Category Archives: planet stronghold 2

Planet Stronghold 2 alpha demo

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In the screenshot above: like the old times, fighting malfunctioning Roboant in the tutorial battle!

Time for an update on the RPG I’m currently working on (personally, I have other writers working on other games right now, like Volleyball Heaven and other “secret stuff”).

Last month I ran a short alpha-testing in my forums (though it was open, everyone could try the prototype) to get some early feedback on the combat. It was very useful since I already added some tweaks/features. In case you missed it, you can still try the prototype here: https://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=4153

It’s slightly outdated since I’ve changed a few things on my side already, but of course if you find more bugs or have suggestions feel free to let me know.

I think in general the RPG part of the game it’s at good point, of course I’ll do a lot of tweaks and updates like I did for my past RPGs during beta, however the base/core system is there. Now my goal is to get the isometric map working so that I can playtest myself all the missions (and side-missions) of the whole first chapter.

Currently the plan is to have the game divided into 4 chapters (not all of same length!) and have the game demo end at the end of 1st chapter with one of my usual cliffhanger scenes 😉

The main difficulty is that I’ll have to deal with a lot of things plot-wise:

  • the fact that you can begin the game either as loyal or rebel
  • the possibility to continue an existing romance, or start a new one (either with old/new characters)
  • using the non-combat skills to solve the missions in various/different ways
  • and last but not least, some more branching scenes depending on the choices

while the RPG part of this game is complex, I’d say that the plot part is not easy either! So I am first planning everything before I jump into writing scenes that maybe I have to discard later on, because I didn’t consider this path or this variable or this plot hole and so on. Maybe it doesn’t seem, and you probably won’t even notice while playing the final game, but it can be really complex and drive you nuts, believe me!

Once I have the first draft of the plot finished I’ll then start scripting the game and at the same time also code the various battles and quests, and probably add a few more along the way since I always get an inspiration to write new sidequests as I code the main game. My goal is also to have personal quests for each character, since it’s also a classic of RPG (and almost all my RPGs had this personal quest feature).

I still don’t think I’ll have the game beta finished before end of year, also because I hope to be “distracted” from working on this because I need to publish Corona Borealis and Volleyball Heaven since I know many people are waiting for those games as well 🙂

Using different artists in a game

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A complaint I heard (not too often to be honest) about Cursed Lands, was that some CG look different. Indeed, another artist did them, so that’s the reason.

When writing the game, the original content was much less (in truth it’s hilarious to say this, considering it was still around 200,000 words!!!). In case you don’t know, I added about 30-33% more content myself, in particular “extra romance scenes”. I felt the original script while was good telling the main story and characters backgrounds, didn’t go deep enough in the romances, and especially the “after”. In many games (including mine) the romance subpath ends when you make love/kiss/unlock the final scene with the love interest.

In Cursed Lands (and I plan to do the same also in future games) I wanted to break this system, since I also think romance scenes in which you’re already engaged or in a deep relationship with the love interest could be a nice bonus.

However, I faced a problem: the art was made by the same artist as Loren, who unfortunately doesn’t work for me anymore (luckily I managed to ask him all the art for Loren sequel and several more NPC/character art before he left). So the only option was to find a replacement artist for these new CGs. I think she did a good job, even if she clearly draws females better than males. Sylrissa and Nuala extra CGs in particular looks very good, while I think for example Jasper’s could have been better.

I think overall I made the right call, since from the feedback I got, the vast majority of players didn’t mind to have a different art in exchange of more content for the game. I could have just written the scenes without art, but would have been worse in my opinion.

More outfits, please!

A different situation instead is when you only add more outfit/poses to existing characters, and that’s what I’m doing with Planet Stronghold 2. I’ve already posted in the social media some images of character with new outfits (like Damien finally in a proper uniform suit).

Haha the image above shows one of the most fun bugs (though for some it might be a feature…lol) that is using a wrong variable to set the outfit of a character! Anyway, the nice underwear Lisa is wearing is one of the many new outfits added by another artist to the existing characters. Also a bit harder to notice, but even Rebecca’s pose is new: the old characters only had one pose, holding his gun in one hand. This one with both her hands on her hips is a new one.

They’re small details and maybe not immediately noticeable (well apart in specific situations like above haha) but they all add variety and if you can find an artist who has a very similar  coloring style (like in this case) the result is always going to be worth it!

Conclusions

In an ideal world, you would first write all the story, and then commission the art. However, during my career so far, I found out that this is a risky approach if you want to be able to release at least a game a year. Artists can disappear, or take long time. So maybe you wait 1 year for the big 150,000+ words script to be finished. Then, once it’s done, you commission an artist, who can take another 6 months or more (depending on how much art is needed of course). As you can see while it can work, it will delay the release, instead of using the approach to produce the art in parallel or almost with the writing (even if this has other problems too).

And it’s not uncommon to find yourself adding more content to the game as you write/code it. It happened to me for example in my old game Spirited Heart, in which to be honest the different art styles shows clearly too much (it was one of my first games though…).

Personally I’m not sure what is the best method. Whenever I found a good artist I commissioned him/her a lot of art, and then adapted the story to the existing art (I had already a basic plot planned though). After all, that’s what we did with Loren and it has worked well it seems 🙂

Mid-Year Point of Situation

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Planet Stronghold 2 character creation: pick custom skills

We’re mid-way through this 2018 and I wanted to make the point of situation. As you’re well aware if you already follow me, this year I managed to release two games already: Cursed Lands and Love Bites.

So, what’s next ? Let’s see!

Planet Stronghold 2

This is the game I’m working on mainly right now. It’s another RPG, and I’m just at the beginning (you can see a screenshot of the character creation) so don’t expect this to be out this year (but should definitely be out next).

I’m having fun so far, even if I’ll need to rewrite a good amount of code to follow the new rules (different shot types for example). The game story is currently at 50,000 words, with a general plot outline and a few character scenes done, but I’m still tweaking it.

While this game won’t be another 300,000 words game like Cursed Lands, it won’t be a small one either (I don’t know yet but probably still around 200,000 words).

So as you can see there’s still a lot of work left to do, both coding and story-wise!

Corona Borealis

This will become my first really TRUE small game in a while 🙂 However I’ve asked the writer to add a few more texts to develop the characters personalities more and get to know them better.

I don’t know yet how long will take to finish this but I think it could be out before end of year.

Volleyball Heaven

In this case the romance CGs are taking longer than expected, but as you can see from the close-up preview above (yes that’s zoomed in, despite the quality, the image is much bigger) the final result will be worth the wait 😉 also in light of recent events, we’re going to have the game playable both in censored/uncensored mode. Before we didn’t think to provide a censored / tame mode, but in the end it’s probably better to do this so will reach a broader audience.

To do this we need to do some minor adjustments both to the CGs (provide a “covered version”) and texts.

The game scripting should also start very shortly and I’ll be posting some screenshot previews as usual on the social media when I start testing it myself!

My 2018 Goals

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Political intrigue! Hot milfs! Cursed Lands has it all!

First of all, Happy New Year! Let’s see what I hope to achieve this year.

Considering how went in the past years, this time I’ll try to be more realistic. Of course two games already in progress (Love Bites and Cursed Lands) should really be finished this year, plus some more possibilities:

Cursed Lands – I don’t know exactly when it will be out, because with RPGs is really hard to set a good estimate release. Let’s say I get all the writing by June (just a worse-case scenario). The game should be finished by Fall of this year, even considering long time to do balancing, etc. Of course as soon as I finish the second act/full moon, I’ll update the current beta version.

Love Bites – Even in this case I can’t say exactly when it will be out, but since it’s not a RPG, once I have all the writing should be a matter of weeks. I want to be a bit more optimistic and say Spring in this case.

Volleyball Heaven – like above, in this case while the writing is basically done, there’s still a lot of art to draw, and do the scripting of the whole story. So it depends on those two things mainly, plus some extra coding required. I think that Summer could be a good estimate.

Anyway just looking at the last title above, I hope you understand why I’m done announcing games: even if VBH writing was 99% finished when I announced it, it was last Summer! And the estimate release is this Summer. One year. For an almost finished game. And it’s honestly nobody’s fault, everyone involved worked hard on it, just a series of bad luck happened.

That’s why I won’t talk about the current games in progress and it was a mistake doing it in the past.

I can also say that I have a few ideas for some SHORT GAMES ™ that I could write myself with an editor’s help. Of course for my standards “short game” will probably mean at least 70-80k words lol

And then there’s Planet Stronghold 2, I didn’t include it in this year of possible releases only because I honestly don’t think I’ll manage to finish it. After all I am already doing another RPG this year, and after I finish it I’ll probably need a few months to recover. So an early next year release it’s a more likely outcome for PS2. But you never know what’s going to happen 🙂

That’s all, and Happy New Year again!

Merry Christmas

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First of all, Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays to you all! 🙂 Like every year I’m doing a promo sale for the holidays, on itch.io and on Steam.

Planet Stronghold 2

In the past weeks I also made very good progress on this game. As you know, I am currently focusing  on the rules first, and I decided to use a random items generation system (plus probably some fixed “Legendary  Items”) like I did in SOTW. The results so far are good:

As you can see, the item stats on bottom-right should be familiar to anyone who played SOTW. I decided though, thanks to my time spent playing-ahem, doing research with Destiny 2, to display in the inventory a big number for the item “power”, and the damage type/rarity and finally level. This way players can find the desired weapon more quickly and with less clicks than my other RPGs!

With the armors I do something similar, I display the overall item power, the higher resistance (like in the first game there will be energy, explosive, armor piercing, acid and psionic damage), the quality and level.

For the armors and determining the damage, I have decided to use a system derived from the Cursed Lands’ one, which at least judging from beta-tester feedback seems good. I already posted in details in forums, so if you want to know more you can visit them, but in summary the defense value will deteriorate through the course of the fight, while the resistances are percentage based and determine the amount of damage absorbed (depending on the weapon attack type obviously).

In the next weeks I’ll go on with my tests, though of course as soon as I get new content for Cursed Lands or Love Bites, I’m going to work on them since they have the priority.

Speaking of Cursed Lands and Love Bites

To speed things up, in agreement with the writer, I am working on the nagas storyline for Cursed Lands myself with the help of Heirs & Graces writer, and Love Bites writer just finished the last “solo player” scenes: like in other dating sims, you can choose to not romance anyone if you want. But since in this game the goal is to survive/find the cure for your curse, we needed to give the players the possibility to find it even if they don’t romance anyone 🙂

Expect an update for both games in the next weeks (in particular for Love Bites I should be able to have half of the whole game content in beta next month for sure).

See you next week for the end of year/summary post (I’m going to break my a post every 2 weeks rule to do that). And again, Happy Holidays!