Category Archives: roleplay games

Happy Easter

First of all want to wish you Happy Easter! 🙂

Second, Always Remember Me is finally released on Steam, after a week of delay! Sorry about that.
Check it out here and spread the word: http://store.steampowered.com/app/291030

Seasons Of the Wolf update

As you know if you follow me in the social networks, my efforts now are all focused on finishing the first season of the RPG Seasons Of The Wolf. I’ve said it already but worth repeating: the first seasons doesn’t mean 1/4 of the game! The first is shorter than the others, even if now I’m adding several sidequests to make it longer. Also will feature only 3 characters, Althea, Shea and Vaelis, so no romance dialogues. But worry not, they’ll come later in the story.

Don’t be fooled by their cute appearance, ratmen encounters are tough!

So far coded two sidequests. Some were written with the help of an additional writer, others, shorter ones I’ll write them myself. Of course, will proofread them too 😉

At same time I’ve done some last tweaks to the game framework/rules. I can still do a few tweaks until I go on in season two. So that’s why I plan to make an open beta and let people play the first season: if there are some MINOR changes that can be done (not rewrite all the skills for example!) that beta will be good to find them out.

One of the tweaks is the cost of allocating each attribute point

For example, I discovered that the attribute points allocation needed some tweaks. Before was 1 attribute point to increase each attribute. But I shortly realized that this way, if you put ALL of them in Constitution (which raises HP) at the end of the game you would get 750HP which is a “bit too much” 😀

Same issues happened with other attributes as well, so I used an “old trick”, increasing the cost of each attribute increase based on the level (as explained in the screenshot’s text above).

Going back to work now, because I’m still trying to finish the 1st Season by end of month, even if won’t be easy 😉

The importance of randomness

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In the screenshot above, the new random items in all their splendor!

I’ve been recently playing Diablo3 on the PS3. I can hear a voice in my head saying:

“What? You’re playing!? Go back immediately to work on the games!”

But NO! Doing research is important for every business, so I decided to force myself to play it (also an excuse to use the PS3 for something since the recent PS+ games have been a bit disappointing for my tastes).

I played more and… I had the idea to implement random items on my next RPG, Seasons Of The Wolf 🙂

One of the strong points of Diablo has always been the use of the random element. I am not sure if other games before it used it so well. I fairly remember the first game, and how every match was different.

Obviously, since I make story-based games, I cannot rely too much on the randomness, since the plot follow a linear path, some locations must be fixed, the characters too, etc. I cannot also generate random maps or dungeon (at least for now!) so the only random element I could add was in the items/loot.

A test for the looting screen. Of course in the real game you rarely will get so much stuff!

And I must say that it works VERY WELL. Now whenever I kill an enemy during testing I wonder what item I’ll get – is pretty exciting! Of course the drop rate is not high, rather than flooding the inventory with garbage that you’d have to resell it immediately I decided to limit the amount, but increase the average quality.

In general the rare items are, rare, but also depends on the enemy. Boss enemies now will drop obviously higher level loot 😉

I decided to go with the following tiers: Rusty, Standard, Fine, Quality, Excellent, Masterwork, Rare and Legendary. Legendary is the only item that is not randomly generated, since I still want to have control over the most powerful items, so I’ll define those manually. They’ll also be unique and have a unique name.

To help the player recognize better the top items, the Fine/Masterwork/Rare/Legendary have a different color and a small letter with the initial of the word near the item icon in the inventory.

Overall, it took me a week of hard work (last weekend I worked 10h/day straight!!) but now that is working I must say that was time well spent! 🙂

I’ve seen the (green)light

In other, but no less important, news, three more of my games were greenlit yesterday! They are Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook, Always Remember Me and of course Planet Stronghold (was about time!).

I plan to release Always Remember Me next weekend, if all goes well. And the others coming shortly after in next weeks. Stay tuned 🙂

Winter is over! A Roommates postmortem

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Today the 21st March, is the first day of Spring!

I have to say that this was a very mild Winter, so I didn’t had to shovel snow for hours, nor had problems to drive in icy raods, and so on. Overall under this aspect was a very good Winter! Lots of things happened, first game on Steam and Roommates release. Speaking of it…

Roommates postmortem!

As you know if you follow me regularly, earlier this month I released the comedy dating sim Roommates.

Like Max in the image above, I can say that I wouldn’t be where I am right now without your constant support and motivation/push (some people are more or less nice regarding this, but it’s effective in all cases!).

Roommates is a special game, for several reasons:

was the first game to have a full soundtrack, including theme song, done by a popular group, Leetstreet Boys
was the first dating sim I made where you could play as both genders, and have a variety of romances including yuri/yaoi
was the first comedy game. Is true that many other games had many funny scenes, but if you’ve played even only the demo you can see the difference!
was my most expensive dating sim to date (full soundtrack, 200.000 words of script, 16 CGs, 27 background images, sprites with normal, spring, winter, summer clothes, etc)
was the first one that I coded using the new Ren’Py, incorporating mobile code changes directly in the script without the need to have two separate code-bases

So as you can imagine, with such an ambitious game, there were good chances that something could go wrong! Luckily, everything went rather smoothly: I’m proud to say that even after only a month, it’s clearly going to be my most popular dating sim ever!

I’m particularly happy because I also found a good and reliable writer, Michael Van Horn, who is now working on Loren’s next games. He was supposed to write Undead Lily next, but Loren has higher priority. Maybe he can still work on it after the second chapter of Loren’s saga is out though 😉

In summary: I wish all the next games’ releases would go as smoothly as Roommates! I have doubts that this will happen though 😀

Quick SOTW update

I have also good news about this game: finally finished designing/coding/testing ALL the skills of Seasons Of The Wolf!

Which means that now I can go back adding all the content for the Winter Season (the first act of the game). I am still aiming at finishing that in time for my birthday (11th April) but of course I’m talking only about the beta/preorder version.

The final / full game is more likely to be out in August/Semptember, depending how testing goes (also still have a few images and music to finish).

I have also got some new ideas on how to implement items while playing Diablo 3 on the PS3, so I need to implement that new system too. More info coming in next weeks!

The Spring Of The Wolf

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Rowinda in her typical serious attire, featuring the Madness spell 😀

This Spring will be the Season Of The Wolf (when I’ll release the first beta of this game). So technically I have time until the 21st June 😉

Jokes apart as I said in previous post too, I hope to have the beta done by next month. The extra delay is due to some last minute decisions: as you can notice from the screenshot above, I decided to remove the skilltree system, allowing the players to decide which skill to learn in any order.

This also means that each character will have 12 unique skills, no more variations like Blizzard I, II & III. Of course, some skills are variations of others, I don’t claim that I have made over 100 skills ALL UNIQUE! 🙂 However, I really feel I have pushed the original Loren RPG framework to its limits in this game, some spells/skills are quite interesting.

The beta will include only the first Season (Winter), but at least will give people a good idea of what to expect if they decide to pre-order the game. A part of delay is also due to new random enemies that I need to do (wild animals, etc) and also to the tileset system:

SOTW will feature an isometric multi-screen map with hotspots to explore

Now don’t expect a scrollable map, but the map can be split into several screens, so I can make bigger maps. There’ll be various “hotspots”, marked with arrows:

a green arrow means that the interaction will be completely safe (like traveling to another zone)
an orange arrow means that there’s the risk of some encounters. In the screen above you can check the trap to see if you caught any wild animal, but there’s the risk of being attacked
a red arrow means that you’ll surely face an hostile encounter (wandering bandits, a monster, etc)

I’m considering if to add a golden arrow to display the current objective, but I don’t think I’ll need it since the main plot is rather simple, at least in the first part.

Anyway, I spent the last week on the new skills (still need to finish them) and also in adding hidden stuff in the map. For example a graveyard location that can be explored for a big sidequest, and subsequently also to do some good old skeleton skulls bashing 🙂

I am also going to implement a sort of limited grinding: there’ll be a simulated time in the game, so players will be able to explore, but when they reach the next key event “deadline”, the plot will advance. This way, I can make sure that the player don’t grind up to level 30 (the level cap) only in the first part of the story! 😀

That’s all for now, I have more news for the other games, but will keep them for the next weeks, so I have something to write!

Roommates officially out + video!

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Here’s the official Roommates video trailer with theme song “My Name In Light” by Leetstreet boys!

That was the last thing missing to officially release the game Roommates. More info and download/buy links here: http://www.winterwolves.com/roommates.htm

I have also submitted the game to Greenlight, so if you liked it, please vote for it:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=233332314

The game is also available for iOS:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/roommates-visual-novel/id827116639?mt=8

and Google/Amazon appstores for Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.winterwolves.roommates
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IK44NA6

Meanwhile…

…work on the other games continues! C-14 Dating is coming along nicely, found a new writer for Nicole yuri to speed things up, but fans of RPGs will be pleased to know that I’m going to add more unique skills to my next RPG Seasons Of The Wolf, for a total of 108 unique skills!

I’m also going to remove the “skilltree” system and just make all the skills available to learn in any order, like you see in the work-in-progress screenshot below:

So in summary, combined with the more attributes (6 in total vs the 3 of Loren) the game will offer much more customization possible for the party, hopefully increasing the replayability / fun 🙂

This is the project that personally I’m working on, and I have almost everything needed (I just got the lineart of the kissing scenes!) so you can expect quick progresses in the next months. My current deadline is to finish the first Season of the game (Winter) and begin the beta-testing/preorders in April.

This doesn’t mean that the game is going to be split in parts, but simply that I’m going to begin testing as soon as I complete the coding of a part of the story (Winter in this case). Then, as testing continues and I finish new parts of the game I’ll make them available as well, until the full game is ready 🙂

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva