Category Archives: general

posts about general topics, even not related to computer games

How was 2009, how I hope will be 2010

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2009 is almost finished. How it was for me? Quite good I’d say. Considering the global crisis, is already enough that I managed to “survive” as indie another year. And in europe even, where you have also to face with insane taxation and the always poor usd value versus euro!
This year I released four games: College Romance (which I didn’t write but only produce), Spirited Heart, Bionic Heart and Heileen 2: The Hands Of Fate. Four games of that quality in a year is a very good achievement for any indie working mainly alone (with the help of external people that produce assets).
Other important things that happened, both good and bad:

GOOD
– I’ve made my first fully voiced game (Bionic Heart). Was very cool, even if a bit painful to put all the voices inside the game and manage all the voice actors. Heileen 2 should have been fully voiced too…
– I’ve learned to manage lots of people and projects at once. Even right now, I have 5 projects started!
– I’ve worked with wonderful people like Ayu Sakata, Deji, Rebecca Gunter, PyTom, Steven Mane, Daniel Conlin, Lucien Dodge and more (sorry if I don’t list you all!). This is very good since I’m building a list of RELIABLE people that I will surely use again on future projects.

BAD
– I’ve learned that writing the game in italian first and having it translated in english is a really bad idea
– I’ve also learned that putting sexy girls in a game doesn’t mean it will automatically sell 😀 you need also to make a good game!
– I’ve finally accepted the fact that none of my games will ever appear on a big portal
– I’ve been disappointed by some people that disappeared or delayed some of my projects for too long

Overall though, was a good year. In 2010 I hope to finish some of the 5 projects I’ve started! The first one probably (crosses fingers) will be the Flower Shop, since in practice once Ayu finishes to put the new character in the game and sends the code back to me, I will finish the farming sim and then… we will only need the voices!

Here’s hoping that this time there won’t be any problems with the voice actors 🙂

Then, I want to finish Planet Stronghold and Card Sweethearts, a interesting VN-Poker game that is waiting for too long. 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…

Merry Christmas with Spirited Heart Deluxe

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Today I’m officially releasing Spirited Heart Deluxe. It is not and add-on or expansion, it simply replaces the older version. It is a FREE upgrade to all existing customers and is my personal way to say “thank you” to everyone that supported me buying the game. I put lots of efforts in my games this year, and since I’m fulltime indie, my direct game sales are all my revenues.

Existing customers can just redownload the game from the link they got in their purchase email to get the new version.

So, what’s so special in this update? A lot! First of all, take a look at the new screenshots:

Image Image Image Image

And now for a complete list of the new features:

– New interactive job system: you can now choose to play each day of work in a fun dice-based game. The old instant result system is still available.
– Titles added: if you reach certain values in two skills you’re awarded by an important Title
– Mission from Goddess: after a while you play, you’ll receive a visit from your race Goddess that will give you a task to complete before you reach age of 30. If you succeed, you’ll unlock an extra unique special ending for each race!
– you can now toggle the romance encounter on/off in the relationship screen
– you can now play until you reach the age of 30
– game texts completely edited/proofreaded

I have also uploaded a new demo, use the links below to try it:

http://www.winterwolves.com/download.php?game=SpiritedHeartTrial.exe (Pc)
http://www.winterwolves.com/download.php?game=SpiritedHeartTrial.zip (Mac)
http://www.winterwolves.com/download.php?game=SpiritedHeartTrial.tar.bz2 (Linux)

and once again, I wish you a Merry Christmas 🙂

VN Series and more

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Today I thought that would be cool to have some sort of VN series. Like a TV series, several episodes covering several months. However, I’m aware that it wouldn’t be an easy task at all. I seriously doubt anyone could release a VN of decent size (at least 2-3h of gameplay) in less than 30-45 days.

Also much depends on the artist, since VNs require lot of art and I believe that artist are even more important than writers, in terms of “releasing stuff”. Of course a great writing can make the difference, but if there’s no art available, the game doesn’t get released 🙂

A way to do it could be to start producing many “episodes” in advance, so you would have “half-season” ready when you start releasing them to the public. I really think this could work, and I’m disappointed that I lack the means (financial, team, time) of trying this. However, not many people know that the game Farenheit, also known as Indigo Prophecy (I quote that often since I love it) originally was conceived as a series of episodes. Yes, exactly: they thought to use this method but even big companies like Quantic Dream had to give up to this idea (even if from what I remember, was because of publisher’s pressure). They had to cut off several chapters from the game, and make 1 big game instead of a series of games. Those were different times though, now that ESD and platforms like Xbox Live are more widespread I really think it could work well (selling downloadable packs with 1-2 chapters each for low amount).

Am I going to try this? Well, never say never, but at the moment I’m in a fun situation where I have 5 projects started, and I am stuck because I’m waiting for external people to finish their jobs on ALL of those 5 (yes, mostly are artists, in case you wondered!). Also, doing a VN or adventure game in 3d is different: once you have the models of the main characters for example, you can reuse them even if you make 10 games. Same for evironments and objects. I’m not saying it’s easier to do in 3d, but that once you build up a good collection of 3d models and you have a working engine, is surely faster to produce games in 3d than hand-drawn 2d (that’s not a big discovery).

Back to my own games, the final proofreading of all Spirited Heart texts is almost done, so I could release the beta-test version of the Deluxe version just before Christmas 🙂

What are “light-RPG” games?

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I remember when I was young, the game genres where very well defined: there were action games, adventure games, role playing games and so on.

As the game industry grew up, some interesting genre-mix started to pop up. For example now we all refer to Diablo as a RPG, but would be more accurate to call it Action-RPG. Actually, right now, we can find many “RPG elements” in lots of games. Very few “pure action” games remains.

One of my upcoming games, Planet Stronghold, is a “light-RPG” game. I consider it a visual novel with RPG elements, but stronger than those you can usually find in dating sims. What I exactly mean? I’m talking about quests, relationships, interactiveness? No, because many of those features were already present in my other “normal VNs”. In Heileen 1-2 there are quests, in Bionic Heart relationship and some interactive scenes, in Summer Session there are the stats/skills to improve and so on.

So to call the game “light-RPG” I knew I had to go forward and push renpy to its limits (well no, not really, is quite easy to achieve good results with it!). Indeed in Planet Stronghold there will be combat, an inventory, quests, character relationships and so on. There will be several kind of weapons based on the damage type: energy, piercing, explosive, etc. There will be 4 classes: psionic, soldier, guardian and scout, each one with special advantages.

BUT, the game won’t be FILLED by stats. You’ll clearly know from beginning what kind of gameplay you can expect from a certain class. Scouts will need lot of time to recharge but will be able to kill opponents with a single shot, especially human ones. Guardians will be tough and have lots of hitpoints, psionics duty instead will be to heal / protect others. That’s why I use the word “light”, because while is clearly a RPG game, it’s not hard to understand.

Clearly is not easy to create a game like that. Is actually harder than creating an uber-complex game like some I did in the past (Magic Stones or Supernova 2 for example). Because with this game, even a casual player should be able to pick up the game and after learning a few basics, being able to enjoy the game without getting lost not knowing what to do.

How to do perfect (or almost) gameplay balancing

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If you check at the bottom of this post you’ll see a sort of spreadsheet page (and indeed, it is!) and you’ll wonder what the … is that.

It’s my system to do perfect gameplay balancing! In games like RPGs, where you have lots of skills/stats, is really hard to balance properly games. There will always be some classes/races with better attributes than others. This is inevitable, but there are some tricks you can use to at least try to make a balanced game.

In what consists my method? simple, I take a spreadsheet program (Openoffice in my case) and I lay down the stats needed in row/columns like in the example below. Then, I use the SUM function to sum all values in rows/columns. The result should be that all totals are equals: it means that if I have a class with more Willpower, there will be another with more Wisdom, and so on. But in the end if you sum all values they should be all equals, grouped by your RPG system (in my case races/elements).

Hope I managed to express myself well. If you’re making a complex game, just try it, might save you some time! Of course there are still lots of things to balance inside the game itself but this should be a good start.
balancing