end of the month they add up! Imagine even only an hour a day – that’s 30h a month “wasted” doing other things, while I could have used them to do game development instead (that’s what most people are interested in).

Lastly: lack of ideas. I don’t know how many other developers have a blog/diary where they regularly post every week. Recently I was struggling to find ideas, find something to talk about. I asked writers to make the characters introductions for future games, to help fill some blog posts. But many times I had to stop and think for hours about what to write!

In summary, I think we can all agree that it’s better if I could save all those hours I usually spend on admin/maintenance and thinking about what to write in the blog, and instead work on the games, right? 🙂

If you can’t afford to pledge, don’t worry!

Of course I’m aware that not everyone has the money or is simply not willing to support me on Patreon: so it’s perfectly normal to just keep buying my games (which is the most important thing). The Patreon page is for those “super fans” who want/can support me even more, and in exchange get to know firsthand about the new stuff or see exclusive content.

But the games themselves will remain the same as before, I’ll put the same efforts in making them, no matter if you’re a patron or not 🙂

Better late than never!

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ambersmagicshop

In the image mockup above, you see Amber and Vin in Vin’s witch house 🙂

As you probably have guessed by the title, I’m talking about yet another game I started… “a while ago”, that it’s finally getting done! Amber’s Magic Shop was originally announced in this blog post, from 2011. Of those four games, Roommates was done in 2014, Queen Of Thieves is in advanced beta testing right now, and “The Hospital” it’s being worked on but as a side project (without hurry).

I must say that while of course having to wait for 5 years is a long time, I am happy that the game is being done now. Now I have much more experience, and similarly to what happened to Queen Of Thieves, which was supposed to be just a simple dating sim with no combat/RPG part, I’ll be able to add more (optional) gameplay stuff even to Amber’s game.

Go craft yourself!

In particular, one of the aspect I want to put the focus on it’s crafting. If you’ve been playing RPG games recently (but even some simulations or other genres) the “crafting” has become one of the key features for many games.

So, together with Anima (the coder) I’m building up a crafting system, not just for Amber’s game, but even for future titles. I’m building THE ULTIMATE CRAFTING SYSTEM MOUAHAHHA!!! 😀

I’ve commissioned over 150 items to PSCD artist, since he is very good and fast (and he’s only drawing objects this time! hehe). He already finished some items:

ore

This system will be expandable, which means that you (obviously) won’t see the same ingredients or recipes for all games. For fantasy games probably a lot will be in common (since the games also share the same fantasy world) but I could reuse it even for a sci-fi game (allowing people to craft weapons/armors in Planet Stronghold 2 for example) or modern settings (for example a zombie game where you can craft weapons with scrap materials).

As you can see the possibilities are endless. Obviously for Amber this is also a key feature since you play as a young alchemist, so gathering/buying ingredients/materials and crafting will be what you do most of the time 🙂

So as you can see, sometimes it’s better if a game doesn’t come out right away. Because there’s no way that the “myself of 2011” (or even 2012!) could have added such complex system to the gameplay!