Category Archives: postmortem

Making of Card Sweethearts

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My latest game, Card Sweethearts, is out. So I thought to make a post about the making of it, including some interesting informations for developers about a hard DRM decision I had to take.

As you might imagine taking a look at the screenshot on the right, the game is about poker. In some parts, you can even play strip poker with one of the four women you’ll encounter during the game. The game features beautiful manga art from Rebecca Gunter (don’t bother contacting her, she is full of work until next year!) and uses a custom version of the Ren’Py card-game engine that the programmer Tom made specifically for this game.

The Game

The project started a long time ago, so long that I had to look in my emails archive to find out when first I asked Tom if he would like to collaborate with me for this game. It was september 2008! The poker engine took quite some time to make (it’s more complex than you might think, especially the Poker AI of the CPU players) so around the summer of 2009 I had a finished alpha version of the poker engine, all the art for the game and a general plot idea in my mind.

At those times I had released already some other visual novels/dating sims like Bionic Heart. The problem for me in making those games was (actually it still is) the language: since I wanted this game to be humorous, I had lots of difficulties in writing it in english because isn’t my native language. So I hired a person I found on Deviantart to write the game texts.

Unexpected Problems

Sadly, that person quit in middle of the story in autumn 2009: so I was in a very bad situation, with almost everything ready except the story. Once again, I asked my precious collaborator Ayu Sakata (which at those times was proofreading Heileen 2, and started writing The Flower Shop) if she could finish the story. I really can’t blame her for not being too enthusiast about this (even if she never said that, I’m sure she was!), being a poker game with a male protagonist trying to date the girls, and end up playing strip poker with them 🙂

But anyway, she did a great job as always and in April/May we had the final beta version. Now comes the interesting part for developers: the DRM!

Why we decided to drop the DRM

As you can imagine, such a game would be very popular among the warez sites (manga, strip poker, etc) much more than my other regular games. Tom even came up with a neat online activation system, that was using a private/public key (similar to what OpenPGP does for emails) so that the product, once activated on a computer, was tied to its hardware. The user would have been able to “deactivate” the game from a computer to reinstall it to another, but still, was unable to play for example at same time on his home pc and on his notebook.

After some weeks of testing and feedback from friends, developers friends and normal testers, we decided to take the risk and drop it. Why? Well, for several reasons:

  • I’ve always promoted the idea that people would buy the game license as “personal”. So restricting the use to only 1 computer per person was against what I always did
  • There’s always the risk of server going down, preventing people from registering (even if was just one-time activation). A fun coincidence was that exactly in those weeks I was unable to play even for just a few hours Dragon Age expansion (requiring online log-in) and I remember I was extremely disappointed as player
  • The game would have been cracked anyway: so all that DRM would have accomplished is prevent a “0-day crack” but possibly piss off some people
  • The Ubisoft DRM epic fail was not too distant: I had fear of bringing my company under a bad name… once you lose the buyers confidence, is hard to get it back!
  • Ultimately, we wanted to provide a good experience to paying users, and focus only on them, not the pirates

So, we released the game using absolutlely No-DRM system. Just a download link to get the fullversion, like we always did.

I don’t know if the game has been already cracked or not (it’s out since just yesterday) but I have the feeling (and the hope!) I made the right choice. The choice of rewarding people who buy games, not punish them with absurd DRM requirements.

Heileen 2 voiced

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Yep, finally the voiced version of the game is out, after almost 3 months of delay 🙂 you can find more info and download the voiced demo at the official page

Everyone that bought the game before can simply log-in to my server (not BMT one) and redownload it. The link is on the purchase email 😉

Now going to explain a bit my choices when doing the voiced version. As you might know (at least those who reads my twitter or blog) there were LOTs of troubles when voicing the main character, Heileen herself. In the end, I decided to leave her unvoiced. Several factors influenced my choice:

  • after trying 2 voice actress that both gave up on the project (mostly because of the length) I started to think if I would ever find one that would finish the job
  • even if I found one, the game wouldn’t have been finished before next summer (or even later)
  • leaving the game unvoiced was like leaving a “unfinished” game on sale, and I didn’t like that!
  • there are many mainstream games (Dragon Age, Mass Effects and probably some less known japanese VNs) who leave voluntarily the main character unvoiced

So even if my initial idea was to have the game fully voiced as Bionic Heart, I decided to go this way. I think you’ll agree with me that the actors involved did a great voice acting job, so I want to thank them all, in sparse order:

  • Ayu Sakata – Ebele, Marie
  • Steven Mane – Elias, Marco, Adam
  • Lucien Dodge – Black, Morgan, Otto
  • Morgan Barnhart – Lora, Juliet and Heileen kid (which unfortunately had to cut, since the main character won’t be voiced)
  • Erica Mendez – Magdalene, Marcus kid
  • Dan Conlin – Robert, Jack and some minor male characters
  • Mauri “Darkblade” Majanoja –  John, Jonathan

As you can see, quite a large cast 😉 Doing the voices was a great task though, and I don’t think I’ll repeat the experiment anytime soon! For sure not for games with lots of texts, because it’s really time consuming !

Flower Shop released + making of

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First of all, in case you don’t know, the game is now out! You can get more info at the official page here: http://www.winterwolves.com/theflowershop.htm

Then I want to give a brief background history on this game in case someone is interested. It all started shortly after I found out about Ren’Py engine and the visual novel / dating sim world. I got to know the LemmaSoft community (which has been very helpful for me in making those games since then) and several great people like Tom Rothamel, Ayu Sakata and M.Beatriz Garcia. Those two last people were later fully involved in the game.

Summer Session, a dating sim made together with Hanako games, was released in July 2008 and was very successful, with mentions on Gamasutra, Macworld, and so on. So I wanted to make another, but at same time go on with my other projects (Heileen, Spirited Heart would get released in the next months). While browsing Lemmasoft forums I found out Deji (Garcia nickname) and of course I was impressed by her skills, but also by the fact that at those times (if I remember correctly) no games (even freewares!) were ever released with her beautiful art.

I thought to ask her if she was interested, and I still remember after I sent her my initial game idea she wasn’t much motivated because of the “guy goes after girl” theme: but when I expanded it mentioning one of the main girls would be a Flower Shop owner, she immediately changed her mind! Also, in the beginning, the game was really like another Summer Session. But then (luckily I think) I decided to ask Ayu Sakata to write it completely on her own, just following my original plot idea, but leaving all the dialogues to her.

Was July 2009, she had just done some proofreading /editing for Bionic Heart and I really liked her work, so asked her if she wanted to take care of the project, and she did. She changed the player perspective from the classic male point of view (the one of Summer Session for example) to a more delicate, romantic view (I’d say definitely more female!).

Meanwhile Deji was going on with the pictures, but was a bit slow because had to do an internship. In late 2009 the plot was fully written but there was still several pictures left: I still remember Marian was the last girl to be added, and some of her poses were paused for over 3 months 😀 But then, the internship ended and I must say I was surprised to see Deji motivation and speed (quality was NEVER in discussion) ! She finished all the remaining art in December, and the main menu in early January.

The background art was done by other external contractors and the interface… is my fault in case you’re wondering 😉 In December 2009/January 2010 I had lot of fun programming the farming sim part: I wanted something casual, not very complex but not too easy either, and I think I made it. Once again I was pleased to work with Python which is without any doubt the best language ever to do … just anything, from games to any other kind of programming task!

So that’s it… basically the game from its original concept in October 2008, was finished more than 1 year later, in January 2010! Of course, there were lots of pauses and dead moments so isn’t like the game took 1 year of actual work to make!

And now, what’s next? I am already discussing with Deji and Ayu about a possible “girl side” version of the game. I agree, I think many girls would like to deal with nice guys like Jacob and Trent…!

Go Adventures!

Beside RPG games, adventures are one of my favourite genre ever. I didn’t make any before, for two reasons: I would have to hire someone to do the art and this was too expensive for me to do in the beginning, and also I wasn’t sure there was a market for them at all.

But in 2005 I decided I wanted to try anyway, so I started to commission lot of characters art for the game Summer Love, that was the original title of Summer Session. The artist was still at art school so took a lot to finish them all, almost 1 year. Then, when I had the characters I realized I needed also the backgrounds! so asked her to draw about 20 different ones, and she was faster this time.

In beginnng of 2007 I had almost everything for the game: the idea/main mechanic, all the characters with their backgrounds and personalities, but when I started to write the game itself I realized it wasn’t easy as I thought: I built up my own adventure engine, but the main reason was the writing itself.

While I can read and write a decent english, creating a compelling story and using the right words is really another world. So in the beginning I thought to just write it in italian and then have it translated, but I wasn’t really sure all the translation money would have been well spent.

So in the end, in spring of 2008 I decided to contact Georgina of Hanako, knowing that she made already lot of adventure games, figuring that she would have been the “right man” (or better woman) to finish my project! and indeed, she did it, and also pointed me to Renpy, a really nice Python-based tool to write visual novel/dating sims.

Recently adventures seems to have gained popularity, and Summer Session sales surely prove that there is a market for adventures (of any kind). So, here I am, ready to finish Heileen, a 17th century visual novel in which you play the role of a girl, trying to discover herself with the help of a voyage to the New World. Sounds cool eh? 😀

I really hope the game will be like I have in my mind. So far, after playing it several times, I am very satisfied. Stay tuned for a beta version coming out soon. Well, as soon as I get my new background pictures delivered! 😉

Magic Stones Postmortem

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Last year was contacted by a person from idevgames to write a postmortem about my game Magic Stones. Since over 1 year has passed already and he didn’t post anything in his site, I thought to post the postmortem in my blog, so at least I didn’t waste my time writing it and maybe someone could find it interesting, who knows.

Here it goes – enjoy it!

Overview

I always liked the idea of making a fantasy-card game, so I started to outline the basic idea on a piece of paper. Yes planning was essential in this kind of game, I knew it from the start (and luckily I did it).

I decided to base everything on celtic mythology, so I first started to do some research both in local library and also on the net. Found the celtic runes and thought to assign to each one of them a spell or a summoned avatar in the game. I divided the runes into 4 elements (the classic air, water, fire and earth) even if their original meaning is a bit different (but hey is just a game!).

So after sketching out the general features, statistics, skills, creatures, background story, etc of the game, I put all those numbers together in a spreadsheet page.

Then had to solve a big problem, to make the graphic of such a game, and found in Poser a very good solution. Bought several ready-made 3d models, and after several weeks spent on various renderings, I had the basic 48 avatars ready (20 avatars for the 4 elements plus many neutral/evil ones).

I added a roleplaying element to the game, so that in addition to your “deck of card” you had also an in-game alter-ego, with an inventory of items that could affect your power and a set of basic skills that would influence the game in general.

Tools used

I used xCode and a very simple but really powerful 2d programming API called PTK (website http://www.phelios.com/ptk) that I had already used in all my previous games with great success.

As I already said, for graphics I used mostly Poser 5/6 for the monsters, characters, etc and photoshop to design the interface of the game.

For the music I just bought royalty-free music from one of the many online stores.

What went right

The game had since its launch a good group of loyal followers. This maybe also because I decided, shortly after I released version 1.0, to add “bonus pack” or “expansion packs” with new game features and new avatars/quests, completely free for registered users. This was both a hard move (once I had announced it, I couldn’t change my mind) but also a winning one because it helped greatly to improve customers loyalty and is keeping my game always “on the news” thanks to those frequent updates (about every 2-3 months usually).

What went wrong

Despite I had planned everything, as always happens in this sort of games, you’ll need to TEST TEST and TEST. When you make a simple match3 game, is hard to have bugs after hours of playing (because game mechanic is always the same). With this kind of game instead, I had many bugs in the initial version 1.0 because I didn’t took the time to test it properly since was too eager to release it (a mistake I will never repeat in any future games!).

Conclusion

I can say that it was both a very rewarding experience (got so many enthusiast email feedbacks!) but also very stressing. The day after release was working 10hours a day to fix all the bug and I had also a tight deadline to deliver the first expansion “The Bone Lord” in time for Christmas 2005. Keeping the game updated also is not so simple, since need to add more content like new art/sounds, and new gameplay elements. But overall I like this kind of games so in this case the passion plays an important role.