Category Archives: indie life

Forums gone and Autoleveling enemies

7 Replies

First a quick news: after thinking about it for several weeks, I finally decided to shut down my forums. As you can see, the blog now takes the place of the forums. So the correct URL for the blog is: http://www.winterwolves.net.
I’ve decided to replace the forums with my blog because:

  • the forums were almost empty anyway
  • the amount of spamming, despite I had tried every possible measure was insane (people spamming manually the forums – nothing you can do about that)
  • I’ve decided that I have better things to do with my time, like making new games 😀
  • people can comment and have direct contact with me with the blog anyway


update: I reinstalled my forums. Too many sites where linking to specific threads, like the walkthrough ones. So I decided to keep them, but will make them invite only. For direct discussion, better use the blog 🙂

Ok, now about the interesting stuff: I’ve been thinking to use autoleveling enemies in my upcoming RPG game Planet Stronghold. But what are exactly autoleveling enemies?
You know in RPGs, you usually start at level 1. You encounter the first enemies, and they’re usually challenging. But once you raise your level, once you’re level 10, if you get back to those level 1 enemies, they should be a piece of cake.

In my game, I’m planning to do like this: the enemies will mantain their original challenge rating even if your character/party levels up. An enemy that was tough at level 1, would still be a good challenge at level 10 (not as tough, but not totally harmless either).
Why I am thinking to adopt this system? Easy, because this way I can provide a constant challenge to the player. There’s nothing worse than having a random encounter and say “oh no, again those stupid easy enemies that will be killed with 1 hit.”
I am still thinking if to allow the player to choose between auto-leveling on/off in options for example, and I plan to use a global difficulty level for the game, so those who don’t like challenging fights don’t need to worry.

How was 2009, how I hope will be 2010

Leave a reply

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…

How to do perfect (or almost) gameplay balancing

Leave a reply

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

The best moment for an indie

6 Replies

This is actually the best moment for me, as indie. What I’m talking about? About the period of time between a finished project, and the start of the new one.

Indeed I’ve officially finished writing all the texts needed for Heileen 2: The Hands Of Fate, even if of course I haven’t finished the game itself yet. But from now on, it is just a matter of waiting for the voices / missing art, and playtesting (but I’ve already done that a lot while writing the story). So while there’s still some work to do, nothing that really require my creativity.

Instead, right now I’m thinking about what to do next. I have several other projects going on, but some are long-term ones, or are carried on by other people (I’ve other writers working on more games). For sure the first thing will be to implement a small mini-farming game for the Flower Shop dating sim, and then… don’t know. I am evaluating several ideas right now, including some light-horror stories, an investigative one, a sci-fi team combat based game with story, and more.

It’s going to be a fun end of the month 🙂

Deadlines and commitment

2 Replies

It’s scary thinking that today is already the 10th october and I announced Heileen 2 for november 🙂 But at same time is thrilling and having a deadline keeps me focused and committed to finishing the game. Not that I wouldn’t have finished it otherwise – but I have the insane tendency to always add more stuff in games. I start small, then day by day I have new ideas and I want to add them all in the game. It might sounds good but it isn’t: if you do something too big too fast, there are several side effect that might happen:

  • bugs – adding too much content/features in short time WILL inevitabily lead to bugs. And you know, nobody likes them 🙂
  • lower quality – this is obvious: adding too much stuff (in my case text or gameplay experiences) in short time means I won’t have time to test them properly and see if they impact the gameplay in a good or bad manner
  • possible delays – last but not least, it can lead to a situation where you won’t meet the deadline. Like happened with Bionic Heart for example, where I delayed the exit of 2 weeks because of voiceovers

Right now I’m still writing the final part but I’m almost done. It’s really nice to see all the various endings, all the possible ways the story of Heileen can end. BUt will it really end with this game? who knows… 😉