Category Archives: roleplay games

End of the year thoughts

This 2006 was a very busy year for me. Many things happened. I managed to release two Magic Stones expansions, The Ice Queen and Haunted Mines of Vox. I updated some of my old games, adding new interesting features in Universal Boxing Manager, like the new search screen, retiring boxers, new young boxer appearing, and many minor bugfixes and gameplay enhancements. I also made Universal Binary versions of my games The Goalkeeper and Supernova: Galactic Wars.

So yes, was a very busy year, but very rewarding, also because I finished USM2, and started three more projects at same time. I can’t reveal yet the details but can tell you that one is a RPG, another is a nice “tycoon” game, and the last one is an adventure game with manga drawings that I’m making together with Sakura Games.

Oh was about to forget: Happy New Year! 🙂

New Magic Stones quests…

As I wrote in this thread in my own forums, I’m evaluating the idea of charging a very small amount of money for each new Magic Stones quest, or maybe for 2 quests at once. Why this change? because I’m starting to realize that providing a “content update” like Magic Stones ones isn’t very viable for me at this point.

When I see other devs, I realize that is very hard, since most prefer to just recycle the same engine (like Spidweb games for example) and add new content (art, characters, story, monsters, items) but they resell everytime as a new separate games. So far I had released 3 new quests for Magic Stones for free, but each one takes some amount of time because usually contains:

new enemy avatars – that means new art, description texts, statistics etc
new life/spirit avatars – those directly controllable by the user, that beside the above, requires also extra testing to ensure that the special attacks and leveling up works properly!
new quest – writing a new story, arranging the “path quest” with the various choices, testing each single battle to avoid making impossible ones (even at highest difficulty setting they should be all winnable)

So as you can see isn’t a “small update” like it happens in other games. I put a poll in forums, but I am definitely thinking that this is the only way I could continue to provide new quests in future 😐

Magic stones online stats!

Today was tired of working on USM2 and also was challenged by my friend patrice to make a sort of “online druid viewer” (lol should copyright that phrase) for my game Magic Stones. For now I just made a temporary page but works already! In the game you can choose to upload your druid stats online, and then you’ll be able to login into a page using your game registration info to personalize it.

I’m still in the initial phase and need some more time, I think I’ll release this new feature in the new version of the game during this Christmas 2006. The biggest problem right now are the artifacts, since they’re randomly generated in the game itself… 😐

I’m having a mad idea… have the artifact “global” and then use the online system to make a sort of “online trading” for artifacts ! hmm well the idea is quite cool I think but I hope doesn’t take too much to be implemented :p

Empires and Dungeons

Today while browsing on internet I found a nice game from Niels Bauer, called “Empires and Dungeons”. It is a sort of mix between dungeon exploration and military conquest, in the style of Civilization or better the old Heroes of Might and Magic series. It has lot of features, like resource management, units/structures building and battles with various options.
The tutorial is very well done explaining every single step, so even if you aren’t exactly an expert of strategy/rpg games, you’ll be able to understand how to play it. Was really a pleasant surprise for me, always looking for more games of this kind.

Well done! 😉

beware of the mudman!

mudman

Ok the last few minor bugs of Magic Stones have been fixed, so I officially released the version 1.1.8 with the new quest “Haunted Mines of Vox”. One of my favourite new avatar opponent is the mudman, pictured above. You’ll have to think carefully to beat them, because their special skill is to reproduce themselves! I took inspiration from a old anime I saw when was younger (don’t remember the name sadly) in which there was a powerful enemy like that one that was capable of quickly reproducing himself, making him almost unbeatable 🙂