Category Archives: preorder

Love & Order preorders available!

Yes, finally the game Love & Order, written by C. Love, is available for pre-orders purchase! You can see more screenshots and information about the game and the characters at the official page. Beside producing the game, I’ve also tested it a lot, and I can say it’s really fun and it will keep you busy for quite some time while you try to discover more about the mysterious abandoned case and at same time, pursue all of the four dateable characters 🙂

Love & Order has also an official forum now – so if you have any feedback, comment, suggestion, bug report (let’s hope not!) or anything else, stop by my forums and write something!

A little of postmortem info about this game. I contacted Christine back in summer 2010 shortly after her game Digital: A Love Story was out. After playing it, I immediately recognized the potential that she had as game developer 😉 And since I’ve learned long time ago that my world-domination plan cannot be fulfilled alone, I asked her if was interested in writing a game for me. We exchanged a few emails and she asked what kind of game I had in mind, so I told her about several possibilities. One of them was:

“I was thinking instead of school, would be nice to have as setting work (like an office job) and have some mystery (not necessarily a murder or anything, but some mysterious event).”

And that’s how it all started. A fun excerpt from one of her emails was:

I would think maybe four dateable characters (is that a good number? three men and one woman? I really wouldn’t want to write a completely straight heroine), plus a couple of other people who work there.

(obviously had no problems with that!). There was a lot of initial brainstorming and then from about July or so it was all in her hands. She coded /wrote it while the various artists worked on the backgrounds and the character art (the character artist is the same of Remember Me, which should also be ready next month… or so).

Obviously Love & Order is quite different from Digital:A Love Story and I hope people won’t even try to compare the two games, since is like comparing apples and oranges. Our goal with Love & Order was to have a fun otome / dating sim game, with a bit of humour, mystery and lot of romance, and I think the result turned out quite good.

That’s all for now, ah no wait – I couldn’t make a friday blog without a cat picture! Here it is:

my cat Grillo seems to think “Love & Order is an awesome game, everyone should buy it!” 😉

Friday catblogging – Finishing a RPG, starting a new one

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In the picture above, Grillo & Leon when they were two small kittens in my old home. They used to sleep together to stay warmer 🙂

As I’m writing this post, I’m doing the final touches to my Planet Stronghold RPG. I hoped to have the final build by now, since I set my own deadline to the end of January, but we’re almost there. In the next few days I’ll release the beta version 0.9, which will be the final build except for:

some unproofreaded texts
might have some plot holes or small bugs (despite the testing, there might be some small mistakes here and there)
some missing voices

That’s it, as you can see nothing really big is missing. The final release is estimated for mid-February, though you can already buy the game now for $19.99 and save $5 on the final game price (once it’s officially out the price will be $24.99).

As the blog post title says, I’m finishing a RPG (Planet Stronghold) and starting a new one. This new RPG will be called “DIM: The Insurrection” and you can see a preview art below, with some characters that will be present in the game:

for now I don’t want to say too much, also because we’re just in the early stages, all I can anticipate for now is:

the main character is the cute girl in the middle, named “Kareta”
as you might notice the game features many hybrid human-feline races 🙂
it will be completely written from scratch by native English speaker, so no more “good game, a pity about the writing” complaints 😉
will obviously feature battles and a spell system based on four elements + life and death
will be written in Renpy and be available for Pc, Mac & Linux
will probably feature some map system. Not sure yet if a tilemap or something different, we’re experimenting right now!
will have cutscenes and less texts than Planet Stronghold. Will be a more mainstream game, not related to the visual novel world
the battles will be more cinematic, featuring many custom scenes
depending on the final texts size might even be completely voiced (though perhaps the voice pack might get released at a later date)

That’s all for now! Stay tuned because next friday I might even announce the official release of Love & Order. Or at least the pre-orders 🙂

Friday catblogging – Love & Order preview

Friday catblogging – Planet Stronghold alpha 0.85 featuring “aggro”

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In the picture above, Othello and Grillo showing a good example of what is “aggro” 😀

If you look in Wikipedia the term “aggro”, you find the following definition:

Hate, aggro, or threat is a mechanism used in many MMORPGs as well as some RPGs by which non-playing characters (NPCs; such as mobs) prioritize which players to attack. Players who generate the most hate (gain the most aggro) on an NPC will be preferentially attacked by that NPC.

This is what I added to Planet Stronghold 0.85 BETA (yes I can finally start to call it Beta!) and it completely changed the game battles (in a good way). Already introducing different attack types made quite a difference in the past, but this change has a really MAJOR impact on gameplay. Before, enemies would just pick a random opponent, making battles a bit of a mess, since no real defensive plan could be made.

It was a simple gamedesign mistake, really. Even a seasoned game designer like me (well, 20+ games released… I think I can call me like that? hehe) sometimes make them. To be honest, is also because I was coding this damn battle engine since december 2009 and was eager to get the game out, so I didn’t pay too much attention to such “details” (which are etremely important though, the famed “polish”).

To make a game fun, you need to have a clear goal and have cause-effect game mechanics. The aggro does exactly that. Now, you can still use Harm psionic at maximum concentration and do even 90hp of damage the first turn of battle, but then your poor psionic aggro value will skyrocket and you bet that when it’s enemies turn, they’ll massacre him/her 😀

So, now you have to do like in many MMORPG (Everquest, WoW, etc), that is have a hero that is a “tank”. A tank is a party character that usually has very high HP and / or armor/resistances to damage. Use the Burst attack option, which now has the real purpose of catching enemy’s attention (sort of Taunt in normal fantasy RPGs), to raise your tank aggro, then use psionics to buff / heal him, and use scouts to silently “take out the enemies from distance”.

I think the battles now are very fun, especially when you fight with the full party, because even if what you have to do is clear, is NOT that easy. Sometimes your tank might be running out of HP, so another class with good HP like Guardian could try to get the aggro temporarily, while your psionic healers restore the tank full health, and so on. The possibilities are really many, but now knowing that the enemies will MOSTLY (not 100%, since some enemies have class-specific special attacks) attack a specific hero with the highest aggro value adds a completely new dimension to the gameplay.

Beside the aggro system I’ve been working on the romance subplots only, so no new main plot advancement in this version. Though I’ve added many hidden things, like Bellamy that can produce grenades (one-use items that hit all enemies!) and Rumi produces lifegivers (resurrects KO heroes). Medikit now will “scale” based on your character level (higher than 6 you’ll ged medikit and ultimate medikits that restore bigger amount of HP). More weapons including some energy based sniper rifles, and many bugfixes. Another big addition is the training screen:

You’ll access it by visiting Rebecca, and lets you train by 1 four skills of any character, but each training attempt consumes Colony Energy that refills only when you complete quests, to guarantee players won’t abuse it 😉 Also the attempts are shared by the party, so you can train max 5 times at time, not 5 times each hero. I think is particularly useful to train in non-combat skills that can be useful in many quests.

So you might ask, where are the download links?? Well, I was hoping to have the version ready by today, but have still a few romance subplot to finish, and I want to have them all done (not proofreaded though!) so people can already see the beautiful special CGs when you finish some of the endings (and perhaps report plot bugs!).

It should be out this weekend though, so keep following my twitter or game forums to know when the version 0.85 will be out! 8)

Friday catblogging – Merry Christmas!

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In the picture above, Mirtillo and Othello sleeping together peacefully. I wonder what they’re dreaming ?

I want to wish everyone reading this blog/following me Merry Christmas! 🙂

Then, a quick status update about Planet Stronghold 0.8 (since is the game I’m currently working on). In the recent weeks had some eyesight problems, so the programming has been slowed considerably. I really hoped to have it ready by Christmas since would have made a great present… but sometimes, real-life problems get in the way and so I had to post-pone the deadline to end of the year!

I’m writing the latest two quest, regarding the Apex Rahn and Arnox races, including two boss fights. I think once you play the game you’ll realize why is taking me so long to make… because the game IS long! The part I’m writing now involves all the races, and if you side with the Empire you have to eliminate them, instead if you side with the King/Shiler you will unify them and form one single alliance.

So this part is the “core” of the game, the biggest one. If you played the demo, this part is basically 5-6 times longer than it…and you can play from two different sides, so some parts are different! That is also why the final release price will be $24.95 (so you have still one week to get it at the deal price of $9.95!). And now, for some postmortem-retrospective about the year that is about to end:

2010, The Year Of The Tiger

I admit I was excited about it (since I am a Wood Tiger in chinese horoscope). Well, my goal for 2010 was to release 5 games, and I was particularly excited about (quoting from my last year post):

And I am producing the art now for a new kind of game style that I hope will be a great success, since I like a lot writing the stories and the storyboards for it. For now I can only say that involves detectives, mystery, and a beautiful blonde girl with a French accent…

I was obviously talking about Vera Blanc, which as you might know, turned out to be a real disappointment in term of sales 😀

So, in 2010 I released The Flower Shop, Card Sweethearts, Vera Blanc: Full Moon, Vera Blanc: Ghost In The Castle. Not only I didn’t release 5 games as I had planned (even if I’m almost done with Planet Stronghold), but most of them didn’t sell well at all! So in all honesty, considering also the other real-life problems I had, 2010 was probably my worst year since I was indie. For the first time in 7 years or so, I didn’t grow my business. During the summer and autumn, I thought it was something beyond my control, the global crisis, the return of middlemen and so on (since also many other indies had very low sales during that period) but if I think about it carefully, it was my mistake for producing games without doing proper “market research”.

Vera Blanc got the most positive reviews I had for a game, on famous sites like Gamezebo & Gamertell. And it has some fans that are eagerly waiting a 3rd episode. Still, it would be foolish for me to release another one using the same gameplay system… so even as indie, you can’t simply do any game you want to do (unless it’s an hobby) but you must also identify the market you want to sell to, and make sure you have the right product. Making a good/original game just isn’t enough, if that game has a very small fan-base.

Next friday, more cats pictures and my plan for the 2011 which hopefully will be a better year 🙂

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva