Category Archives: Vera Blanc

Au revoir, Vera Blanc

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In other words, the second episode of Vera Blanc, “Ghost In The Castle”, is officially out. To find more about it, just visit the game official page at http://www.verablanc.com
This time, Vera must investigate a mysterious ghost that is haunting a old castle in the italian town of Bargi. It’s the ghost real or is a myth? is Roberto Anastasi, the man who hired you for this case, hiding something? why Eva and the Master are still following you?

You’ll find answers to all those questions in the second and for now last episode. As I said before, it’s very unlikely that a 3rd chapter of the game will be released in this format, since the production costs are much higher than those of a traditional visual novel, but maybe next year something might change. I would like to make a “real adventure game” based on Vera Blanc character since I think would be perfect for that kind of game.

Imagine something similar to those good old Lucasfilm adventures with many puzzles to solve, less texts to read, and maybe a fully voiced version.

However, first need to finish several other projects I’ve started (many RPGs and otome games) and then next year we’ll see. Meanwhile, if you like the games I’m producing, and if you like the character of Vera Blanc, please buy the game and spread the word so the chances of having a 3rd great episode will increase 🙂

So for now, au revoir Vera Blanc. Hopefully she’ll come back next year in a completely new gameplay system, and why not, maybe with a more manga-oriented style!

The revenge of point’n’click adventures

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I’ve always loved point’n’click adventures, of all kinds. First person view, or 3rd person (with the characters walking on the screen).

Unfortunately I’ve never been able to make one, because they are probably the kind of game that require most art assets. Also, I wasn’t sure that there was a market big enough to justify that kind of investment. However, recently things seems to have changed. Not just indies, but even some bigger studios are starting to produce adventure games, even if most of them are full 3d ones, real-time.

I really don’t like 3d real time. It might be good for certain settings, and surely gives more freedom so you can have very complex puzzles. But still I think 2d painted art is the best you can have in an adventure game. A good solution/compromise is 2d pre-rendered backdrops with 3d real-time sprites though.

Does it means that I’m thinking about making an adventure game? Well, for now I want to finish the current projects. Then, I want to experiment with some online games.

But next year, depending also how some things go, I might start thinking about it seriously (depends also if my favourite artist Rebecca will have enough time to do it)!

In the past I’ve experimented with lots of genres, and still I like to experiment, however the main kind of games I like are story-based games: RPGs, adventures and all the VN variants (dating sim, etc). I believe an adventure based on Vera Blanc character might be interesting, with many puzzles and horror-themed situations (zombies, vampires, and so on).

Now better I stop thinking about it and focus on finishing my current games though! 😀 A new alpha of Planet Stronghold should be ready next week for sure (just waiting for artist to finish a few background images).

Announcing Vera Blanc: Ghost In The Castle

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I’ve already uploaded two teasing videos on youtube (you see one above) and now I’m officially announcing the next episode of Vera Blanc, called Ghost In The Castle, that will be released this fall, probably in September. The game story is being proofreaded/edited, so all is need after that is some testing and reviewing the plot to be sure that there aren’t big mistakes (plot holes and such). As you can see from the video, there’s a new comic artist for this game, Ricardo Mendez from a Brazilian comic studio.

This time, Vera and Brandon are investigating a mysterious ghosts that is haunting a castle in a town in middle of italian countryside.  A local famous businessman, Roberto Anastasi, wants Vera to solve the ghost problem, because he doesn’t want the town filled by tourists. The first day seems to be rather quiet and relaxing, but as soon as the night comes, Vera will have a short encounter with the ghost! A short chase in the woods that ends up in a opening and a man hanged on a tree!

Stay tuned for more details and a more accurate release date for the game.

Vera Blanc: Full Moon is out

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Vera Blanc pc/mac/linuxI’m very happy to announce that finally this game is out. I’m quite proud of it, because I think is something new, for the art-style and also a bit for the gameplay (a mix with visual novel/mystery/minigames).

Those who want to skip the rest of this blog post can head straight to the download links on the official game page.

Now, a bit of background / making of this game. I always loved comics: indeed, as soon as I was 5-6 years old I started drawing them. As I grew up, unfortunately I moved away from them, until recently when I started being an indie developer and in 2008 made the first visual novel / manga games.

I like manga art style, but I also like the standard comic (more realistic) style. I also believe that for this kind of game, which has a strong supernatural and mystery setting (and also a bit of horror), the manga would have been a bit out of place. So I think this other style fits the game perfectly.

The making of has been divided into 3 stages:

  1. game conception: I remember I pitched this game style/character to a developer friend of mine who expressed some interest in entering the visual novel / dating sim area, but then changed idea.  I thought it was good and worth a try myself, so I first wrote down a storyboard in Openoffice, containing all the game details (character, story, objects, events, etc).
  2. coding/writing: this was the most fun part, coding all the various minigames and write the story. Writing the story was really hard though, because of the many different paths the player can take. It caused much headache, indeed in the sequel that I’m writing right now I’m going to make it more linear, also to make it easier to test.
  3. testing/proofreading: this was the less fun part. The game was started the 1st february and finished the 1st april. So took me two months to make. It is ou now, the 1st July. All this time was due to delays in proofreading (and also some testing of course). No need to say, I am really eager to resume working on less text-intensive games!!! 🙂

If you follow my tweets, you already know that I’m writing the second episode (I am at a very good point). So if you liked this one, you know that another one should be out very soon (this time the proofreading stage should take much less time).

And after the second? I don’t know if I’ll make a third yet: as you might imagine it largely depends on the sales of the first two episodes, so if you enjoy the game and want to see more, spread the word about it! 😉

Competition, good or bad?

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I’ll start this post with a quote from Jeff Vogel’s blog (he is the man behind Spiderweb software):

“One of the worst things about what I do for a living is that hardly anyone else does it. You might think that not having competitors is a good thing. It is not. In the game industry, competitors help as well as hurt you. When EA spends millions of dollars advertising Dragon Age and Mass Effect, they aren’t just pushing their games. They are also advertising the whole idea of playing RPGs. Dragon Age makes as many potential customers for me as it takes.”

I really can’t agree more with this – but under the “niche games” perspective. We all know what happened to the casual market. First, Bejeweled and Zuma. Then in a few years, 150.000 clones of those games: then the rise of Hidden Object games, and lastly, the pricewars. That had several DANGEROUS side effect (for us game developers):

  1. market flood. What if there were 3 RPG games out every day? Pretty cool (for us RPG fans), but a bit less cool for people like Spiderweb. It’s easy to say “other games also advertise the same kind of games I make, so is good because buyers might eventually find out about me”. Sure, but what if there were 3 new RPG games out every day? Seems impossible right now and probably will never happen (that’s why I overall agree with him) but this changes everything. It surely changed the casual market for the worse, because such a market flood caused…
  2. pricewars. Pricewars is when two big companies compete lowering the prices of their products (in this case the games) to gain market share. It’s a very common tecnique, used in many fields. It’s surely good for the end user, you would think. Well – yes and no. Yes, in the beginning for sure: imagine getting those great games you were paying $20 for $5 instead. Sounds great! The problem is, that doing simple maths, unless the sales also multiply by x4, devs are going to make MUCH LESS money. If they make less money, they have also less money to invest. Less money spent in game assets usually mean lower quality of games, or shorter games. So, in the end, you’ll have also worse games as consumer 🙁
  3. clones / lack of cretivity. The last consequence I can think of, related to  “minimizing business risks” is to have games that look and play identical (or almost). No need to say that this is quite evident in the casual market. You will rarely see an original game in the casual market. It’s inevitable: they know which model works, and they make game using that “template”. Why risk losing money, when you know what works? But once in a while, some more brave developer comes out with something original and in almost all cases is a hit (which I find quite ironic): Azada, Plant vs Zombies, Virtual Villagers, Build a Lot. Those are all games that innovated in the casual market and all of them were TOP HITs.

What is my take about competition? It’s good, I like it, as long as I can sell as affiliate 😀

Jokes apart, as long as are product made with heart, passion, and not simple clones made quickly to make some fast money, they’re all welcome. For example, I recently played a great game by Sakevisual called Jisei. Is really very well done, and beside the fact that I know the author and the artist well, I honestly think is a good product. It was fun when was released because I was still working on my game Vera Blanc since December 2009: so seeing such a quality game that was started just a few months (I think May) already out BEFORE mine, obviously made me thinking “What, how is possible!?” 😀

But like Jeff says, it’s good, and also I think that we indie devs should help each other (that’s why I often promote games as affiliate to my huge mailing list and other devs to the same with my games). Maybe people playing Jisei will find out about my other detective/supernatural game Vera Blanc (when it will be out, hopefully soon!!), and vice versa, maybe people playing Vera Blanc will also find out about Jisei and love it.