Category Archives: life simulation

PSCD – meet Mira

After a break of a few weeks, back to introducing the PSCD characters. And what character! 😉

Name: Mira Patras
Nation of Origin: Greece
Service Branch: Civilian Consultant

Description:
As one of the youngest Nobel Prize winners ever, it was a foregone conclusion that Mira would make her way to Planet Stronghold. The numerous anomolies and mysteries have drawn scientists like a moth to flame, and Mira is certainly no exception.

There are many demands on Mira’s time, however. A true polymath, she has provided valuable insight into numerous fields, whether it is geology, or robotics. It is known some of her research was instrumental in Lucius’ construction, for example. This also causes a bit of exasperation for the military since as a civilian, Mira isn’t as bound by military doctrine as a soldier would be, and they worry she may inadvertantly leak some critical research.

What initially brought Mira to the planet were reports of excessive gigantism among some of the animal species, and upon her arrival, witnessed this firsthand as a giant grub attempted to consume her transport shuttle. Instead of frightening her off, Mira was inspired to stay. After all, if she could discover the source of this enlargement, it might then be replicated among other things such as food bearing crops.

Mira is also a bit of a media darling as various outlets vie for her attention. Some of these include invitations to anchor her own show, or various movie roles. While she makes time for inteviews, Mira usually declines these entreaties as they would. There were many broken hearts when she refused the lead role in the remake of ‘Attack of the Giant Amazon.’

Needless to say, she is one of my favorites. Not because of the piercing on the lips, or the blue eyes. Or her sexy alternate outfit. No, really, not because of that… 😀

Jokes apart, I really like all the character design of this game! And I’m also pleased by the progresses made by the writer so far.

SOTW DLC and other games in progress

SOTW Steam testing is going well, can you believe that we found some more small bugs? haha the work on a RPG is never done! They were all minor things of course, but needed to be fixed 🙂

I can also confirm that we’re going to work on a DLC for SOTW. Only 20 days have passed since the official release, but I’m confident enough that it’s worth doing it. The DLC will happen after the end of Act 4, but of course before the various “alternate endings” (since they talk about things happening far in future).

I’ll manage to keep the existing characters so keep your saves, but I think will also offer the possibility to “start anew” just for the DLC, automatically leveling up the characters to level 25-26 and picking your romance, so people don’t necessarily need to replay the whole thing!

The DLC will focus more on the story/lore and the interaction between the player and the various romances. Is a RPG, so of course there will still be battles, but not often as the main game!! Of course everything is still in early planning stages, since the DLC for sure won’t be out before next Summer/Fall (as always, depending on how the other various projects go).

Queen Of Thieves is going well too: the artist is making the new characters with his “new improved style” and what can I say? just take a look for yourself:

Therjalla the elf healer is going to be one of the female yuri romances of the game

So, Myrth from Loren has a formidable competitor it seems! 😉 Jokes apart, also pleased by the new writer’s speed. I have no release estimates of course but if both writer and artist keep going at this pace, the game will be out sooner than I thought.

See you next Friday…the Black Friday!! 😮

November update!

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A mockup of the character inventory screen for Queen Of Thieves

The image above is a mockup I made for the GUI artist, for the game Queen Of Thieves. Does anyone remember it? 😀

When I first announced it, was very long time ago. Yes it was February 2011!! Lots of things happened since then, and to be honest I am almost glad that I had to put the game on hiatus for a long time, since now I have the knowledge and the resources to make the game as I wanted and much better.

Most of what I said in that post is still valid. The main change in the game is that your mother is not dead but being held captive. “Oh noes, a damsel in distress!” Well yes, but to save her there are 3 other younger damsels 😉 There will be the father/husband but he will only be present to give advice and run the shop.

Artist resumed working on it, currently he’s adding 3 new female characters since I’m going to have also yuri options (not as DLC, but all in one). The romances are 6 for each gender, in practice each girl will have two romance options. Obviously, this will make someone unhappy (why Joanne can’t date Fredrick! Why Thalia can’t date Tiberius! etc) but is normal, so I’m not too worried about that 😉

It’s another “experimental game”, since for the first time you control all three the characters. It will be strange maybe, sort of “The Sims”, in which you kind of play as God and decide their fate (including the romances). I am still thinking how it will work in details regarding the romances, currently it works like this, at least the first scenes (click to enlarge the storyboard):

Tiberius for example (the guard captain): can be romanced by Kira and Joanne. But only by ONE of them. In the game, you’ll control all the girls, but depending on your choices, only one of those two will get the romance. This means that in theory, there can be only one combination in which each female character gets 1 romance each. In all other cases, there will be two.

However, considering I have to rewrite the game from scratch (the current writing was 3/4 done but the quality doesn’t match my recent much higher standards, so I have decided to redo it), I could change that, maybe just have one romance each girl, since I don’t want this to become “yet another monstrous game that won’t be out before YEARS” 😀

As for the gameplay, I am thinking to reuse the one from the SOTW maps/dungeons, maybe with some changes. There will also be two other “mini-games”, I still have to decide how to code them. I’m in the design stage in practice, so while I’ve resumed working on this, definitely doesn’t mean will be ready anytime soon!

Planet Stronghold: Colonial Defense update

It’s fun to see the original artwork and the revamped version of the same alien race!

Above you see the Matrick from Planet Stronghold 1 (the RPG) and the same alien in a new style, the style of PSCD. They’re very different but both cool 🙂

The writer has written a good amount of the initial missions, and also planned the whole storyboard. Of course, even in this game are still in early stages, since there isn’t yet a single working mission 😀 but hopefully I’ll have something to show in the next weeks!

Finally, about Seasons Of The Wolf, the soft release is going well, with only some minor bug fixes/rare bugs and improvements done in the last couple of updates. So really I’m quite happy how things are going so far! 🙂 Definitely next Friday I’ll officially announce it.

Spirited Heart is out on Steam

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Another weekend, another Steam release. This time is my fantasy raising/dating sim Spirited Heart. You can get it here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/293920/

The whole Heileen series was also Greenlit, however I have to keep working on SOTW and also I found new writer(s) for Nicole yuri so I’ll need to take some time to manage her. I can still guarantee that the first Heileen game will be out next month, but probably Heileen 2 and 3 will be postponed to July (they take a bit more time to test!).

The curse of Nicole yuri

As you probably know, I’m having a lot of troubles completing this version of Nicole. I decided to replace the second writer because of communication problems (she had connectivity issues) but I’m quite confident on the new one. Is still early days, but she seems very motivated, so this time I have hope 🙂

It’s crazy thinking that the game was out October last year, and to compensate the yuri fans, I am now talking with other writers who applied for the position but weren’t picked. I thought that since they are quite good (my main criteria this time beside quality was the speed) I thought: why not start some yuri/yaoi exclusive games ? After all, I promised it to my fans and I always try to keep promises 😉

Yuri and yaoi power!

In the next week, between all the crazy mess that is my daily job (Steam release, SOTW testing, etc… madness! lol), I’ll try to find the time to talk with them and get them started. Two of them already replied and are interested. No official announcements yet (I am now waiting until the whole script of a game is almost finished before announcing anything, like I did for C14 dating) but I’m working on it.

Now excuse me, must get back to work! 🙂

2014: New Year Plan

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My cat Mirtillo sleeping in an unusual way 😀

2014! Happy New Year!

I’m going to change completely my way of working. From now on, I’ll only make games in my native language, Italian.

Heh, good joke uh? 😀

The real plan

OK jokes apart the real plan is:

1) Release Loren on Steam. This is going to happen soon ! Took a bit of time to the coder to implement the achievements on all the OSes, but now everything works. The DLC Castle Of N’Mar will also be released, a few days later.
2) Finish Roommates. The game is long and the writer Michael tested it a lot, but I really think the best solution is start the preorders and the public beta testing, this way thanks to the awesome users in my forums the testing will go much faster. In the next weeks will fix all the issues found and code the scheduler, which will be similar to Flower Shop one.
3) Finish Nicole Yuri version – though this mainly depends on the writer to be honest 🙂 my job in this case will be to motivate her!
4) Release another otome game that for now I’m still keeping “under the hood”, but that I’ll announce in the first months of this year.
5) And of course, finish Seasons Of The Wolf and Planet Stronghold 2. Both games are quite big, but this time I shouldn’t be distracted by other things and will make sure to motivate and help the writer and coder appropriately 😉
6) At this point we will probably be in late 2014. Depending on the situation, either start working on Spirited Heart 2, Undead Lily, Loren 2 or something else. In this case is impossible to make any kind of prediction since there are too many factors and people involved.

Better integration with the story

Looking back at past year, one thing I didn’t do properly was to support the writers more. This doesn’t mean telling them exactly what to write line by line, but (for those who needed/wanted it of course) be more involved in the process as they write.

Some writers are happy to work on their own at their own pace with minimum need of my support/feedback: but in any case I need to check what they do to make sure that the final product reflects my vision and most importantly players’ expectations, and that works with gameplay.

And also I need to integrate the story more with the gameplay, though probably this can be done only by planning better the whole thing from start and writing a good amount of draft/storyboards myself, so will need more time for this.

Always Remember Me on Dailyroyale.com

If you missed my Christmas sale, you can still get a good deal for my game Always Remember Me at http://www.dailyroyale.com/! Expires in the next 2 days (approximately, there’s a counter on the site).

I have many other interesting things going on in the next weeks, stay tuned 😉

Experimenting is fun

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If you follow me from the early days you already know that I like to experiment. I like to mix game genres, or at least try new things/features in existing genres.

That’s what for example pushed me to add the Social Boss Fights in Bionic Heart 2. By the way the official video is now on youtube, see it below:

And is why I’m trying to add a simplified (it won’t be Sim City of course!) colony simulation metagame in Planet Stronghold 2:

As always they’re early work in progress screenshots, but you can get the idea of what we’re trying to do. I think will be interesting to integrate the colony sim with the RPG gameplay. While we’re still working on the details, there will be some influence of the RPG part to the colony sim and vice versa. Of course playing in Easy mode will reduce the overall difficulty, while playing in Hard mode might be interesting since you’ll have to balance both the RPG and colony building simulation aspects.

Many quests will be directly linked to the colony expansion (like acquiring new blueprints to build new building), so it will also work plot-wise. You can see now why Planet Stronghold 2 is taking so long, it’s definitely an ambitious game! 😉

At same time, I’m trying a new GUI/gameplay system on the dating sim Nicole:

instead of the game map like Always Remember Me, I’m going to try using a simplified interface, showing “pictures” that are places you can visit. Then each place will offer a variety of actions that change based on the plot, time of day, day of week, like Always Remember Me.

I’m going to try to experiment also on the plot: I thought today that rather than having a “alone ending” if you fail to romance anyone, the game will end in a different way… since there’s an abductor in the campus, the final scene will see our poor Nicole being kidnapped (of course without revealing who it is, so doesn’t spoil the fun).

More scary than the usual otome games? well for sure, but I think will be very interesting…mouhahaha 😉

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva