Rumi Kai

Rumi Kai originally joined the military as field medic. However, one day Lieutenant Shatz saw her psionic skills at work and convinced her to become a combat soldier. What Shatz couldn’t imagine was how mistreated Rumi would be at the training camp. The camp’s zealous scientists found out that Rumi’s psionic index was two levels higher than the maximum level ever recorded in the time of Graciela Reyes (one of the first human psionics). Thus they began the “experiments.”

Rumi was no more than a test subject, and unfortunately during her “training time” she lost her sight. Luckly, once Tom found out what was happening to Rumi, he used all his influence so that she could be released and join the regular army.

Since then, Rumi Kai has always been considered an invaluable member of the team thanks mainly to her incredible psionic skills and code of honor similar to that of the ancient samurai. She treats enemies with respect, opposes decisions that she doesn’t consider “honorable”, and sometimes can show admiration for the most formidable opponents.

Progress update

The blog posts are written every 2 weeks so the info here is not super up to date, however for those not following me on the other social networks, I have tweaked how the skill checks work. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Initially I simply reused Cursed Lands skillcheck system. That means: if you have the required value of skill XYZ, the check is successful. However I quickly noticed during testing that it wouldn’t work in this case, for a simple reason: in Cursed Lands the checks were done only for the main protagonist, here instead any member of the current team can do the check!

As you imagine this meant that out of 6 active party member characters it would be very easy to find someone with the required skill, so I decided to change it this way:

• if you have the required skill level with any character, it will always be successful (100% success chance). For example, a choice requiring Stealth II will always be successful if you have anyone in your party with Stealth II
• if nobody has the required skill value, the success will be percentage based. For example in the screenshot above, the check is for Stealth II, and Rebecca only has Stealth I. There will be 50% chances of success

Differently from the first game, the random number are generated in a way so that the infamous “save scumming” is not working. Even if you save before the skill check and reload 1000 times, the result for that particular check with that particular character will remain the same.

I’m doing it this way since in the first game was a common strategy to save just before a skill check and try until you make it. However on the other hand, the success percentages here will be higher on average, so you should be really unlucky to fail a check (and even if you fail it’s not a game over anyway).

For Jacob sadly I don’t have any camp talk image. We did first the love interests ones, and we kept Philipp and Jacob as last. Artist managed to do Philipp but then she was too busy to finish even Jacob. Poor Jacob!

So instead of his camp talk screenshot you can admire in the video above some new nice battle effects I’ve added to the game.

Jacob Miles

Jacob Miles was raised by androids on Planet Stronghold. He kept his identity a secret from everyone except Captain Nelson: Jacob is half-human and half-alien. His father was one of the last few survivors of the Zhion, an alien race of powerful psionicists. Because of this, Jacob inherited a very strong psionic affinity from his father. He is regarded as one of the strongest psionicists of the whole colony, second only to Rumi Kai.

Even if he is half-alien, Jacob believes that ideals are stronger than belonging to a group. He has no regrets if he needs to fight against other aliens if he believes in what he is fighting for.

While Jacob can be a good soldier on the battlefield, his main interests are in the sciences. He spends every single moment of his spare time in the science labs of the colony, collecting and analyzing data on Planet Stronghold’s bio-diversity.

At the end of the war with the Descorians, he asked to reassigned to the research department where he felt more useful there in times of peace. However, this peace seems to be coming to an end, and Captain Nelson might need his skills on the battlefield once more.

Halloween Sale

Like all years, the seasons of sales kicks off with Halloween. I’m doing a small Halloween sale on itchio.

Older games are 25% off:

https://itch.io/s/13571/winter-wolves-halloween-sale-older-games

Newer games (the 2 released this year) are 15% off:

https://itch.io/s/13572/winter-wolves-halloween-sale-recent-games

There will be one on Steam as well, but I am not allowed to say when sorry!

Tom Shatz

Before joining the army, Tom Shatz was a professional racer. He is still passionate about high speed and vehicles of all types. With modern ships, he likes to turn off the ship AI and take personal control.

Tom strongly believes in the military hierarchy, and will sacrifice soldiers on the frontline to win a battle if necessary. He believes those higher in command have a better picture of what’s going on, and they should be the ones making decisions.

Tom and Rebecca used to date, but that was long before Nelson arrived at the colony Zero-One. Though he may not show it, wrapped up in military matters as he is, Tom would do anything for love, even if he sometimes appears a bit clumsy and inexperienced.

At the end of the first game, Tom was assigned to Colony Zero-Two by the newly promoted Captain Nelson. Tom did so well in the new colony that he was promoted to Captain as well. Nelson and him communicate regularly, discussing matter that only Captains have to face.

Progress Update

I finally finished the crafting screen, that part took me much longer than I thought (sometimes it happens that you greatly underestimate how much adding a “simple” feature as crafting/upgrading might take).

The screen above is the tutorial, as you can see I added also a few other things. Salvaging items to obtain resources is obvious. Datapads work like this: they contain specific item data, you can see a sort of preview of the item but not the exact stats, until you decrypt it. Once a datapad is decrypted, you unlock that item’s blueprint and then you can produce as many as you want (as long as you have enough resources).

This is actually more useful than you might think, especially for armors, or when facing certain battles. For example if you know a boss enemy is weak to Explosive damage, and you have a datapad for an Explosive weapon, you could craft 2-3 of those and equip a good amount of the party with it (of course not all characters could use that weapon).

In general I think the system I made offers a good compromise: I didn’t want crafting to be super powerful, but not useless either. Casual players might even not need it (because the battles will be easier) but I think in Nightmare mode it will be very useful.

Fun fact: Rebecca was the first character I commissioned for this game back in 2010, after Lisa. Originally the game didn’t have a playable male protagonist, Joshua was named “Gunnar” and was a secondary NPC! Then after some feedback I decided also to add a male protagonist (Planet Stronghold 1 was my first game to feature both a male and female playable character).

Rebecca Fox

Rebecca Fox is considered to be the best scout/sharpshooter of Planet Stronghold even if Philipp might disagree. Despite what one might expect, she doesn’t come from a family with a military background. Her lineage contains famous journalists, actresses, models — nothing to do with shooting targets with deadly accuracy from long range.

Rebecca Fox is very competitive, and spends a lot of time in the gym training and honing her skills. She often encourages others to do so as well, offering to train them. She is not stupid, but sometimes she rushes into battle or takes risks that she would normally avoid trying to impress her companions and reassure herself about her abilities.

She can be quite bold, ignoring the chain of command to speak her mind. However she has never disobeyed a direct order; even when she broke up with Tom Shatz and he was her commander, she never let personal feelings endanger her companions.

Rebecca is a very confident woman, and doesn’t restrain herself from showing off her body. After all those hours spent in the gym, it would be a pity to not show the results, though in matters of love, her aggressiveness has often intimidated more than one man from getting closer.

Rebecca’s sister, Cassidy, was in the army as a field medic but was killed years ago by aliens. While Rebecca doesn’t unconditionally hate all aliens (at least not as much as Philipp does), her sister’s death left a deep mark on her, leading her to distrust most aliens, possibly more so with especially manipulative ones like Queen Shiler.

Meanwhile, work on the game continues. I basically finished the crafting system, I’ll talk about it in details maybe in a future post, but the most interesting feature is the possibility to upgrade the Rare/Legendary items, so if you are attached to a specific item you can keep using it until the end of the game (assuming you find enough resources for the upgrade process!)

Before you think I’m crazy, let me explain: I am going to do a series of blog posts about Planet Stronghold 2 cast, re-introducing the old characters as well. Why? Well first of all, I never did it before (at the times of making the first game, I wasn’t doing this sort of thing). Second, because over 7 years have passed since the release of the first title (PS1 was out in Spring 2011…!) I can’t say I remember clearly every detail of the characters’ background, personality, story, etc. So it will be helpful also to me. Plus, it will be an excuse to show some of the new outfits I’ve commissioned for the characters! For example the new “gym outfits” below:

During the next months I’ll introduce the old cast and also the new ones. I’ll take some breaks to do the usual end of year/new year blog post, or in case I have a new game announcement to do… 😉

Let’s start of course from the protagonist, Lisa or Joshua Nelson. I’ll write this intro as if they were both present in the story but of course, you can choose to play as either Lisa or Joshua on every playthrough.

Lisa and Joshua Nelson

Lisa/Joshua doesn’t remember much about their parents who were assassinated on the colony of Mars when they were only five. Raised in an orphanage, once they reached the age of adulthood, they joined the military.

They graduated as the top recruit of the wole military academy, and shortly thereafter were assigned to the colony on Planet Stronghold. Once there, they discovered that their father worked at the colony as a scientist, and their grandfather did as well. Albeit the official records were destroyed during a ferocious war, the legend of John Nelson is very popular on Planet Stronghold, and everyone, Lisa/Joshua included, started to think that they were the true descendant of John Nelson.

Lisa/Joshua played a key role in the events following their arrival, until they defeated the fearsome Descorian, a race of sentient robots.

Because of their exceptional performance, Lisa/Joshua were promoted to colony Captain of the colony Zero-One, while Tom Shatz, the current captain, was reassigned to Zero-Two, the second biggest colony on Planet Stronghold.

With great power comes greater responsibilities they say, and this case is no exception. The story begins several years after the victory against the Descorian, and we find an exhaused Lisa/Joshua trying to keep everything together while the colony seems to be collapsing at every turn: food and water scarcity, revolts, and mysterious earthquakes shattering Planet Stronghold’s surface.