Category Archives: preorder

Friday catblogging – moral decisions in RPGs

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In the picture above, the young cat Maja. I found her while on a trip in Croatia and decided to bring her home. She lived with me for 7 beautiful months (sadly, she’s not here anymore).

I’m writing right now the Planet Stronghold quest with the Matricks. They’re giant rocky humanoid, very resistant to physical damage but weaker against Psionics. During this quest, if you side with the Empire you’ll face a big moral dilemma: you have the option to kill their “breeders”, as sort of distraction so you can fight the King Rock (the evil tyrant of the race) with less defenses. Of course, even if we’re talking about aliens, killing breeders is always a bad thing! And indeed, some party members will be seriously disappointed if you do that.

I like how the “Empire side” is turning out. Because even if the ultimate goal is to submit all the alien races, it’s a somewhat grey territory – the decisions you make might seem inevitable since there’s a big war going on, but you’ll often wonder if what you’re doing is ethically correct, and you can still choose to act differently.

About the mid-december deadline, I’ll try my best to met it, however after the Matrick race I still need to write the Arnox and Apex Rahn quest, and then the final battle. My goal was to finish the game plot, apart for the romance subplots that can be done anytime since they’re not connected with the main plot (except when you decide to do the final fight). So I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it, it might be more like 20-21st december.

I want the next version 0.8 to have the full plot so anyone who preordered can play/test it and let me know any problem. Note that after 0.8 is released, I’ll raise the price to $19.95 and then once the final version is out, to $24.95.

Finally, I also got the new boys images for Spirited Heart new game. You can see a mockup below. Frebo is always the best! 😀

Planet Stronghold 0.7 and pre-orders

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Planet Stronghold pc/mac/linuxAfter another month of work and many bug fixed and new features added, I can finally announce the alpha version 0.7 of my upcoming sci-fi RPG game Planet Stronghold! 🙂

First of all, the download links:
http://www.didone.com/testing/PSAlpha07.exe (Pc)
http://www.didone.com/testing/PSAlpha07.zip (Mac)
http://www.didone.com/testing/PSAlpha07.tar.bz2 (Linux)

The new version has many improvements and most importantly provides you more hours of fun. The story plays until the end of chapter 4, titled “The Choice” (I don’t want to spoil the fun, so you’ll have to play it to understand what is the choice about).

The game also now behaves like a demo: you can get the game now for only $9.99 instead of waiting the official release (which is scheduled for January 2011). Why I am doing this? For several reasons:

  • because this way people who are eager to play can get the game at half price (once it’s officially released, it will be priced $19.99 if not more, depending how long the game is after I finish writing the whole story).
  • player can send me their feedback through the game official forums. Not talking just about bug reports (that’s what pre-orders are usually for) but I encourage people to share their thoughts also on the gameplay, interface, and so on. I won’t rewrite the game from scratch, but I’ll read and listen to any suggestion (I’ve already changed the game quite a lot based on users feedback)
  • lastly, because pre-orders are trendy and cool 😀

In the next weeks/months I’ll keep working on it, writing more story and adding new enemies, weapons and armors. The current plan is to finish the version 0.8 for the end of November, the 0.9 for the end of December and as I said the official 1.0 release in January 2011.

So, if you want to support the development of this game, please visit the official site and download the demo or pre-order the game. The game right now for practical reasons uses a simple one-time activation, but the final version will likely use a simple fullversion no-DRM download.