Category Archives: postmortem

2014 the year… of change

Reading back the previous end of year post, I can’t stop thinking how things have changed so rapidly for me. This is probably the biggest “problem” of being indie: things change at lightning speed, for good but also for bad!

Last year I was happy because Loren Amazon Princess was accepted on Steam. Nowadays, I have 13 games there, with the 14th (Seasons Of The Wolf) to be released next month!

Last year I had zero games for iOS. This year I ported almost all of them on Apple’s platform, and I plan to do more next year, especially since Ren’Py will get its own porting system!

Last year beside my loyal long-time fans, I was mostly unknown to the general public. Now, while I’m still not *that known*, people talk about me. Some adore my games, others hate them, others are neutral, but at least people talk about me. The worst thing is being ignored/unknown 🙂

This year I made “only” two games, but two big ones: Roommates and Seasons Of The Wolf.

Roommates

Roommates is a title that totally exceeded my expectations. I’ve made “a few” dating sims before, but this one basically is of another league! I think probably is due to the fact that, like my RPGs, it is not focused on only a romance genre/combo, but all of them. Playing as male or female, straight or homosexual romances. It’s a game for everybody.

But also, great comedy writing. There’s nothing wrong with more serious/mature themes, but sometimes people just want to escape the mundane problems with funny stories 🙂 So, thumbs up to Michael (Roommates’ writer) for his great job on the game!

The game soundtrack by Leetstreet Boys was also a very good move. I really can’t find an issue in that game, something that “if I could go back, I would have done differently” and it’s a good thing!

ToA: Seasons Of The Wolf

SOTW is officially out since just little more than a month. It was a challenge, a bet. I wanted to see if I could make “a real RPG” myself. With romance, with a story, with my usual artwork style, but… much more detailed, with a Nightmare difficult level that would actually make people go crazy with it, with a map system, secrets, randomized items, etc.

I won that bet. The game is doing VERY WELL, beating Loren’s first month sales. Of course, is not an entirely fair comparison since 2 years have passed from Loren’s release and now I have a much bigger following. But to be honest, I was fearing that it would be a flop 😀 So seeing that is doing well reassures me and was already worth it.

Still, I’m not going to do another insanely big game like this one anytime soon! It really “burned me”, because I worked on it 10 months straight, every day, fixing/tweaking stuff. I know it’s my job, but now I need a break from such big games. I’m going to make some smaller games (this time, FOR REAL!! LOL) like Queen Of Thieves. They’ll still be RPGs, but have limited party members/skills/items/and so on. They will also be easier to balance 😉

However, there could be something new related to SOTW, maybe next year. I just received this letter via a pigeon from a certain Jariel the bard from the green lands of Grandtree:

End of year’s thoughts

Even if this year was good for me, the future is still very uncertain.

I personally know several indies who this year took a huge hit on their finances, some have abandoned the business to move elsewhere, others went back to contract work or looking for funding. And only a few years before, they were earning six figures! So, you never know what the future holds! Doesn’t matter how much you plan things ahead… because this business moves so fast, is easy to be caught by surprise.

I think the most important thing is to stay humble, never think to have “made it”, and keep working on what you love. At least, this is what I’m planning to do in 2015 🙂

Happy New Year!

Winter is over! A Roommates postmortem

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Today the 21st March, is the first day of Spring!

I have to say that this was a very mild Winter, so I didn’t had to shovel snow for hours, nor had problems to drive in icy raods, and so on. Overall under this aspect was a very good Winter! Lots of things happened, first game on Steam and Roommates release. Speaking of it…

Roommates postmortem!

As you know if you follow me regularly, earlier this month I released the comedy dating sim Roommates.

Like Max in the image above, I can say that I wouldn’t be where I am right now without your constant support and motivation/push (some people are more or less nice regarding this, but it’s effective in all cases!).

Roommates is a special game, for several reasons:

was the first game to have a full soundtrack, including theme song, done by a popular group, Leetstreet Boys
was the first dating sim I made where you could play as both genders, and have a variety of romances including yuri/yaoi
was the first comedy game. Is true that many other games had many funny scenes, but if you’ve played even only the demo you can see the difference!
was my most expensive dating sim to date (full soundtrack, 200.000 words of script, 16 CGs, 27 background images, sprites with normal, spring, winter, summer clothes, etc)
was the first one that I coded using the new Ren’Py, incorporating mobile code changes directly in the script without the need to have two separate code-bases

So as you can imagine, with such an ambitious game, there were good chances that something could go wrong! Luckily, everything went rather smoothly: I’m proud to say that even after only a month, it’s clearly going to be my most popular dating sim ever!

I’m particularly happy because I also found a good and reliable writer, Michael Van Horn, who is now working on Loren’s next games. He was supposed to write Undead Lily next, but Loren has higher priority. Maybe he can still work on it after the second chapter of Loren’s saga is out though 😉

In summary: I wish all the next games’ releases would go as smoothly as Roommates! I have doubts that this will happen though 😀

Quick SOTW update

I have also good news about this game: finally finished designing/coding/testing ALL the skills of Seasons Of The Wolf!

Which means that now I can go back adding all the content for the Winter Season (the first act of the game). I am still aiming at finishing that in time for my birthday (11th April) but of course I’m talking only about the beta/preorder version.

The final / full game is more likely to be out in August/Semptember, depending how testing goes (also still have a few images and music to finish).

I have also got some new ideas on how to implement items while playing Diablo 3 on the PS3, so I need to implement that new system too. More info coming in next weeks!

Making wrong choices

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I wish I had someone like Tanya to help me out, because I would really need it.

Today I hoped to announce Bionic Heart 2 beta testing. After two months of coding/testing, would be about time!

Instead no. I have bad news. I’m at one point where I fix a plot hole, and a new one appears. I check a variable, one path works, the other doesn’t. A scene that before was fine, now plays out of order.

I’ve worked like crazy in past 3 days, I’m stressed like never before and then I came to a simple conclusion. There’s no hope to make this work. Every time I open the script I have a headache now. Writer doesn’t have time to help.

So I’m thinking what to do. It’s really embarrassing for me. Despite all the efforts, I know that I can’t make this work, unless I make some really big changes. And I’m not used to release half-broken games. Testing to find the bugs is one thing, but the version I have currently is not even to be considered “testable”. Only 3 days ago I thought I was at good point, but then I discovered that is like a house of cards, if you move a piece, everything falls apart.

It’s the first time I find myself in such situation in my life, and I’m the sole responsible of this. I should have followed more carefully the situation, instead I was busy with other projects. A wrong choice, trusting too much someone else capabilities, thinking he can do it all on his own without supervision, and that’s the result.

A pity because the story itself is really good I think.

Not all is lost though!

However don’t be afraid, I’m already thinking what to do to solve the situation. A simple solution would be to eliminate the “multiple path” feature and just have a continuous story, where if you fail the Mars or Earth path the game ends. Less cool than the original project, but probably in this case I wouldn’t have to do a total rewrite of the story, and would be faster to solve it.

Don’t worry, the game WILL be out, you will only need to be patient for a little more! I am still aiming to finish it by the end of March, even if I’ll have to rework the game structure a lot.

I’m really sorry about what happened and will make sure this won’t repeat in future.

Heileen 3 postmortem

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With the official release of Heileen 3: Sea Maidens, the development of Heileen 3 ends. As always, both the otome (GxB) and the yuri (GxG) versions are merged in one single download and then you can choose what version to buy and play (or both!).

More info on the official page: http://www.winterwolves.com/heileen3.htm

I just did an update this morning to address a problem playing in Hard mode (getting a profession ending was really too difficult) but the rest of the game was unchanged and has been in testing since over two weeks, so decided to release it officially.

Heileen postmortem

The Heileen series ends with this third chapter, and I’m overall satisfied by it. Without doubts it’s the best game of the series under several aspects: the longest, the most funny, the one with more variety of romances, the one with more artwork, the first one with a custom soundtrack and theme song, and the list goes on.

Of course, it’s still not comparable with my bigger budget RPG games in terms of gameplay, complexity or mechanics. I did it mostly because I wanted to make it – I knew already beforehand that probably it wouldn’t have been a big success, but even as indie sometimes you make games only because you want to do them for yourself 🙂

Ideally, the games you enjoy making for yourself are also a commercial success, but very often that’s not the case…

Anyway I don’t regret making it, but for sure I have no plans to make any more games in Heileen world, also because I feel I wouldn’t have anything else to add, and I don’t want to drag it too long, like happens in some TV series, where you think “why they didn’t end the story in this season? Making another one makes no sense.”. That’s what I think about Heileen 3 too.

The development

The game development started in Summer 2011, I wrote the full storyboard of it between July and September of that year. Then I started commissioning the new artwork, and the original writer started with the story. In the course of 2012, several things happened:

the original idea was to have four male romance options, and two females. But talking with people in forums I agreed that didn’t make much sense, so I decided to divide the game in a otome and a yuri version, adding two extra female romances (Ebele and by popular demand, Juliet)
writer had to quit about mid-way, so I found another one, Sarah, to replace her and finish the game, in particular the new yuri romances and several extra scenes. I was really lucky to find her, since she worked hard and without her help I wouldn’t have met the deadline for sure!
the last months of development were really frantic, with some extra art needed, background artists that quit, and the usual mess associated with developing a game when you have a deadline: finish the otome version before Christmas 🙂

In the end I didn’t had to make many compromises, maybe I would have added more sprite poses if had more time, but in the end as I said I’m happy enough of the final result, considering the kind of game (light comedy) and the primary target market (teens/young adult).

Now, the next challege is to finish Bionic Heart 2 before March… 🙂

Loren Amazon Princess expansion is out and postmortem

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First of all, I want to announce officially that Castle Of N’Mar, Loren’s expansion, is finally out after a long testing stage. It features three new characters, four new romance combos, new zones to explore, non-linear quests, different endings and much more.

You can get more info at the official page: http://www.winterwolves.com/lorencastleofnmar.htm

If you preordered the game, to register it just redownload the game demo from the website to get the latest version which now includes the base game+expansion.

Making of and postmortem

I had the idea of making an expansion to the main game since beginning of the year. Including all the content in the base game wouldn’t have been viable for me – since the game+expansion is now 230k words and has really a LOT of content, almost 3 times the length of Planet Stronghold!

So for obvious financial reasons I couldn’t include everything in the base game, but I decided to split it in the base + expansion.

The expansion was well received and sold well. However, I made a big mistake when I planned it: making an expansion that adds new content to the existing storyline is… A TOTAL PAIN!! 😀

Why? For several reasons, in no particular order:

Because you had to check every possible change that could happen in the main story, based on the new content you added
Because the new content was visible only before a specific point of the story, causing some confusion on players
Because it would also change the final endings! So, sometimes you had to play it to the end to find out any plot holes
Because not happy about the difficulty, I even decided to add non-linear quests which added extra problems!

So as you can see it wasn’t definitely a smooth release. Consider also that this summer when we worked on it was insanely hot, and… yeah, it was really hard to finish it, but finally is out and I’m quite happy about the result 🙂

But if I had to do it again, for sure the story would take place after the base game, continuing the plot, rather than adding extra content in the middle of it. A mistake to not repeat again.

Also, while some people liked the non-linear quests, I am not sure they’re really worth the extra efforts. I think players would prefer a longer game anyway, rather than having non-linear quests.

The manga bundle

As you know, in the past weeks I also ran a promotion called “Manga Bundle”. It ended with 1374 bundles sold and while I don’t know the final gross revenues yet, but even if it doesn’t seem as good as the other bundles, I don’t mind too much since I did it mainly for the charity aspect and to let more people know about my games.

It didn’t do so well also probably because it wasn’t a very good moment to do it. Too many good, top AAA games coming out (Torchlight 2, Borderlands 2, XCOM, etc) and also several bundles including the big Humble Bundle launched about at the same time. I think things might have gone differently under different circumstances.

Also to be fair, the games I offered were the oldest ones and plain visual novels. When Spirited Heart was unlocked 2 days ago, the bundles sold had a big spike – obviously, that game for $1 was a great deal. I have the feeling that perhaps in a different moment and with different games, it might have done much better.

So will I do more bundles in future? I don’t know yet, but for sure not soon 🙂

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva