Category Archives: life simulation

Amber’s Magic Shop: Introducing Ruby

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intro_ruby

Time for one of my favorite characters (ahem and not just because she looks incredibly hot, I swear) of Amber: Ruby the vampire! Here’s the introduction:

Despite her age in human years, Ruby is regarded as extremely young for a vampire and still clings to her humanity because of that.

Despite these things, she and her brother are well respected in the small vampire community that live in Icesilia. Her word carries a lot of weight and she’s not afraid to use her influence to get what she wants. Outside of vampiric politics, Ruby finds herself fascinated by Amber and strikes up a friendship with her after a few chance encounters.

Over the years, she finds it harder to resist the urge to feed of mortals and so asks Amber to find a way to return her to human form. Such a request is not without its perils but she knows without a cure she will soon lose what humanity she has left.

Ruby is an extremely outgoing person who enjoys flirting with members of any sex. As a human, she was a dancer and she still shows signs of that in the way she moves and acts.

Despite her pretence of aloofness, she actually cares a great deal about those whom she calls friends and will do anything for them. Her fear of becoming as monstrous as the legends say drives her to avoid drinking blood and often only on animals when the need becomes overwhelming.

Animals barely sate the need, however, and she often turns to Amber to help her resist the true hunger for the warm blood of mortal men and women.

As you can see from her intro, she looks like an interesting character. Her endings are great, even the “dark ones” are somewhat cool 🙂

Amber’s Magic Shop: Introducing Daniel

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intro_daniel

Time for another introduction: Daniel the apprentice mage!

Born to an Elvish mother and a human father, Daniel is Haros’ son and Amber’s first friend. The two of them work together as apprentices under Haros until their adult years. Their paths take them in different directions, however, and eventually the two drift apart.

A couple of years after Amber becomes an alchemist, Daniel rekindles their friendship. He is now a well-respected mage in the local Mage’s Guild and rising quickly in the ranks there. The Half-Elf eventually recruits Amber to help him create the Elixir of Life although he refuses to explain why he wants it. He claims it is to impress his superiors but Amber suspects he is lying.

Daniel’s main weakness is his pride. He believes that he is better than anyone. This is true for the most part although it takes him a long time to admit that Amber is a better alchemist than him. His main comfort is that at least he can use magic and she cannot.

Although he rarely talks about it, he often feels alienated from those around him. He is the only Half-Elf in Icesilia and he often feels like he cannot fully relate to either side of his mixed bloodlines. It is perhaps why he gets on so well with Amber who has a similar problem.

Amber’s Magic Shop: Introducing Amber!

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intro_amber

Let’s start introducing the cast of this game, starting obviously with Amber herself! In the image above you see the young and adult version. There are more clothes besides the two shown above 🙂

Abandoned as a baby in the woods to the south of Icesilia, Amber was found and raised by a witch called Vin. She spent all her life in the woods, never venturing beyond its borders at the insistence of her adoptive mother.

The Dark Elf grew up wanting to be a witch like her mother but Vin would not allow her to practice magic, instead concentrating on teaching her how to brew potions and other aspects of alchemy.

When Amber turned sixteen, her mother announced it was time for her to see the world and she had arranged an apprenticeship with the legendary mage Haros of Icesilia to help her become a true master alchemist.

Amber has a natural talent for Alchemy. She has a knack for finding ingredients and a phenomenal memory that allows her to remember anything she has read. As a person, she tends not to show her emotions all that much and her natural expression tends to give the impression she is in a bad mood all the time.

In truth, she is actually quite a positive person although she is terrible at showing it.

Better late than never!

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ambersmagicshop

In the image mockup above, you see Amber and Vin in Vin’s witch house 🙂

As you probably have guessed by the title, I’m talking about yet another game I started… “a while ago”, that it’s finally getting done! Amber’s Magic Shop was originally announced in this blog post, from 2011. Of those four games, Roommates was done in 2014, Queen Of Thieves is in advanced beta testing right now, and “The Hospital” it’s being worked on but as a side project (without hurry).

I must say that while of course having to wait for 5 years is a long time, I am happy that the game is being done now. Now I have much more experience, and similarly to what happened to Queen Of Thieves, which was supposed to be just a simple dating sim with no combat/RPG part, I’ll be able to add more (optional) gameplay stuff even to Amber’s game.

Go craft yourself!

In particular, one of the aspect I want to put the focus on it’s crafting. If you’ve been playing RPG games recently (but even some simulations or other genres) the “crafting” has become one of the key features for many games.

So, together with Anima (the coder) I’m building up a crafting system, not just for Amber’s game, but even for future titles. I’m building THE ULTIMATE CRAFTING SYSTEM MOUAHAHHA!!! 😀

I’ve commissioned over 150 items to PSCD artist, since he is very good and fast (and he’s only drawing objects this time! hehe). He already finished some items:

ore

This system will be expandable, which means that you (obviously) won’t see the same ingredients or recipes for all games. For fantasy games probably a lot will be in common (since the games also share the same fantasy world) but I could reuse it even for a sci-fi game (allowing people to craft weapons/armors in Planet Stronghold 2 for example) or modern settings (for example a zombie game where you can craft weapons with scrap materials).

As you can see the possibilities are endless. Obviously for Amber this is also a key feature since you play as a young alchemist, so gathering/buying ingredients/materials and crafting will be what you do most of the time 🙂

So as you can see, sometimes it’s better if a game doesn’t come out right away. Because there’s no way that the “myself of 2011” (or even 2012!) could have added such complex system to the gameplay!

The wind of change

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Need to give credit to my wife for the nice photo above!

And now after writing this title, I have the good old Scorpions’ song stuck in my mind!

“Listening to the wind of change” or better listening to the critiques, to suggestions by other more experienced indie, and listening to my heart 😉

Between this and last year I have learned a lot, and I’ve decided that (after the current “batch” of games is done) it’s time to change:

  • no more “insanely huge epic games”. I know, I know. Everyone would like very big, long games (even if honestly I haven’t finished yet some AAA titles because… they were too long!). Anyway, I’ve realized it’s not possible anymore, with the exception of a few titles like could be Loren 2 and Roger Steel (big RPGs) to make games too big. I’m talking from the story point of view. I want to have a good story, but also add more gameplay. When I talk with more successful indies doing the same kind of games, I’m often surprised to see that their wordcount is always not even half of my most recent titles!
  • story based on the gameplay, and not vice versa. When I will make more “hybrid games”, apart of course the usual VN/Dating sims/RPGs, I will first decide the gameplay and then craft the story around it, or at least design them at same time. This is even more important for “experimental games” like PSCD was. In that case it was a mess (because of first coder quitting) but in general for my own games it’s not wise to have a story written and then have to code the gameplay around it. The result can’t be good. So, first design the gameplay, and then have a story to complement it.
  • much clear separation of genres. One of the strong points of my games (based on what OTHER people say, so it’s not my opinion) has always been the mix with visual novel and other gameplay genres. Well, there will still be this. But if the two genres don’t work well together (like visual novel and card games) doesn’t make sense to mix them, better have two separate games. Or if I still want to have story and gameplay, the story cannot be 200k word long, 10+ romances, etc. It’s just not possible to do that in the current climate, to have a huge story AND good gameplay. I should price the games over $30, and that’s honestly not going to work anymore right now, so it’s not really my choice! So instead of that, a card game for $9.99 and a story-based game for $19.99 for example (just a simple example of what I mean).
  • less grinding, more fun. For the dating/raising sim, one of the major complaints of my past games was the grinding. I’m definitely going to address that. For the record, I don’t consider grinding using a scheduler like Roommates. More like the various activities in Nicole to reach the required stats. Love Bites should be a good example of a dating sim with stat raising but not grinding. For the RPGs instead, I’m going to leave it. Since many RPG players like to grind! 😉
  • gameplay-only games. I had already announced this, and it’s also related to future card games. I’ll make more (not just card games, even other genres) games like this to be sold at cheaper price, since I think is good to have a bit of variety over the dating sims/RPGs/VNs.
  • shorter but full of branching story-games. As you know I want to make a CYOA/old gamebook style game in future, illustrated with pictures. Well, that one won’t be 100k words, but even if it’s only 50k words will have a lot of branching. After all Bionic Heart has one of the highest review rating on Steam of all my games, and it’s just a little more than 50k words! Of course, I won’t write the games myself, only the storyboards.

OK I think I’ve explained enough! For many games that will be out (even next year) the things above won’t apply since I started them time ago, so they will still have maybe some grinding or be really “too big” (but of course since the text has been already written, it’s not like I’ll cut it down!).

But in future, doing the things above, I should be able to release games more regularly, and some of them cheaper than usual (which in the current climate seems very important) and even if the word count might be lower, the overall fun (and critic/players reception) will probably be higher. At least that’s what I hope, we’ll see!

For those wondering about the progress on games, I made a sort of estimate release schedule in my forums, which I copy paste here:

END OF MARCH
– launch C14 Dating on my site “soft release”. Probably on Steam towards end of April or early May
– finish all the QoT romance coding (not much left)

APRIL
– Forsaken and artist should finish the last scenes/CG for QoT
– I will take a look on Heirs & Graces and probably code the gameplay and start the beta maybe (though could be delayed to May)
– decide what to do with Undead Lily gameplay, possibly a RPG. Make a detailed storyboard this time :)
– probably do the PSCD extra romances free add-on (though could slip into May)

MAY
– Heirs & Graces beta
– Queen Of Thieves beta

JUNE
– hopefully release of both Heirs & Graces and Queen Of Thieves, but this last one could be delayed to July

JULY-AUGUST
– it’s likely that will be too hot to work as usual, plus I might want to take a break considering the insane amount of releases this year! I might do a few prototypes for new games though

SEPTEMBER
– Love Bites beta (though it’s just too early to say it now)

That’s all for now! Happy Easter by the way 🙂