Category Archives: loren the amazon princess

Inspiration is everywhere

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Being indie is a creative job (obviously) assuming you’re trying to make your own games and not cloning others 🙂

The last weeks finishing Loren Amazon Princess have been quite stressful, and it’s fun because in theory there wasn’t any deadline set in stone except for the one self-imposed by me – but I always do that 🙂

Anyway, it was stressing! So while I’m working on the expansion, I decided to take it easier and work only half day on that, and in the other half day do more creative tasks like writing the storyboard of the new scenes for the other games, or “monkey” tasks like creating the icons, banners, preparing the HTML pages of the future games.

This is something I always do, even if the game in question will be out maybe next year – in the moments where I am too tired to code or write I do such tasks that still needs to be done anyway, but require no brain work. So when the time comes, I have them done already.

Also, last week I went to IKEA shopping with my girlfriend and curiously, I got the inspiration for Bionic Heart 2 main menu image! I know, inspiration is really bizarre and comes when you less expect it.

You might wonder “what the frak” IKEA has to do with the sequel of my sci-fi horror/romance game Bionic Heart? Nothing, but there was an image that inspired me, the one in the SOLMYRA picture, which you can see below, and on the right the sketch made by the artist for the main menu image following my indications:

Ssht

of course, the copyright of the left image belongs to IKEA and the artist who made that image, Deborah Azzopardi. On the right you see my vision – the beautiful and deadly Tanya who seems to say “silence”, with her robotic finger covered in blood (once the image is finalized and colored, it will be more evident!).

Speaking of Bionic Heart 2, I’m getting the various characters remade with the new art style. I made an interesting comparison of the old vs new version of the same character, except for Luke since he never appeared on the first game:

Newluke Oldvsnewtanya Newvsoldhelen Oldvsnewtom Oldvsnewtina

I particularly like the new Helen and Tina, but to be honest I like all the new versions of the old characters 🙂 Maybe the only one that looks worse, or at least different, is Tom. But he’ll have a very different role in this sequel!

On the other games front, I made progresses on Queen Of Thieves, Heileen 3, Roommates and Nicole. For this last one I’m probably going to rework the plot adding more scenes and also more characters, since is a mystery otome game and I want to add more variety and red herrings to the story 😉

About RPGs, beside Loren’s expansion, I’m getting lots of art done for Planet Stronghold 2 and starting to think how to implement the famous steampunk / horror rpg I’ve been talking about lately on Twitter…

BecauseWeMay has ended, some figures

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Today the BecauseWeMay initiative has ended. I participated with Spirited Heart + GIrl’s Love and the Android version. Overall I got a lot of traffic (over 8k uniques between 24th May – 1st June) and sold 116 copies of Spirited Heart and 127 of Girl’s Love for desktop, while the Android sales have been 123.

Because of the low price of $0.99, Android sales total was about $110-120, while because of the “higher” price of $9.99, the desktop sales were a nice total of $1347. Not Earth-shattering numbers of course, but remember that those were direct sales only, not Steam or iOS! 🙂

Overall I’m very happy about the result and the initiative and hope that distributors/portals took notice, the few that still don’t let developer choose their own prices. Luckily, there aren’t many, mostly are the casual portals.

Loren Expansion update

I’m going to focus during this month on finishing Loren’s expansion. I have already scripted a good amount of quests/battles, even if I still have to decide some part of the plot (alas a very important one, and I’m a bit stuck). I also have decided to add a pet, a nice hellhound called Trouble. You can see the inventory image below:

Nicepet

I decided to add it because I realized that the total amount of characters with the expansion was 13… and in the new level up screen, there was an empty space! As you can see below:

Newquestlevelup

…that was unacceptable! So I’ve added this extra character/pet, which has some nice unique skills (already implemented and tested).

What you can expect in the expansion? Let’s make a list:

  • 4 new recruitable characters: Sauzer, Trouble, Chambara and Mesphit
  • 2 new “bisex” romances: you can date with male/female playing character both Mesphit and Chambara
  • several new zones, including the Tomb Of Twilight, The Cyclops tribe, The catacombs and of course, The Castle Of N’Mar
  • new interesting NPCs that will offer multiple-solution quests, Fallout-style. You’ll be able to do their quest, or change your mind and kill them! (they’re evil, so no regrets!)
  • each character will have a specific quest with unique reward item: you’ll discover more about the backgrounds of the base-game characters. Help Rei and retrieve his special Crossbow, help Draco and discover more about his past (and get a cool cloak) and so on.
  • new storyline about demons that will change the game ending and establish a new starting point for future possible games/sequels

So as you can see, there’s lots of interesting stuff in the expansion. The current goal is trying to have a beta by the end of this month! Stay tuned for more updates, and if you haven’t already, go check the original game!

The Roommates game

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Those who’re waiting impatiently for Loren expansion don’t worry! We are working on it, but after my blog was monopolized by Loren for about 4 months, I decided to talk about one of my other games in progress: the dating sim set in college life called Roommates.

The setting

You play as Anne or Max and the game takes place in a house on-campus, the Latin House. Max is a singer and a rebel, his plan is to stay in school long enough to save up enough money through part-time jobs to get by without his parent’s financial support, then drop out and start a ska band. Anne a small-town girl, studious but very shy and easily embarrassed, Anne thinks that college could be the fresh start she needs to break out of her shell. Her goal is to make at least three new friends while keeping her grades up.

The cast

They share the house with several other characters:

Isabella – A flirtatious Latina with a hardcore edge, she likes to party and have a good time, no strings attached. She wants to try everything at least once. Works at the coffee shop on campus. Openly bi.

Sally – A bleeding-heart, vegan activist girl with a cheerful demeanor, she’s always picketing or putting solar panels on roofs or out getting people to sign petitions. She has a weak stomach for horror movies or anything with gore and can’t say no to strays, even when you’re technically not supposed to keep animals in your dorm room. Works on the college farm.

 

Rakesh – A chill Indian exchange student that doesn’t let much get to him, he is an artist that believes that everything has the potential to be a canvas. Unfortunately, he doesn’t always remember to ask for permission before making things into art, leading to some disasters involving other peoples’ personal property. The male bi character.

 

Dominic – The RA (Resident Advisor, basically the person who makes sure people in the dorm aren’t breaking major school rules) and a former child prodigy, he considers college serious business and disapproves of most of what the wilder members of the house would consider fun. His rule is iron-fisted, but his ability to keep everyone corralled is probably the only thing stopping the place from burning to the ground. Works as a Teaching Assistant for the lower-level Physics classes.

 

Plus there will be more secondary characters that will have a role on the story.

 

Gameplay

 

The game is divided into three quarters, with two big breaks (Winter and Spring breaks) and each quarter is made of 6-7 weeks. During each week, some events will trigger and you can choose if to participate to the event or skip it (to save energy for job/studying).

 

There are 8 different endings in total, each ending is made of a scene CG + kiss CG, sneak peek below:
Roommates_male

Max will be able to get an ending with Anne, Sally, Isabella or Rakesh (BxB)

Roommates_female

Anne will be able to get an ending with Max, Rakesh, Dominic or Isabella (GxG)

Current progress

The art is at very good point, missing only the backgrounds and the secondary characters. The writing is still at the early stages (first weeks) but since it’s a big game will take a while before is finished. The setting is light-comedy with LOTS of fun moments. Think something like the tv show: How I Met Your Mother, to be clear 🙂

The big change of my future visual novels and dating sims

I am in process of switching to a custom engine made in Monkeycoder language that will allow me to simultaneously release the games for Pc,Mac,Flash/HTML5,iOS and Android (and in theory PSVita, if I really wanted to, but I doubt it). However, it still needs to be finished and tested and will need some more time. But at this point I am thinking to create all the future visual novels / dating sims with the new engine, instead of doing them in Renpy to have to recode them again.

I decided to take this route because at this point seems obvious that none of my games will ever appear on Steam, the only way to make good money with visual novel / dating sims (or any other indie game to be honest). So to survive I am trying this new route that at least gives me more exposure through web and the various appstores, and still grants my usual direct sales as before 🙂

That means that the imminent new releases this year will mostly be the RPGs, including Loren expansion and Planet Stronghold sequel, since for those I can’t use monkeycoder yet, building a RPG engine takes a lot of time! Speaking of Loren expansion, you can see a promo image below:

Expansionpromo

That is all for now. Have a good weekend!

The relax week

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As you know if you follow me on twitter, after Loren RPG release I decided to take a break for a week. Break from coding, but not really a total break from work 🙂 During this week both good and bad things happened:

Good things

In the first week of release, Loren is the best selling game I’ve ever made. However I must not forget that it is also the most expensive and the one that took most time, so I haven’t even recovered costs yet, and sales are starting to decrease already (that’s normal).

Of course, just a week means nothing, will have to wait at least one month or perhaps 2-3 to judge better, but so far the early results are somewhat reassuring and I don’t exclude the possibility of making more deep RPGs like this one in future.

We’ve started working already on the expansion that should be out sometimes in the next 2-3 months, depending how much content we decide to put in it 🙂

Also, the press release outcome wasn’t bad as I thought: I said last week that my PR was mostly ignored. Luckily, I spoke with a veteran indie, Chris of Arcengames, who enlightened me about how PR actually works. It’s uncommon, if not very rare, to get press coverage for a game after just one PR. You need to chase journalists, send follows up, and so on. He stated it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

So I followed his advice and sent some review codes to some journalists, and while I cannot be sure when they’ll do it, they said will review the game. This include two of the biggest review sites online, so if a review appears in those sites that would be pretty good 🙂

I made good progresses also in the other games. I got new texts for Queen Of Thieves, Roommates, Nicole. I got new art for Nicole and Planet Stronghold: Warzone. Below you can admire the Marada Knight, one of the new enemies:

Marada_knight

And this is Kurt from Nicole game, one of the 3 dateable boys:

Kurt

One last thing, curiously Bionic Heart is my best selling game on Android. I would have never thought about that, and while Android sales in general are very poor due to the rampant piracy, it’s interesting, since on desktops that game definitely doesn’t outsell Heileen or Spirited Heart.

Combined with the many ports of Flash games I’ve seen, I’m thinking that Android is a mostly male-dominated market, while iOS is more neutral or even more female oriented.

Bad things

Of course, also some bad things happened. First of all, I realized how wrong I was to commission a J-pop song for a RPG. Basically, lots of people don’t like Loren theme song, and even those who like it say that is out of place. I’ve now removed it from the main game menu (you can listen it in the credits screen) and I’m thinking to replace the trailer in the game page as well, since I’m quite sure it was hurting sales.

Even if I have already commissioned Heileen 3 song, I’m thinking won’t make theme songs anymore in future, since that money could be better spent in making the game bigger with more art or texts.

Another bad thing was the reaction of some people to the game art. I realized that as a straight male, I simply cannot understand if a female outfit is too skimpy/sexy, so from now on for the games that need to appeal both genders, or only female players, will ask the feedback of female friends.

Right now, the artist is redoing most sprites of Amber, the main character of Amber’s Magic Shop, because as my writer Aleema suggested, her outfit was completely wrong for an otome game! And beside Amber is supposed to be an alchemist and I haven’t seen one with such outfit in any game yet 😀

Of course I plan also to have games with more adult themes, like Bionic Heart 2 will be. Lots of fanservice and sexy outfits, horror/mystery, betrayal and blood. Well, like most tv series airing on TV lately, no? 😉

Loren Amazon Princess is out and postmortem

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In case you missed my newsletter or twitter announcement, the fantasy RPG game that kept me busy for the last six months is finally out!

You can download the demo from the game official page:

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

The postmortem

Making such a big game like Loren was really a tough journey. Now that I have finished it, I can confess that several points during the development of the game, I thought to quit, to cancel it. Yes, I started thinking that perhaps I could reuse the art in a simple fantasy VN, or that I tried to make something beyond my capabilities and was the biggest mistake of my indie career.

If you tried the demo, or purchased the game (thank you!) you’ll quickly realize how complex the game is. It’s a full RPG, with classes, statistics, skill trees, several characters, a detailed turn-based battle with many tactical choices, quests, different endings, map,  and more.

Now that is finished I’m really really proud of it. I’m happy to have finished it, despite several problems I had to face developing it.

The bad

As I already wrote, the bad is that is a game that is quite hard for a small team to make. I want to thank again Aleema (the writer) and Anima (the coder) for their effort, but even with their help, “assembling” the game was still a real pain.

It was also my fault, because from the initial design, I added lots more skills and more complexity to the game. The result, as you’ll notice, is very good since there are lots of different strategies to win the game, lots of different character skills customizations. That’s a clear sign that I made a good job with the design, however implementing it was a real NIGHTMARE.

The problem with RPGs is that there are so many gameplay elements linked together, that is easy to break everything: when you fix a bug in a point of the game, there are good changes that you’re adding a new one in another point! Add to this that I didn’t have an autoupdater in place, and every time I had to reupload the whole game (100mb) I cried.

As you can see, “the bad side” is not really bad because I screwed up something, but because it’s just how hard those kind of games are to make. I’d say is the hardest kind of game you can make nowadays.

So, now I know that if I ever start a new one beside the already planned expansion, will need to restrain myself from adding too many features, because each new feature is extra pain to debug and extra weeks to test.

The good

I had a fantastic support from several people who pre-ordered the game as soon as it was out, and helped a lot during the beta testing phase. The beta testing lasted two months, during those I had lots of feedback: both bugs/typos report but also very good suggestions to improve the gameplay.

Of course I wasn’t able to implement all of them, but the ones I implemented really helped making the game even better than it was.

I think the final result is awesome – I usually am pretty modest with my games, but this time I’m breaking the rule, because I think Loren is the best game I’ve ever made and I’m not even sure if I’ll ever make a better one.

Yesterday I sent the game PR and a BIG site showed interest in reviewing it, even if I know from past experience that I must not get too much excited until I see the actual review.

Conclusion

Even if I sent it just yesterday, I can say that the press release was the usual disappointment, the game was mostly ignored (except that big site above that I won’t mention now) and people quickly labeled it as “just another bishoujo game” just looking at screenshots. But that’s something I am used to 🙂

I was however pleasantly surprised to see how much traffic I got from social network like Twitter, Facebook, etc. Seems really like that lots of people started talking about the game. Not journalists, not websites, but people who discovered the game through other friends, the infamous word of mouth!

In the end, is still too early to draw any conclusion. Anything can happen from now until the end of the month, and will most likely decide if I’m going to make more games like Loren in future or not. So if you’re reading this and enjoyed Loren, and want to see more games like this, you know what to do – spread the word about it. Contact the big websites and tell them to review it – maybe they’ll listen to you more than they listen to me 😉