Category Archives: roleplay games

Planet Stronghold Public Alpha 1

I’m proud to finally announce the first public Alpha of my next game Planet Stronghold. For those who don’t know what it is, I’m currently also building the official website which will also contain more info about the story and each character, but for now I can tell you what you’ll find in the game:

a manga sci-fi roleplaying game – with beautiful art and really varied characters (not all the same good-looking boys/girls you find in manga games)
two different heroes to choose (male / female) – The choice will only impact the romance and few situations in the game, but the statistics / skills / gameplay will have no differences
battle system – similar to those you find in JRPG titles and a gameplay similar to adventure games
romace option – romance was always present in all my recent story-based game and this won’t be an exception, including new homosexual romance option for both the male / female characters! The romance is entirely optional so if you’re not interested in it, you won’t see it at all (you won’t have the chance to stumble in it by accident)
relationship system – with any of the 8 charaters beside the main hero. Keep them happy to increase their skills, piss them off and if you push it too much they could even leave your party!
autoupdating – I’m experimenting with an autoupdate system that should allow me to release updates on server-side, and players to download only the changed part. No more “redownload the whole game to get latest update” like before! 🙂

Instead what you won’t find on the game:

tilemaps – if you’re a RPGMaker fan, sorry to disappoint, but I really preferred to concentrate my time on writing the story and characters interactions than mapmaking. There will be a generic map to move from a location to the other though
puzzles – since I’m building this game system from scratch, for this first game I want to concentrate more on the battles, the skills, the statistics and variety of enemies, than puzzles. However I’ll have an interesting character training system. More on this later.
offline play – to play most of the game past the alpha version you’ll need to be online. Partly to protect me from piracy, but also to offer new features like achievements, autoupdates, new missions / maps / weapons / items and so on.

Are you still here? Good because now comes the good part, the download links:

http://www.didone.com/games/PSDemo.exe (Pc Version)
http://www.didone.com/games/PSDemo.zip (Mac Version)
http://www.didone.com/games/PSDemo.tar.bz2 (Linux Version)

I absolutely love to get feedback on gameplay and/or any bugs you encounter. Especially for the mac and linux platform, since I have already many testers on Pc! The build uses a very new version of Ren’Py game engine so you should be able to play with openGL acceleration enabled (press key F to go fullscreen).

Thanks and I hope you’ll enjoy the first alpha, even if is quite short for now 😀

Making story-based MMOs ?

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It sounds impossible, doesn’t it?

While talking with some other developers last day, it appears clear that to survive in the struggle that is happening right now in the shareware games (in which we are seeing the return of middlemen, cutting indie revenues even more) there’s only one effective way: do online / MMO games.

As a player personally I hate them. I was a long-time player of Everquest, but when I started working I didn’t had hours to spend (waste) into that kind of game anymore. Anyway, as developer, I can clearly see how this is the only viable solution for long-term revenues nowadays.

Problem: how do I integrate online/multiplayer/MMO with a story-based game ? I’ve come up with some ideas, nothing really new of course:

making simple flash / JS singleplayer online games – this would mainly have the purpose to eliminate completely piracy, but no particular advantages for the player
do some sort of series of games centered around a character – somewhat similar to what I’m doing with Vera Blanc, but not simple offline downloadable games, but a series of games connected each other, using achievements and maybe even some RPG elements. However this is a big risk since if the first episode for some reason doesn’t sell, it’s really not worthwhile to continue the others
a MMO based on missions, each mission with a story, still playable as single player, maybe with some limited player to player interactions (but not real-time) – I like this idea, like a collection of stories, each story representing a mission (like in a fantasy or sci-fi RPG) that the player must complete, playing as single player game

I think it is possible to come up with something like that, keeping in mind to focus on the single player experience. I would love for example to do a sequel for Bionic Heart, but apart some art problems (I would still need to wait for the artist Rebecca to be free, which will be next year anyway!!) I would need more guarantees to make it. The first game was VERY popular amongst male, sci-fi userbase, as much that I got lots of emails asking me about a sequel. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, there’s also lots of piracy in that market segment: so much that clearly damaged the direct sales, demotivating me from even just considering the option to make a sequel!

This is one of the most common situations for a developer and I hate it: have a game that has a good following of “true-fans” (people who would instantly buy a sequel) but that unfortunately has also a lot of piracy, so that makes me think twice before starting a sequel 🙁 So it’s really not a surprise that many of my developer friends completely abandoned the road of single-player offline games, and I believe many will in the near future.

I would love to start something new like this. Imagine a normal game like my others, but that could connect and auto-update, downloading new chapters, books or missions. I could add the new content anytime, after 2 weeks, after 1 year, of the initial game release (of course with some sort of notification like email/newsletter). Each content could be only a small fee, so there would be less risk for me and less money to pay for the player.

Yes I like this solution, maybe I could try it already with my next game Planet Stronghold… by the way an alpha is coming out very soon!

Living in a fantasy world

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Who wouldn’t like to? Stop playing the Sims and enjoy a fantasy life with Spirited Heart!

Ahem, sorry about the ad. I wanted to talk about the spin-off of my fantasy life simulation game which I released last year. First of all, I’m still in the early stages so is hard to tell when it will be finished. Previously I said maybe for Christmas but at this point I doubt it, since I want also finish Planet Stronghold first.

I can reveal a bit more info about the game itself. While Spirited Heart was set in the imaginary town of Triberg, and the whole game took place there, in this spin-off there will be already a major difference: you’ll be able to relocate in any town of a whole region. Have yet to decide how many towns there will be, but is very likely the amount will be around 20 or so.

This choice won’t be purely to provide more content, but will greatly influence the whole game, for example:

some towns will have exclusive crafting materials. For exeample they will be built nearby mines of various precious metals, essential for certain jobs
some will have Masters of certain skills, for example Master in Tailoring. During the game you’ll be able to train and learn skill like before, but to unlock special skill levels you’ll need specific trainers found only in certain towns
each town will have different quests: yes, there will be combat in the game! \o/ I always wanted to introduce combat, so people won’t describe this new game as “it’s a visual novel with RPG element” but as true RPG! 🙂
based on your character race, season, origins there will be a specific “global quest” that will involve performing certain tasks spread through the whole region
being the game online-based, new towns with new features can be added anytime to the game

About the last point, I already explained how this game will take advantage of the online feature. The game on each run will auto-update itself, to provide the user with the latest version available. At same time will notify of new features like new towns, quests or items. That is my goal for this game, to start moving finally to the new era of online games. So, except for last minute technical difficulties, the game will be online only (a big step for me, but I feel is necessary for this kind of game).

As you can see from the thumbnail on the side, I’m also investing lot of money on assets to produce a game with great art. I really believe this will turn out to be one of my most beautiful games 🙂

The title and everything in that picture is just a mockup, so definitely a Work-In-Progress! But I think it already shows off the kind of art you can expect in the full game.

That’s it for now, I’m really eager to begin working on this game, but since is probably my most ambitious game ever, I’ll take it easy and cure it in every small details!

Will social / online games completely replace traditional offline gaming?

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Short answer: No.

Long reply:

If you’re a developer or just a player, you’ll have noticed reading all around the net that social /online games “ARE THE FUTURE”. Literally everyone is doing it. Even Google, with his NaCl and the upcoming Chrome Appstore (at least with it people will be able to use their existing code and not use Flash or Javascript!).

But what exactly does this means for players, for indies and for the big AAA studios. I honestly belive that this is just a hype, a bubble that is going to explode. Still, we’re at the very beginning so many YEARS will pass before it’s gone. Let me explain better what I mean in some points:

1. I think players just look at the GAME, at the experience, they don’t care much if is online/offline or in which language is written to.
2. Social games right now are doing most damage to casual games. Also while I don’t have any real figures I really believe that this enormous amount of free content is going to damage everyone in the casual games industry, so that at one point it will have to end or shrink. People that once used to buy casual games from portals, now spend MONTHS playing the social games spending a ridiculous amount of money vs the time spent on them. Maybe also the crisis is helping this?
3. “Downloadables are dead”. This is far from being true. Steam basically is a giant, huge, downloadable webstore. There are many indies doing GREAT with downloadables. I’ve recently been selling Eschalon Book 2 as affiliate and honestly the download market doesn’t seem dead at all… 😉
4. There isn’t just one type of gamer, but several types. There are also taste changes based on the age and time constraint. I myself was playing Everquest almost 10h a day when I was at the university (doing nothing), then when I started to work seriously I completely quit that game and now I don’t play any MMORPG at all. I’ve noticed this same pattern amongst many other friend I know. So, a people’s tastes can vary/change greatly over the years
5. I know many younger people that don’t care about Facebook or social games in general. It’s a bit like saying that nowadays nobody reads books anymore because everyone watches TV or play games 😉 That is not true. You can still make quite good money with books, as well as other creative mediums.

So, while it’s clearly true that right now your best bet to make money is a social, online or MMO game (I’m doing some online game experiments too), this doesn’t mean that everything else is going to be dead soon. It all depends on your target market: if your target are teenagers or casual people, your best bet is to make a FB game now, rather than a downloadable (and still, a decent game on top10 of a major portal like BFG can bring in still LOT of money).

If you’re into niches like I am, you definitely don’t need to worry about which system you’re using. If your game can benefit from being online (for example to reduce the impact of piracy), then do it, otherwise you can just keep doing downloadables like Spiderweb is doing: he just announced his new game series called Avadon (I find hilarious the name because is very similar to Avalon). It will be a downloadable as always, he’s doing it since 1999 (or sooner, I forgot) and it’s surely easier than changing completely the kind of language/platform/system.

What about me? I am making some experiments right now with a Renpy downloadable client+php/mySQL server, and I must admit is VERY HARD. I am making it though 🙂 But I have intention of keeping this project running as a “side-project” because I want still to make normal downloadable games as well.

Time for a screenshot I think:

Not hard to guess what kind of game it is… 😉

Yes, I’m making a horror game too

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva