Category Archives: indie life

Heileen on Xbox and iPhone

I’m currently working on getting the first game Heileen to work on xBox Indie Games and iPhone. I just started the port to XNA and is coming out nicely even if I’m just at the beginning 🙂 I haven’t started looking ath the iphone yet because there’s an additional problem on that platform: the screen size, which is really small. So I’ll probably have to find a VERY SMALL font, and resize everything to fit the smaller screen. Sigh if at least was 4:3 ratio, but instead has a weird resolution of 480×320… 🙁

Anyway my goal is to keep working fulltime with Renpy and the Pc/Mac/Linux platform and in spare time go on with those other ports, since I’m dubious simple VNs can do well in those market dominated by young male players 😉

How to waste an afternoon!

…sigh 😀 Today I wasted the whole afternoon to restyle the blog layout and the forums one. The blog was very quick but the forum took lot of time! I changed from the previous one because I realized was really too much different in style vs my own winterwolves and tycoongames websites. Beside that it’s true that white/bright text over black/dark backgrounds are harder to read and make pain to the eyes ! 🙂

Luckily this morning managed to go forward on Bionic Heart development. There is really only a few endings missing right now. I have almost all text written for those new endings, I’ll need to send them to sake-bento who is proofreading/editing them and then will start selecting the voiceovers for the game. I’m not yet sure if the game will ship with all the voices, I doubt it since takes some time for the actors/actresses to dub all that text (the game has almost 50k words by now).

Gamasutra articles about my games

So it looks like is a two out of two. Both my games Summer Session and Heileen were featured on gamasutra by Emily Short (originally part of her ‘Homer in Silicon’ column at sister site GameSetWatch):

Summer Session – Refining Simulation into Narrative

Heileen & The Art Of Game Storytelling

Obviously I’m quite proud of that, even if the article about Heileen doesn’t really speak too much well of the game (but in a constructive way in any case). I really love telling stories, but of course my biggest barrier is the language. Anyway, I’d be also happy just to outline the main plot and have other native english writer do the rest, like if I was a director 🙂

I’ll be surely doing an Heileen 2, even if don’t really know when, probably next year. I’m about to release Spirited Heart at last, after 2 months of crazy delay for translation problems (a lesson to learn…). So I’m a bit late on my planned 4 releases this year: however luckily Ewan Grantham (the writer/programmer behind College Romance) is doing right now the first chapter of a space trilogy that I’ll publish this year, which sounds very interesting and will keep the number of games released higher (even if they aren’t written directly by me).

Right now my plan is:

mid-end of April release Spirited Heart
May/June first episode of Space Trilogy
July/August release of Bionic Heart
September/October release of a mysterious card game… 😉

but of course I know already that this schedule will be messed up completely in the upcoming months, so let’s say that I’d be happy to release at least 3 more games this year 🙂

Spirited Heart update + new game

So in theory by mid-march my new game should have been finished. And it is. The problem is that I wrote a big part of the story (the love/relationship scenes, so the most important) into my own native language, italian. I then handled them to a “translator” so she could deliver me the final texts in time for mid-march.

The result was disastrous. A translation so poor that I would have done much much better myself alone. So, I had no choice but ask another translator (a REAL one this time) to proofread again the texts, resulting in a delay of 1-2 weeks. At this point I think the game will be ready by first days of April.

Some of you might have noticed recently I switched to more casual/simple games. But fear not! I am working also on another game, similar to Magic Stones, called “5 Elements: The RPG Card Game”:

for now I’m still in the planning stage, but I can reveal some features:

– 5 elements that influence the whole game (units and spells): fire, air, nature, death, life. Your initial choice will reflect into the kind of units you can train during the game.
– you’ll create your commander choosing from three types: Warlord, Wizard and Marksman. Each type will unlock some extra powerful leveling options for your units
– several “race packs”. Initially the game will be shipped with only the human race, but I’ll release extra packs containing new cards with new races (amazons, dwarves, etc)
– leveling avatars. The cards all start based on one of the three archetypes: melee, magic and missile. Each base archetype can evolve after level 4 into a more powerful unit, picking an element. Then after the units reach level 15, can evolve into an even more powerful unit.
– I have planned 48 unique units for each race. A unit, different from magic stones, will have a full set of skill and attack options, like a real RPG character.

Ok I think that’s enough to wet your appetite 😀

New screens and facebook app

I’ve uploaded on my facebook profile new pictures of the upcoming game, but I have reuploaded here in my blog too:

related to facebook, I made an app to play my webgame inside facebook. If you liked the game and want to see more of those in future, please take a minute to try it at this URL:

http://apps.facebook.com/heileen/

it will ask your permission to post a small feed on your facebook profile saying that you’re playing the free flash game Heileen. This way I hope to get more people interested in visual novels to be able to release more soon! 😀