Category Archives: otome games

Promo sale & Roommates video preview

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Back To School promo

In case you missed it, despite the newsletter and all the social network promotion I did, you can use the coupon BACKTOSCHOOL during the checkout process to get 50% off any of my games.

Doesn’t work on Cinders since is not my game, and with bundles because they have other predefined discounts. So for example if you want both Flower Shop games you have to buy them separately, using the coupon every time.

Expires Sunday 1st September!

Roommates update

Today I thought I would be able to talk about SOTW skills, but had other problems to solve this week, so wasn’t able to do it in time. However, it was a very productive week for Roommates and I was able to make the video below:


This intro video provides just a glimpse of the crazy humor present in the game!

I plan to do more videos like that in next months, introducing each character of the story separately.
The writer has finished editing 2/3 of the game, and I hired Aleema to finish it (playtesting/coding/final polishing) so I can work fulltime again on SOTW to hope to finish it before end of the year.

Speaking of Seasons Of The Wolf…

Don’t be surprised, but the game is turning out bigger than expected 😀 Why I have this Deja-vù sensation? (it happens every time, I always say it will be a smaller/simpler game and then…).

The game is already over 30,000 words, is still on the second season (Spring) and that doesn’t include any camp talk conversation.

trait traitresult
An example of a decision you’ll have to do for in the traits screen

Coding / design wise I just finished the “traits selection” screen, in which you’ll be able to choose an event from the twins’ early life that will reward them with a unique trait, and I think turned out nice to play.

As for the remaining stuff, I’m a bit behind but only because I decided to rework the skills, since there are “only” 8 party-members, beside having more attributes (as seen in last week post) I want to make the skilltree more complex than Loren, with some branching decision, so that you won’t be able to unlock all the skills but you’ll have to choose.

Luckily once that thing is out of the way, I think I can go on with the battle coding much faster since I had already redone the battle screen months ago 🙂

Incoming Nicole demo preview tomorrow

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I wanted to post it today, but as my cat Othello below always says “Never do today what you can do tomorrow”.

Othello
Othello is a world-expert in cat-napping

Jokes apart, tomorrow will upload a “demo preview” of Nicole. What is a demo preview? well is not the finished game, and not a finished demo. But is more than an Alpha version.

Ok I confess, I just made up that term. But in practice what I mean is:

  • the game romance plot is finished except one route (still missing the mystery part)
  • all the art is done, except a few chibis and some extra sprites for some scenes
  • the gameplay is done, but need a bit more testing to balance it

So there isn’t much work left, assuming people involved will work faster (I’ll make sure to use my spiked whip this time to speed things up!). I am releasing this demo because this way everyone who pre-ordered the game last month has something to play, and don’t think that I ran away with the money on a desert island! 🙂

I wanted to release it today, but there are still a few annoying things to finish so I want to wait one day more to give time to the chibi artist to draw two more images.

actionchibis

Also, I’m very likely going to hire another writer to do the yuri part. Not because the current writing is bad, rather the opposite (as I’m sure you’ll agree after reading it tomorrow) but because is taking too long. I definitely don’t want people to think that yuri is just a secondary thing for me, I want to treat all my customers equally. And while releasing the yuri version 2 months later like for Heileen 3 was acceptable after all, releasing it after 6 months it would be too much! (and I think that’s what would happen right now).

I got a few submissions already, but if you’re a writer, are motivated and interested feel free to email me (you can find the email visiting the support page of my site on the top menu).

RPG fans I haven’t forgot about you! Please stay tuned because next week will hopefully talk about the new changes I made to SOTW, like the new attributes/skills! Meanwhile here’s a screenshot below to keep you interested 😉

attributes

I sense some incoming preorders…

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First let me introduce the last two party-member characters of the Seasons Of The Wolf RPG:
chalassa_intro
Chalassa is the GxG (yuri) romance of this RPG

Chalassa the deadly assassin. You’ll encounter her later in the game, but she’ll have her impact on the story, be sure of it 😉

vaelis
Vaelis is like a second father for Althea & Shea, so… no romance sorry!

Vaelis is one of the first characters you can recruit, a very useful Mercenary (front line combatant).

Nicole’s incoming preorders

Check Nicole’s temporary official webpage here:

http://www.winterwolves.com/nicole.htm

The download links don’t work yet, but the buy links yes 😉 I’m opening the preorders even if there’s still a character route and some chibi/icon art missing, plus the extra final scene when you solve the mystery still to write. The writer said would send me the last route next week, and artist should be able to do the same with the art.

So seems that there isn’t much left to do, that’s why I decided to start accepting orders for the game (otome version only for now!) since you can play the game two ways: solving the mystery, or ignoring it completely. Once I get the last route, the game can be completely played in the second mode, and that’s what the people who preordered will probably get around mid-August, while we finish writing the mystery part and the various different final scenes (will be a different final scene depending who you romanced).

Gameplay-wise, the game will use a system similar to Always Remember Me, with a daily cycle, several places to visit and several actions to do, though there’ll be less variety of choices than in that game. But on the other hand, the story is VERY long, much more than Always Remember Me (is around 100,000 words already, and is missing a route as I said).

If you get the bonus content edition you’ll be able to download the official soundtrack, the chibis at bigger size and several wallpapers including both the male and female characters.

You can see a preview below:

boywallpapers

girlwallpapers

Of course, you can wait until a demo is available before buying! There won’t be any difference between the preorders and the final version. I’m only doing it since some people repeatedly asked for preorders 😉

Introducing the main characters of Seasons Of The Wolf

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althea-shea
Althea & Shea, the snow elven twins are the two playable characters of the game

During the game, you can play as one of the two twins. Like my previous RPGs, the main story doesn’t change based on who you pick, but the romance dialogues do.

Speaking of romances, this game will have one for each sexual preference. I know is much less than previous RPGs but I had to do this if I wanted this game to be out this year. I can always release DLC/expansions adding more romances later 😉

In this game though, differently from Loren, you can choose three classes: Ranger (the equivalent of Warrior class), Hunter (the equivalent of Thief class) and Druid (the equivalent of Mage class). So as you can see there will be more freedom of choices regarding your character class.

The character creation will let you customize your character, or pick some predefined builds (for those who want a quick-start). I am thinking to allow the same choices for the other twin: you can decide his/her skills or pick some ready-made builds.

The only restriction will be that both twins can’t have same Class, for balance reasons. As much as it could be fun to have two Rangers or two Druids, I am not confident that I can balance the battles for such situation. I might still allow the option for the more adventurous players, displaying a big warning though!

While I haven’t decided yet how the gameplay will be outside the battles, I plan to have a map with more “free roaming” than Loren’s one, have randomized encounters in specific places, some opportunity to grinding using a new system which I called “leveled grinding”.

In what it does consist? Let’s say that the plot is divided into “key points” that you must reach to advance in the story, and of course we’ll have different difficulty levels.

In practice:

beginning -> until key point of the story 1 = you can level up skills up to tier 1
-> until key point of the story 2 = you can level up skills up to tier 2
-> until key point of the story 3 = you can level up skills up to tier 3
this way maybe it would be possible in Easy/Normal mode to not reach the level cap for the next “key point” but still be powerful enough to go on, while playing in Hard mode it would be recommended or maybe even needed to get past. This system would let me balance the various fights much better since I would know exactly which skills the players CANNOT use in certain battles 😉

…and the other games?

Ahem, I have a good and a bad news. The good news is that Nicole will be a much bigger game than I thought (only the otome part will be over 100k words!) and Roommates background artist has started working. The bad news is that for sure I won’t be able to release those two games soon, because there’s still quite a lot of work left to do.

If I really must give a date, I’d say that probably one of the two games should be in beta towards the end of August, but I’m not 100% sure of that… so please wait, I assure you that will be worth it!

A hot Summer

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Technically today 21st June Summer starts, but here in Europe things are getting hotter since one week at least. Every year during this period I struggle to work, and this year is no exception. I thought that going living at 800m on sea level would have been enough but apparently I was wrong…

Nicole update

Anyway, at least I still manage to work hard in the morning. Check the video below:

Nicole’s first encounter with Ted. I chose the wrong choice on purpose since is more funny

I’m working on Ted’s route right now, and then there’s only Jeff to finish the otome version! Of course, some things are still missing, but maybe I’m not behind as I thought 😉

Planet Stronghold 2

Spoke with the writer and the coder, things are progressing well. As for the new RPG framework, things are a bit on hiatus now but coder said that everything should be ready this September. Which means that meanwhile writer can go on with the story, so in September I could be able to start adding/design the items/encounters/enemies and have a beta shortly after. IN THEORY, of course! 🙂

The Mystery RPG

I am voluntarily not saying much about that game yet even if development has already started since several weeks. I want to have at least all the characters artwork done before starting to talk about it. Writing is going well, and I think it could be finished by this Fall. Then of courseI’ll have to code all the encounters and do the testing…

Crossing fingers, it means that this Fall I should be able to work on at least one of the two RPGs above! If that happens, I’m confident that I’ll manage to release at least a new one before the end of year, and maybe the other a few months after,so RPG fans will finally be able to play new stuff after a long wait (in the last two years I always managed to release at least a game a year).

Android platform

While I haven’t abandoned completely the idea of getting my games on iOS, for sure that won’t happen soon (and  for sure I won’t waste anymore of my personal time trying to submit, I had enough!).

On the Android front, I’ve started porting Loren as you can see from the video below:

Loren RPG running on an Android tablet

Unfortunately there’s still some work to do (though that video is old, the character selection already works now for example). I’ve also “donated a Fire Kindle HD to the cause”, so that the Ren’Py coder can investigate the problems publishing on the Amazon store (and fix other generic Android bugs as well).

Stay tuned for more info coming in the next weeks!