Category Archives: indie life

Happy Holidays!

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This year the latest blog post of the year will be the Friday 25th, so I’m wishing you happy holidays now 🙂

About the future : 3 points to survive

I’m going to review this year in the blog post next week, but here I want to talk about the necessary changes I’ll need to do in future.

You may have heard the word “Indieapocalypse” around the net. What is it? Well, some developers (I’m among them) have this theory that it’s going to be a tough future for indies, since the quality bar has raised, the market has been flooded, prices have collapsed, and exposure is really hard to get.

All those things are happening at same time.

While I’m not a big/famous indie, I’ve noticed this phenomenon myself too. Personally, I never had much exposure (I wasn’t on Steam until last year!) but what really changed is the prices drop and the market flood. I honestly think it’s an uncommon situation that will settle itself in the next 4-5 years (lots of devs entered the market thinking to make big bucks, but when they’ll see how hard is to just break even, they’ll probably quit and do something else). But the real challenge will be to survive those next 4-5 years!

Yes, because while for now things for me are “OK”, if the current trend continues like this, I would be likely forced to shut down everything next year around this period or early 2017. And absolutely don’t want ever to write a blog post called “I’m quitting the game business”! 🙁

Note added later: it sounds scary but to continue like this, means I shouldn’t release any game even in 2016. I’m fairly confident that it won’t happen! 🙂 However, I need to do some adjustment to my workflow, described below.

Point 1 – release games more often

If you have noticed, my newer games feature a LOT more content than before, and I kept more or less the same prices as before. But what I really need to do, is go back to releasing at least two games in a year. That is of course impossible, if one of those two games is a big RPG like SOTW, or a complex card game like PSCD 🙂

Which means, I really need to go back making more visual novel/dating sims. I have already a lot of them started to be honest (as you might know) but I need to get personally involved in some. Never Forget Me is one of those: I did all the storyboard myself, which was quite helpful for the writer since she is almost finished in about 10 months (and she had some troubles during Summer, otherwise would have been faster!).

This method works well because writers don’t need to imagine each scene or think about the story or anything else: I do that, and then they expand the storyboard I write. Luckily I don’t lack imagination, so I can do the storyboard rather quickly: I did Never Forget Me in a month. Of course writers still have a lot of freedom about writing the scenes. But is definitely easier for them this way.

So in the coming years I will need to make sure to have at least 2 games out each year, like I always did in the past.

From what I’m writing it seems that making a good visual novel or dating sim is easy: not at all!! But it’s just that… compared to a RPG/card game or similar, it’s honestly MUCH easier, for obvious reasons (think that just the balancing part of SOTW took me 4-5 months… lol).

Another possibility of course is to still do the usual games, but on a smaller scope. Long Live The Queen by my dev friend Hanako is the perfect example of something smaller, but still definitely fun to play.

Point 2 – I’m done with bundles

One of the big mistakes I did in the past 2 years was to do too many bundles. I thought it was harmless and a way to get more fans/attention, but the long term impact of doing too many is really disastrous and apparent now. No surprise there, it’s all my fault. So it’s safe to say that you’ll never see again another “Winterwolves Bundle” because was a total loss of money for me, thinking long-term.

The only bundle I might still consider is Humble, but anyway it won’t happen as often as before for sure.

Point 3 – moderate discounts

I still want to offer discounts to people, since I know not everyone can afford to buy my games at full price. However even in this case I need to be a bit more careful, and never go higher than 50% discount. Why? also because luckily there are still several people buying the games when they’re just out at full price, and I want to “reward” them. It’s not cool to see the game you bought at full price discounted by 50% shortly after. To be fair, I always waited at least 1 year before doing a big discount (for example SOTW was out in November 2014, and the first 50% discount was indeed last month, not sooner).

So it’s not like I’m doing what too many other indies do, starting to discount the game already after 6 months. But in future I’ll stick to smaller discounts and go up to 50% only when a title is really old.

Conclusions

The points above might make me look like a greedy person. The reality is that it’s what I think I need to do to survive 🙂 I see a dangerous trend recently in which everyone is bundling and discounting everything, without thinking about the future. And while I don’t know about the others, I plan to stick around for several more years to come.

Heirs & Graces – Borges

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borges

First of all, a new character introduction for Heirs & Graces by the writer:

Borges comes from a fairly well off family. Though not a noble by any means, he can’t say that he’s suffered any overwhelming hardships over the years. His parents, though not particularly strict, always had a certain path in mind for him. They helped him get a good education to become a doctor and still occasionally meddle in his love life in an attempt to get him to settle down. Borges has followed their plans for him as far as becoming a doctor, but he has a few minor issues with that second part. He’s put off talking to them about it however, figuring he has more important things to focus on at the moment– like treating Lord Sandor.

Borges isn’t an incompetent doctor by any means, but there are certainly more experienced ones that Lord Sandor could afford to employ. However, after going through several of them, Lord Sandor has stuck with Borges. Borges visits Lord Sandor directly and has become a familiar face to all of Lord Sandor’s employees. He is very polite and is well liked by most of the servants including Marcel, but he occasionally clashes with Vincent and Lord Sandor. He finds the two to be unreasonable at times and has made a point of telling them so. He is genuinely invested in Lord Sandor’s well being, but there is only so much he can do when Lord Sandor insists on keeping information from him.

Borges is kind and puts the well being of others before his own. He’s been through enough situations to know that he can’t save everyone, but he still takes it personally whenever he’s unable to help someone in need. He gets frustrated often, but tries to keep it to himself as he works through it. He’s usually able to talk himself into remaining positive, but Lord Sandor’s case has been wearing him down bit by bit. It’d be one thing if it was just the disease that he had to worry about, but Lord Sandor is definitely one of the most infuriating patients he’s ever had to work for.

Status update: panic! Or maybe not…

It’s June and I’ve made some accounting work, and noticed that my direct sales halved vs last year in the same period… :O However, I quickly understood why: so far this year I just released SOTW DLC and… nothing else 🙂

Nowadays is vital to keep releasing quality titles in this very competitive indie world, and I only released a DLC, so not even a full new game (even if SOTW DLC is quite long and complex).

I am in a weird situation in which I have a LOT of titles in progress, but so far none really close to completion (I consider a game close when I could begin the pre-order/beta testing phase).

The closest to being finished is without doubt C14 Dating, with Nicole yuri a second close. Then, depending how things go, Queen Of Thieves or some other dating sim (like Summer In Trigue, Heirs & Graces, etc).

Anyway, currently I only can wait for the artists/writers/coders and keep working on QoT since is the only game I can be actively participating in, for now 🙂

Queen Of Thieves update

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First of all, SOTW DLC ending images were added to the game! So if you waited you can play the DLC beta using the download link from the forums:

http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=3610

And now for today’s blog post…

Time to talk a bit about Queen Of Thieves! In particular the gameplay I’m going to try with it. As you know if you read my SOTW postmortem, I don’t want to do another “super complex detailed hardcore” RPG like that one again, because wasn’t worth it (in term of popularity but also burning out).

So this game will be really a more casual RPG. Before you complain, it doesn’t actually mean it will be “worse”, just different. I think might be even more fun to play if I manage to do right what I have in mind…!

The Skills

Let’s start from the skills: I will bring back the “beloved” skilltree system from Loren. Each character will have a unique offensive and defensive skilltree, each one with 6 skills with 3 variants each, for a total of 6 x 3 x 2 = 36 different skills each character.

Each character is an archetype: Kira the Warrior, Joanne the Mage, and Thalia the Thief.

The biggest difference vs Loren or SOTW is the “combo” skills. I have yet to implement it in the battle, so take everything I say with a grain of salt since as always things might change from now until the final release. But in practice while fighting you’ll have the chance to unlock some combo skill once you fill a combo bar. There will be two offensive and two defensive combo, and will obviously be very powerful skills.

Another difference is the combat itself. In Loren/SOTW was common to have a LOT of condition/status effect. Here, having TWO will be uncommon 🙂 This because I’ll limit the number of special moves you can do each battle and there will be no healing except the potions (which will be limited).

It is a completely different approach as you can see. Will require some testing but the goal is to make the battles last less and the skill be something very “special” and not just another type of attack.

The inventory

Then there’s the inventory screen. Each character will have 5 slots: head, chest, legs, feet and weapon. Each slot will have 5 item, except the weapon that will have 7. Yes you read it right: the number of items is LIMITED 🙂 I’m sure this won’t make everyone happy, but is part of the design. Each item will give a specific bonus. Some more attack, other more damage, and so on. There won’t be a “better” or “worse” item, maybe with the exception of the starting gear and the ending one, just different ones that will be better suited for specific battles.

The fact that each character has unique gear has also some positive effects, like each item will be unique and more detailed, as you can see from Kira’s weapons in the image below:

kiraweapons

Check the work-in-progress screenshots below: when you open the inventory the first image will be like this:

thaliaQOT01

You can see the whole character body, so everything she’s wearing. If you click a Legs or Feet slot, the image will zoom in to show better what she’s wearing:thaliaQOT02

Similarly if you choose Head/Chest slot, it will zoom in on top:thaliaQOT03

Thalia is really cute, isn’t she? 😉 Since the screenshot above were taken, I’ve also been trying to implement an even more intuitive way to use the inventory, in practice next to each slot there will be all the items that the current character can use. Since items are limited, we can fit them all in one row like in the screenshot below:

newinventory

Elementary!

I also plan to have elemental resistances, but done differently. By default all characters will be weak against elemental damage, and the armor (in case of players) will give resistance bonus, but in small steps. Everything about this game uses smaller numbers which I think will be easier to balance.

For example let’s say you’ll start with -5 in all resistances. A fire based attack would inflict base damage (5) + 5 = 10 total dmg
Now you get armor resistant pieces, but you have only 4 slots (head, chest, legs, feet). Each will give +1 fire resistance. So the same attack above would deal: base damage (5) +1 = 6 total dmg.

In this game, 4 point of damage difference will be meaningful 🙂

Anyway, I’m still thinking about it, I might also just ignore elemental damage but only apply elemental statuses. So Frozen would reduce speed, Burning would damage HP over time, and so on. I might even just go for this simpler solution.

SOTW DLC “Bad Blood” coming soon

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palisade

To paraphrase what Guard Captain Daronas says in the screenshot above: “I have good news. As we speak, the last segments of SOTW DLC code are just being placed” 😀

While of course there can still be bugs, I have tested the game already several times also with the help of the writer, and so far appears to be stable enough 🙂

I am still thinking if to open preorders and beta soon, like next weekend, or try to wait and see if some more art could be ready. The biggest thing missing are the new ending CGs, and is not a small thing. Of course you could still play/read it and save just before the CG… or replay them through the gallery. I got the sketches yesterday and artist said they’d be ready by mid-April, so maybe I could wait a bit.

Anyway, last week I coded the last battle of the whole game, against this funny guy:

giantgnoll

…and I must say that it was really a weird feeling doing it. Like placing the last stone on a house, or something like that. Sniff sniff, SOTW you’ll be sorely missed! 😉

A little burned out…

…or maybe not! Haha I already spoke in the past enough about SOTW and why in the end despite being my biggest/better game, it wasn’t worth it from commercial point of view. However another thing I didn’t consider, are the long term effects like the “burning out” that I’m suffering right now.

Being burned out after a project is absolutely normal. All the indies I spoke with, just take a break from work for 2-3 weeks or more after a game is out (except support, marketing, etc of course). But in my case ? Hmm I really have a hard time coding stuff even now, after months. Like I find a problem and my brain freeze, refuses to cooperate and I get stressed and grumpy.

And I am even taking it easy compared to my usual working schedule! so I think it was still a consequence of all the stress and work accumulated last year. The fatigue just doesn’t go away instantly, but takes time. Luckily apart SOTW DLC, the other games in progress don’t need much coding on my part 🙂

Some random news

I updated the work in progress thread in my forums with progress bars! 🙂 check here: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=3128
Of course is not like it is 100% accurate but maybe can give you an idea.

I got some preliminary scenes for the CYOA-style game I’m making, and it’s looking good.

I got the full Moirgane romance path for Queen Of Thieves! plus half of the otome one. If artist can keep it up (he finished redoing all the 3 sisters already), might be the next game I’ll be working on, depending how the new card battle framework is going.

Speaking of which, good progress has been made on that front too. There’s a basic framework working with already several mechanics implemented. I admit I borrowed a lot from Hearthstone, but also tried to add some new ideas, also because for story reason it will be different from Blizzard game, with cards that should last more and not be so easily destroyed.

Also, more writing for Nicole, Loren sequels, etc etc. I like when I get updates for all my games in a week 🙂 Stay tuned for a new character introduction for Heirs & Graces next Friday!

Playing games is important & time optimization

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Playing games is important!

Yes you heard me well: is important to play games! Especially if you are a game developer like me 🙂

I have less and less free time now (in particular in recent times with everything happening all at once, Steam, iOS ports, etc) and as you can imagine, when I have some I prefer to spend it with my wife, pets and doing outdoor activities.

However, I still try to find the time to play for a few hours a week the new games. Because that’s the equivalent of “research & development” of other industries.

Some practical examples and games that inspired me while I designed and coded my latest RPG ToA: Seasons Of the Wolf:

– Guild Wars 2: from this game I grabbed the ideas of “solve all quest in an area” and “discover all locations” and so on, to get bonus EXP. From this game I also wanted to implement the idea of stat-derived enemies (no matter your level, all enemies would be a challenge) but after a week of testing I realized that it wasn’t a good idea 😀
– Diablo 3: it’s nothing new, the random items I mean, but still while playing this game I thought that would have been cool to use random items with tiers even in my games, alongside manually created ones.
– Everquest 2 and another MMORPG I can’t remember now, the idea of offering items as reward for quests. Again it was nothing new, but just playing those games reminded me of this feature.

chooseitem

And by playing Hearthstone I had the idea to change PSCD from a tower defense game to a collectible card game. So if you’re a game designer, try to find the time to play a few games. Your own games will benefit from it!

Time optimization

Speaking of SOTW, this week I made more progress on the DLC. I was a bit stuck with all the other titles for various reasons, so I thought that instead of waiting for the SOTW missing art, I could code all the remaining things using placeholder art, so I don’t waste time.

specialeventIn the image above, a special event in the “Rebuild Ninim” minigame

Another thing that many indies should learn is to optimize your time. You don’t necessarily need to do things in order. So like in my example above, you can finish coding something even if the art is not ready using placeholders. Or if you’re tired/burned you can do some trivial tasks. I often do that when I’m too tired to code. Trivial tasks could be:

– webpage design: sooner or later you’ll have to do it, right? so why not create the page already? you can always tweak/adjust the texts or images a few days before the release, but at least most of the work is already done!
– product setup: doesn’t matter if you sell only through Steam, or direct, or mobile. There are a lot of steps to do to setup a new game. Screenshots, box-shots, icons, description texts, etc etc (every platform is different but you need to do them for all). This is another thing I do in advance.
– testing: I now do open-betas to test, since 10-50 people testing are better than 1 or a small team of friends. However, I always do some preliminary testing to make sure that at least the most obvious bugs are fixed. Sometimes when I am too tired to code I just start the game and play a bit to see if there’s something that I missed.
– create banner-ads: assuming you do some form of advertising, another thing you can do is designing the banners for the game ads (unless you outsource it to an artist).
– write blog posts like this one or other marketing stuff: writing is easier than coding, so I always do the blog posts one week in advance. I think that never miss a blog helped overall, on each blog post I get several views and many comments. Other things you can do is forum polls to see what people think of your next crazy idea, or anything else really, an interview, a tumblr post, or other social marketing stuff.

So as you can see there are many things you can do, even when you’re tired from coding 😉