Category Archives: indie life

Nicole’s progresses

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In the video above, Nicole’s first encounter with Kurt Madry

Nicole made some big progresses. Oh no wait, I mean… I made some big progresses on Nicole (the otome/yuri dating sim I’m working on).

First of all the game has a brand new GUI:

I’m quite happy about it. You can see the main menu, load/save and options screen, and a in-game screenshot. By the way about the last screenshot, I’m sure Natalie from Winter In Faibrook would agree with Nicole, about what she says 😉

Yesterday I just finished coding Kurt’s route, and writer said should send me Ted shortly. There’s only Jeff left to write. However I don’t want to say anything I could regret later… so for now the estimate release date is still mid-July, for several reasons:

  • we decided to add extra images, so that there will be a “normal” ending, and a special ending. In the normal ending will use sprites over transparent backgrounds, while special endings will be full CGs drawings.
  • even if writer manages to finish writing the last otome route with Jeff at end of June, we still have to write the events in which the mystery is solved. Yes because they’re going to be different from the normal romance route, at least the final part.
  • also, we need to add some mystery events that will trigger in the game during certain points. Won’t be long scenes but needs to be thought carefully.
  • while the main gameplay is done, we wanted to add some nice touches like cellular messages, online shopping (since the main character is a bit of a geek) and so on. Small things but they take time to draw the art and code.
  • the chibi/main menu/GUI artist wants to do an OP to the game (a sort of trailer with music for it to show at the beginning, for those not familiar with japanese dating sims). That will be very cool but also require some time as you imagine.
  • last but not least I need to code all the scenes, add them inside the game and do a preliminary testing. And even if this is one of the main games I’m working on at the moment, I have to work a bit on the others as well… 😉

So, still a lots of stuff to do, and probably will delay the game release, but I think in the end will be worth the wait!

News on the new RPGs in development

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A “sneak peek” video of Planet Stronghold: Warzone (the sequel to Planet Stronghold)

Let’s talk about RPGs!

It was a while since I showed something about Planet Stronghold: Warzone. Being a bigger game than previous ones there has been some troubles developing it, but luckily now the development seems to be going at good pace. Making RPGs is very hard, sometimes I forget it 😀

Anyways, in the video above even if there’s still a lot of placeholder art, you can see some good stuff. The main menu, the music screen with some official tracks playing (the final OST will be available in the bonus content version like in my most recent games). But also the codex and the colony sim “minigame”.

I also made a test replacing the placeholder art with some of the finished desert tileset:colonysim

looks still a bit messy because it was just a quick test, but already better, doesn’t it ? 😉

We also had the “crazy idea” to have an exploration part similar to the one from the first game, using the isometric tileset system. It would show only during the missions (in the game there will be several missions to play, some unique to each side), so not the full game. This way the environmental situation the party is in will be better represented, offering some more strategy to decide how to pass specific points guarded by enemies, where to use the skills, and so on.

For now is just an idea and I don’t want to promise anything since is not like there aren’t other things to do, but if possible we’ll try to add it 🙂

The game will also have a much better “World Building”, meaning that the codex will talk about each race, faction, the main characters (in party and outside) and so on. It will also explain better how the Psionics work, the origins of Planet Stronghold and all that stuff. In summary, will rule 8)

The “Mystery RPG”

I have also some more good news about the “Mystery RPG” that I’m working on from time to time when there’s a moment of pause from the main games. I’ve hired again Taleweaver to write the story, and commissioned some of the art already. I don’t want to say any estimate release dates but if everything goes as planned (which probably won’t, by Murphy’s Law) this Fall the game might be at a good stage, maybe even in beta 😉

So as you can see, even if my next games to be released will likely be two dating sims (Nicole & Roommates) the fans of roleplay games can sleep well knowing that there will be some good stuff for them coming later this year!

Where On Earth Is Undead Lily?

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Room_Aquaria
Do you recognize her? it’s Aquaria, one of the superheroes of the Undead Lily game

In the blog title, I paraphrased the famous game “Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego” 🙂 The reply to the question Where On Earth Is Undead Lily could be “she went on hiatus for a year or two but now she’s about to come back!”.

Yes, because finally all the backgrounds for the game are finished (that artist was busy doing Loren GUI and other things, so wasn’t his fault), and even if I asked the original character artist to redo the final romance scenes, work on the game can start already.

I’m still in the planning stage for now, but I really think that I’m going to make it a bit different from the original idea. A tag-team battle, arcade style wouldn’t really be simple to do in Ren’Py, and since those games are all about the animations, it’s definitely not a good idea. So I’m just going to make it more RPG-esque! 😉

In the game there are 12 characters, 6 “evil” and 6 “good”. That would be already enough to do a classic party-based RPG. However, since there won’t be a real exploration but more like a sort of big “map” where you move your units each turn (who remembers the old game “Archon”?), I think I’m going to make it similar to a collectible card game, where each character can learn to summon creatures to help them in battle, starting from low level ones to big powerful ones.

So the idea for now is to allow a party of max 2 superheroes, each one able to summon several “elemental minions”. Or maybe only 1 superhero each battle, as always will have to see while playtesting what is better.

Anyway that’s the initial idea for now 🙂

I’ve been also experimenting more with the “topsecret” RPG set in Aravorn. I had a brilliant idea (modestly MOUHAHA). Take a look at the screenshots below:

thiefattack warriorattack

As you can see, the position on the battlefield will have a big impact on the gameplay, and the Thief will have a special bonus vs the Warriors being able to always attack without penalty any enemy, no matter their position. This small change should lead to interesting decision during the battles, and finally give some use of the thieves in the front line.

I had other ideas like some random special zones on the battlefield that would give bonus/malus (like a rock area that increases defense, a mud area that slows character down). But have yet to see if they’re easy to implement. Anyway as you can guess I’m having some fun experimenting! 😀

But that is just a side-project. On Planet Stronghold 2 side, Anima is going forward coding the new RPG framework that will be awesome, with lots of new features, while Aleema is doing her great job as always writing the story. I can’t wait to reach the demo stage with this game to show it to everyone 😉

The last missing piece

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What last missing piece you ask? Well, yesterday for real-life reasons I had to commute for long distances, so I spent a lot of time thinking. An activity that probably I should do more often 🙂

So, I thought that making games is like making a puzzle. You need all the pieces to finish it, and like puzzles, there are pieces that fit immediately, and others that take long time before you’ve found the right spot.

Gameplay design

A bit is for gameplay design reasons. I had to experiment a lot with the RPGs, but even for simpler games (at least apparently) like dating/life sim, quite often I have to tweak the screen layout and system for days or even weeks.

For example you might remember the old look of the scheduler for Nicole from last week post. Now look at the new version below:

newscheduler

Much better now! I eliminated the top title and made the photos look like Polaroid so four could fit on each row, and the text doesn’t overlap the image anymore. Small changes like that might seem obvious but still take time to design and code.

The real missing parts/pieces

But the most important thing, is to have all the needed pieces/parts/assets for a game!

I am doing several projects at once (probably too many) but there’s a reason for that: in every one there’s something missing. Nicole is missing some chibis and some extra artwork. Roommates some artwork, the main soundtrack, some writing. Planet Stronghold 2 is still missing a good amount of writing, some art (the talk poses) and good part of the RPG framework, plus GUI work.

In some cases is people’s fault, in other simply the job takes time to make, or is my fault because I waited too much to hire the right person for the job or planned the project badly.

But no matter the cause, every indie is in this situation, unless you make games that you code yourself using pixel-art / poser to do the graphics. In that case you might be able to do everything on your own, like I was doing in the beginning. No delays ever except for my own, but the results were much worse, since obviously I’m not a good artist nor a great writer!

So I wrote this post to say that even if a game is 90% done, sometimes that last piece of art, music track, writing scene, gameplay tweak, might cause big delays on a game release. That’s why when people ask me when a game will be out I always use the conditional “it SHOULD be out…” 😉

This year goal

I realized that we’re already in May, so at this point, as I said to a recent interview I did a week ago, my main goal is to release one RPG this year! Since I have the feeling that with the first Loren game everything went smoothly, all pieces fit together very easily, but I didn’t notice it until I started working on new RPGs and difficulties started to arise 🙂

Meanwhile, here’s a short video of Nicole so you can get an idea of the art and writing. The GUI artwork is still temporary placeholder of course!