Category Archives: general

posts about general topics, even not related to computer games

BecauseWeMay sale and game prices

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First of all I wanted to inform you that I’m participating to the BecauseWeMay initiative. What is it? Quoting from the website:

We believe that developers should have the freedom to price their games how they like, without interference from the online stores that sell the games. Why? Because it allows us to promote our games more freely, as we are doing here! We rely on the ability to promote our games for our livelihood and control over pricing is an important tool for this purpose.

For the last week of May (May 24 through June 1) our games will be deeply discounted to celebrate online stores that give us control over pricing: The App Store, Google Play, Steam, Desura, IndieVania, and a few others.

I offered my game Spirited Heart + Girl’s Love at half price, sold directly and in the Google Play store.

About game pricing

Game pricing is more complex than what people imagine. I often got comments about how my game prices are too high, and I should price them $9.99, because that’s what an indie game should cost 🙂

You can talk about what indie is, what is really worth (3d cutscenes or GAMEPLAY?) and if my games sucks or not. But one thing you simply cannot argue are the statistics. Us developer aren’t setting the games prices randomly! At least, I don’t. If you’re an indie dev you should only listen to your statistics and not what people tell you. Doing occasional sales like this one is fine of course 🙂

Also, this is my personal experience. I am sure different game types have different audience and prices. I cannot imagine a tower defense or a platform game to cost more than $9.99 for example!

Now, let’s see some graphs just to explain better. Below is Spirited Heart Girl’s Love revenues graph from the launch day to the BecauseWeMay sale:

Shgl

…not an impressive bump eh? The fact is that during the release day, all sales came from my own site only and a few affiliates. Instead I got lots of traffic from because we may initiative, but despite having many sales, the half-price really hurts revenues. Still, was a somewhat good result compared to the regular sales. Maybe I should lower game prices then? Let’s check Spirited Heart graph instead:
Sh
…for this one I didn’t even had to go back to the release day to find more profitable days. In two previous occasions, when I sent the newsletter to announce updates about Loren or promote some other game, I got more revenues than for the BecauseWeMay sale. And I got much more traffic from the becausewemay initiative than during those newsletters!

And portals?

But what about portals ? Sadly as you know my experience is very limited, but luckily there are some very indie-friendly portals like Desura. I don’t have Spirited Heart there (couldn’t make it in time since uses DLC and I don’t know yet how to implement it) but I recently put Planet Stronghold, and many people complained about price. So, after a while I did a sale last weekend for $9.99 instead of $24.99, and I promoted it on twitter, and showed up on the “on sale” section of Desura (which I think is the most visited! lol). Result:
Desuraps
Yes, the day of the sale the revenue was slightly higher than release day, and in other two occasions. But what about in the long run ? I am not really sure, considering the increase was so small that could have just been a random thing! Also, I should compare prices without a promotion, because is normal to have higher exposure during a promotional sale…

I will continue to experiment with prices of course, but so far everything seems to confirm that lower prices = lower revenues. I’d be very happy if I could make same amount of money (or maybe more) and at same time make more customers happy, but so far it really doesn’t seem the case.

Professional developer’s look at Ren’Py

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Editor

In the image above, some Ren’Py code (people familiar with python might recognize some keywords/syntax) from my current project Loren Amazon Princess in my preferred editor, SciTe.

Ren’Py was created by Tom Rothamel, as a tool to help everyone to create visual novel games, with very little or no coding knowledge required. I first learned and started using it around Summer 2008, and since that year it has evolved quite a lot. So it’s been 3 years and half since I started using it, and right now I can prototype many games rather quickly, even if works better for certain kind of games: heavily story based, with no real-time animations and of course 2d, since Ren’Py is a 2d game tool.

Currently Ren’Py is available for PC, Mac, Linux and is still experimental on Android, though it should be available sometimes in the future. There’s no iOS version planned at the moment of writing, even if the author seems to be thinking about it.

The language

Ren’Py, as the name suggest is based on Pygame and Python, which I consider the most advanced language available today. Simple, concise, but at same time powerful and easy to use.

It was love at first sight for me: I was used to type the Divine Comedy in C/C++ to load a .csv or do string operations, and when I realized how quick was to develop with python I immediately started to learn it, and it was very simple process (thanks also to the online documentation).

Ren’Py is NOT a visual tool. You don’t use the mouse to place UI. You use an IDE, currently available are SciTe or Jedit. This might discourage many people who first approach it, especially if they’re not coders but are used to play with Flash, Gamemaker, Stencyl or other visual creating tools. However, you soon realize that for certain kind of games there’s nothing better than Ren’Py and you don’t actually need a visual editor at all.

As I said the language was designed with visual novels in mind: though you can use it also for any story-based game like dating sim, RPG games, or adventures with some extra coding.

Recently a new Screen Language and ATL (Advanced Transform Language) were introduced, making the creation of interactive screens and special effects (zoom, rotation, movement, etc) even easier.

The Good

Very simple cross-platform capability. Since python is an interpreted language, this means that you can build the game for the three platforms (PC, Mac, Linux) with ONE CLICK. This is simply amazing! And you don’t have to worry for different behaviors: if the game works in one platform, it will behave the same in another. This was a big plus for me since I was used to have mysterious bugs on Mac when coding in C and Xcode, that weren’t present on PC.

With Ren’Py, I went as far as copying new .rpyc (Ren’Py compiled source scripts) directly into the zip (Mac version) or the tar.gz (Linux versions) from my Windows computer, without rebuilding the games and it worked, I didn’t encounter any problem. So for example you can develop for Pc, Mac and Linux without the need to buy a Mac or have a machine with Linux installed.

Powerful language and syntax. The language is really simple and intuitive. Remember that it’s a tool specialized for Visual Novels, but you can effectively write most 2d games with it. Probably the only ones that I wouldn’t reccommend coding are those who rely on real-time movement, like a RTS, shooter, or similar. Note that is still possible to make that kind of games, but I would pick another tool honestly.

Still for any other 2d game it’s really a great solution. Very strong GUI system, combined with the ease of use of python makes this a great tool.

Easy to debug. In most other languages, debugging is a pain. Not just finding the bug, but finding out which line of code cause it. With Ren’Py thanks to Python you get very detailed crash reports, telling you exactly where the problem is.

Magic reloading and rollback system. Those are without any doubts the BEST features I’ve seen in ANY 2d development engine. Not even Unity has something so powerful. What is that, you might ask? First, the reload: since python is a scripted language, you can ANYTIME (and I mean literally anytime) hit shift+R and see immediately the changes you’ve made to the current screen.

The rollback system instead is something inherited by the visual novel mechanics, but that works surprisingly well even to debug. In practice, the program stores the path you have choosen, and memorizes XX amount of “steps”. This was doen so that the player could “rollback” with the mousewheel or keys, to a previous situation in the game story. But it works even for coding!

Trying to explain better: if you start the game, then visit in order: screen 99, do action 32, screen 32, click button 2, screen 12, type your name, screen 42, click button 5. Can you remember that? the game can, and provides you with a way to go back, a sort of “Undo” but you can use it when directly playing the game in debug mode!

I know that even in Unity you can modify the game world with the 3d world editor and see the changes, but here I mean something different: you can see the changes without having to EXIT the game, and restart.

A few simple examples:

case A: you’ve been testing for 6h a complex RPG. You see a visual bug. You look in the code, find that a button was aligned badly, change the code and reload. You see the change immediately, and go on testing. “Flawless Victory”.

case B: you’ve been testing for 6h a complex RPG. You click “done” and the next screen crashes. Thanks to Python built-in descriptive crash you see where the problem was, in previous screen you assigned a impossible value. You do a rollback, in practice executing an Undo of all executed code, then fix the bug in the source with the game still running, reload, and go on with the testing. “Epic Win”.

And the documentation? it’s good, at least for the basic features.

The Bad

As I said, there’s no editor apart an IDE. There is no intellisense/code completion, and you cannot browse classes or labels (some people managed to use Eclipse or other tools for python to code with it, but it’s definitely a hack). This is definitely something that could be improved, since in particular in the first weeks of use you can’t remember all the commands by memory and you’ll be looking at the documentation extensively.

Bad documentation for the most advanced features. How does Sprites work? What is im.ConditionSwitch? and so on. The documentation explains everything, but sometimes seems written like if the author assumes the reader is a good coder/clever as him, but often that’s not the case 🙂 I consider myself an average coder but surely not a beginner, and sometimes I have hard time to understand how some of this stuff works. But it’s not bad as it was in the early days when documentation was really scarce!

It’s an hobbyst project. Don’t get me wrong: the author is doing an awesome job trying to reply to all the support requests, mainly done through the specific Lemmasoft forum dedicated to Ren’Py. However it still is, at least for now, an hobbyst project. The author doesn’t make any money from it, and so obviously there’s no guarantee that you’ll get an answer to your question. I repeat, he is doing the best he can, and sometimes other people help answering the most common questions, but still you must not expect to get immediate responses to your problems.

Personally, I’d love to see Ren’Py become a professional tool, with full support of deployment for Android/iOS, and maybe future porting to HTML5 and more. I am sure many other gamedevelopers even outside of the “visual novel / dating sim circle” would pick it up because of its features.

In conclusion

Ren’Py is a tool with double face. If you want simply to use it for what was made for, it will do the job without problems and is simply the best visual novel/dating sim system around, at least for desktop computers.

If you’re a more advanced coder and want to build simulation games, strategy games, rpg games, or any 2d game that doesn’t need a lot of things moving on the screen (but even in that case, you could make it) you’ll be surprised by the ease of use and powerful features that Ren’Py has to offer, combining the power of Python with one of the best GUI / scripting systems I’ve seen in modern 2d libraries.

Yes, to use it in advanced mode it has a steep learning curve, but once you get the grasp of it, is really hard to get back to… anything else. I had to do some C coding last week, and wondered why the “rollback” wasn’t working, or why I couldn’t just hit Shift+R to see instantly the changes I’ve made!

At least this was my experience. If I was able to release 12 games in three years and half (almost one every 4 months) it’s only because I discovered this powerful tool. Thanks again to Tom Rothamel for the incredible piece of software he managed to create!

Merry Christmas and Best of 2011

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Img_1334

In the photo above, my cat Othello sleeping peacefully in a basket with a cushion 🙂

Merry Christmas to everyone! To celebrate, from today until the 25th December EST timezone, you can get a single game from the whole Winter Wolves catalog for 50% off, using the coupon “XMAS“.

And what about the title “Best of 2011”? Well in the last week I’ve seen around internet lots of “Best of…” by almost all sites. The fun thing, is that they talk always about the same games! I don’t want to argue about Minecraft or Skyrim being the best games. However, I want to remind that there are small niches, who don’t care at all about those two games, and there’s nothing wrong with it!

Personally I TRIED playing Minecraft but I quit after 5 minutes. I know many other people who did the same. Does it means that it sucks? Of course not, but while that game entertained lots of people, there is a minority (a niche) that maybe preferred to play other kind of games, maybe one of my games.

So of the games I have released this year, I want to make three “Best Of”. I talk about my games because sadly this year I was so busy with work and real-life stuff that I really didn’t had time to play accurately ANY other game (including AAA titles) so I cannot judge anything.

Best Art

1. Planet Stronghold
2. Winter In Fairbrook
3. Always Remember Me
4. Love & Order
5. Spirited Heart Girl’s Love

The first two places are very close. However, while in Winter In Fairbrook the character art by Deji is lovely as always, the backgrounds are definitely worse than Planet Stronghold ones (they also had a different budget, so it’s normal!). Always Remember Me has slightly better backgrounds than Love & Order (and same character artist) while Spirited Heart Girl’s Love had the beautiful characters drawn by Meago, but it was an add-on, so it mostly reused the old game art.

Best Writing

1. Spirited Heart Girl’s Love
2. Winter In Fairbrook
3. Always Remember Me
4. Love & Order
5. Planet Stronghold

Ok I know that everyone loves Ayu’s writing. I do too 😀 But I think that Aleema writing on SHGL was a bit overlooked because of the game theme (yuri) which is much less popular than WiF one (otome). I might be also biased because obviously I like more yuri than otome 😀 Anyway, was a close call and depends on tastes. Always Remember Me writing was nice I think, while Love & Order was good but definitely short and not well developed in the romance scenes. Planet Stronghold…<coughs> I know, that’s the weakest point of the game, but the sequel won’t be written by me, I swear! 🙂

Best Gameplay

1. Always Remember Me
2. Planet Stronghold
3. Love & Order
4. Spirited Heart Girl’s Love
5. Winter In Fairbrook

Well, there are no doubts that Planet Stronghold has the most complex gameplay, however I think that even Always Remember Me life simulation system, with the map and time of the day was not bad. A close call really, but Planet Stonghold probably was too much niche for most people. But again depends on tastes!
Love & Order wasn’t bad even if maybe a bit too much repetitive. The last two places could be considered a tie, since they were using the gameplay of the original title without much innovation.

Friday catblogging – Happy New Year

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Gilda in a basket in the bathroom of my old home. Because we have so many cats, we never had a decorated Christmas Tree, otherwise would be instantly destroyed… 🙂

First of all, Happy New Year to everyone! I have released Planet Stronghold alpha 0.8, which features lot of new content! If you’re interested in trying the demo or buying the game please visit the game website.

Then, a quick update on what you can expect in the next months:

Role Playing Games

Beside Planet Stronghold, which will be finished at end of January 2011, I plan to start 2-3 more RPGs. I love RPGs and I always wanted to make them, but in the past I was lacking proper funds and/or technical knowledge to make decent ones. Now, using Planet Stronghold RPG framework I can expand it and create new RPGs. Most of them will be in fantasy setting though, since it’s the most common/popular one (unless Planet Stronghold is so successful that convinces me to make add-on/sequels). I have already a good collaborator of mine who is starting creating the main game plot, character sketches, and so on. Another one should start hopefully in next months, and I want to do another myself as well. So the 2011 will be surely full of RPGs!

Adventure Games

I am still in love with my character of Vera Blanc, despite the first two episodes not being really topsellers. As I posted several times if I make a third episode, it will be an adventure (first person) and not a visual novel, since the adventure style integrates better with that kind of game. I have already a plot for the story, but since it requires lot of money, it’s still a risky decision, so if I make it, won’t be before next summer, or even later during Fall/Winter of 2011.

Visual Novels / Dating Sims

Of course I’ll keep making them! Flower Shop 2 release is really close, is just a matter of few months. But since is tied to external factors (artists finishing some pieces) I won’t dare to name a date for it. Instead I can already say that very likely the otome game “Remember Me” will be ready around February/March 2011, since the plot is completely written and need only to code the “simulation part” of it and do testing/balancing. Depending how my other projects go, I could make more VN/Dating Sims, but they’ll be mixed with simulation games.

Strategy / Simulation Games

In 2011 perhaps I will finally release the sequel of Spirited Heart. I have yet to start coding it though, so is probably more accurate to say that in 2011 I’ll begin coding it, which is a bit different. It won’t be ready probably before 2012, also because I have in mind some online-features (probably optional) that could improve the gameplay a lot, so I am not sure yet I’ll use Ren’Py to code this one.
There will be for sure more strategy/simulation games coming in 2011 though. A remake of my game Universal Boxing Manager, this time with the fights completlely in 3d realtime, is under production! Is made in partnership with a good 3d coder who is going to use Unity3d to power the 3d simulation. It’s probably my biggest/most ambitious game to date and the 2011 will be mainly focused on it. I hope will do well since I’d like to port more of my old games into 3d or start new ones.
As I said I might also find the time to do a sort of light-strategy/time management game based on Heileen settings. In particular, Heileen 2 settings (pirates, the caribbean). The game could be played as normal strategy game or with visual novel cut-scenes (they’ll be optional). This will be a sort of experiment since I am not sure if/when I’ll finish it. Let’s say I’ll work on it on my spare time and when it’s done, is done 🙂

Online Games

Almost every year I say “next year I’ll make one”. So, this time I won’t say it! But, I would like to try making one, even if I am not sure I’ll find the time…or better, if I’ll find the right person, since I’m probably going to outsource the coding (will be most likely done in Flash or HTML5). Or if the new interesting BRL:monkey project from Mark Sibly (creator of Blitzmax) gets released, I might use that and do everything myself.

So in conclusion, looks like the 2011 will be a year full of new releases! Happy New Year again!!

Friday catblogging – Merry Christmas!

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In the picture above, Mirtillo and Othello sleeping together peacefully. I wonder what they’re dreaming ?

I want to wish everyone reading this blog/following me Merry Christmas! 🙂

Then, a quick status update about Planet Stronghold 0.8 (since is the game I’m currently working on). In the recent weeks had some eyesight problems, so the programming has been slowed considerably. I really hoped to have it ready by Christmas since would have made a great present… but sometimes, real-life problems get in the way and so I had to post-pone the deadline to end of the year!

I’m writing the latest two quest, regarding the Apex Rahn and Arnox races, including two boss fights. I think once you play the game you’ll realize why is taking me so long to make… because the game IS long! The part I’m writing now involves all the races, and if you side with the Empire you have to eliminate them, instead if you side with the King/Shiler you will unify them and form one single alliance.

So this part is the “core” of the game, the biggest one. If you played the demo, this part is basically 5-6 times longer than it…and you can play from two different sides, so some parts are different! That is also why the final release price will be $24.95 (so you have still one week to get it at the deal price of $9.95!). And now, for some postmortem-retrospective about the year that is about to end:

2010, The Year Of The Tiger

I admit I was excited about it (since I am a Wood Tiger in chinese horoscope). Well, my goal for 2010 was to release 5 games, and I was particularly excited about (quoting from my last year post):

And I am producing the art now for a new kind of game style that I hope will be a great success, since I like a lot writing the stories and the storyboards for it. For now I can only say that involves detectives, mystery, and a beautiful blonde girl with a French accent…

I was obviously talking about Vera Blanc, which as you might know, turned out to be a real disappointment in term of sales 😀

So, in 2010 I released The Flower Shop, Card Sweethearts, Vera Blanc: Full Moon, Vera Blanc: Ghost In The Castle. Not only I didn’t release 5 games as I had planned (even if I’m almost done with Planet Stronghold), but most of them didn’t sell well at all! So in all honesty, considering also the other real-life problems I had, 2010 was probably my worst year since I was indie. For the first time in 7 years or so, I didn’t grow my business. During the summer and autumn, I thought it was something beyond my control, the global crisis, the return of middlemen and so on (since also many other indies had very low sales during that period) but if I think about it carefully, it was my mistake for producing games without doing proper “market research”.

Vera Blanc got the most positive reviews I had for a game, on famous sites like Gamezebo & Gamertell. And it has some fans that are eagerly waiting a 3rd episode. Still, it would be foolish for me to release another one using the same gameplay system… so even as indie, you can’t simply do any game you want to do (unless it’s an hobby) but you must also identify the market you want to sell to, and make sure you have the right product. Making a good/original game just isn’t enough, if that game has a very small fan-base.

Next friday, more cats pictures and my plan for the 2011 which hopefully will be a better year 🙂