Category Archives: planet stronghold 2

Bionic Heart 2 preorders open

Leave a reply

Bionic Heart 2 update…

Good news, after months of hard work Bionic Heart 2 is almost finished!

I am coding the endings in those days, and doing some extra testing because the game has so many paths that I want to test them all to make sure there are no mistakes (even if probably will miss something, but that’s what the beta testing phase is for!).

Now check this cool image:
tanyahelenwallpaper

Helen holding Tanya’s hand, eager to show her something (this image will be present in one ending as well).

Anyway, this is one of the many wallpapers you’ll get with the “bonus content” edition of Bionic Heart 2 (the real ones have resolution if 1920×1200 so will fit even the biggest monitor/resolution!). There are much more steamy images, both of female and male characters from the game 😉

Beside the wallpapers, you also get a full atmospheric soundtrack with 10 original tracks.

You can preoder the normal version clicking here. If you want the version with bonus content instead, please click here.

But there’s no hurry, both versions will be available at same price, so you can wait to play the demo first if you are unsure 🙂

…and the other games!

The other projects are advancing, more or less. Some faster, other slower, but of course depends on the game type. RPGs take a lot of time to make, as you well know 😉

Speaking of RPGs, you can read the latest sneak preview of Roger Steel in my forums here: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2887
(and catch up with the other sneak previews if you missed some)

Planet Stronghold 2 artist is working on more enemy sprites, and the last task is to draw the camp talk poses.

Roommates is also going well, writer is finishing the script and in the next months will try to talk more about this game, since I should start to decide its gameplay. Below you can see 4 new secondary characters that you’ll encounter in the game:

Finally, do you remember Queen Of Thieves? got in touch again with the artist who said will finish the latest ending scenes (they were made in a very unique style as comic pages), so I should have all the artwork needed for the game in the next months 🙂

What’s Next?

As always when people ask me what will be the next released game (apart Bionic Heart 2 of course), my reply is that I have no clue because depends on how fast are the artists/writers. Once I have everything done, usually takes me from 2 to 4 months to finish a game, depending on the complexity of course.

Deadlines

7 Replies

Deadlines are part of almost every job. With indie games, and in particular small/single indies like me, deadlines are usually self-imposed.

When I used to work in a (small) software house, we had deadlines and was a bit crazy. Every time, we had to do last-minute “crunch mode” which basically meant working 12h a day for the last weeks before the deadline. Not a great experience as you can imagine, and lots of stress!

Thank God, now that I’m indie I have more flexibility! But that still doesn’t mean that I can take as much time as I want to finish a proejct of course! A delay of one or more months will have both economical consequences (I need to regularly release new games to keep the cash flow) and also could damage my credibility (missing deadlines or delaying games is never a cool thing).

Even if I have to say that my followers are absolutely awesome and even when they ask me “when will be game XYZ be out!!?” they do it only because they’re eager to play it 🙂

Speaking of deadlines let’s see what could be some estimate release dates for upcoming games. Note how estimate is written in bold!

Bionic Heart 2

Hyppocratesresearch

Is the game closest to completion. At beginning of month, everything was going smoothly and I was thinking that the game might be finished by the end of February as I originally planned. However there have been some problems, so I can already say that I won’t be able to release it by that date.

In any case, I really think that March will finally see the release of the sequel of one of my first visual novels, Bionic Heart ! By the way, I recently lowered the first game price to $9.99 to promote the upcoming release of the sequel, so if you never played it, now is a good time 🙂

Roommates

Everything is going well on this game, even if there’s still a lot of work to do! I managed to make two new “fact file” for Isabella and Rakesh, the latest two romanceable character of the game:

Rakeshfile Isabellafile

Writing is going steady, but still need to commission all backgrounds (though I have already an artist ready for it) and of course code the gameplay, script the scenes, and so on, so is very unlikely that this will be out before June/July 🙂

Planet Stronghold 2

Well I would be lying if I was saying that everything is going well 😀 however, this game will be a big step forward compared to the first, both in term of gameplay (a much better RPG system) and writing. Good things needs time though! At least all the romance scenes are done, below you can see a sneak peek of Joshua’s romances:

Joshuaromances

Art-wise there’s still a few more enemies to finish, and some extra “camp talk” sprite poses, where each character will be in their favorite environment (guess where Philipp will be?) when you visit them to talk. I decided to do that since talking with the characters standing up like in previous game was a bit weird!

Also showing the character in a normal life situation with normal clothes and various poses will be more realistic and also more “interesting”, for example if you go visit Rebecca at the gym, or the new hot guy Milo while he’s training… understand what I mean? 😉

Heileen 3: Sea Maidens in beta

2 Replies
Reminder

Despite being buried in snow and recovering from a flu, this week still managed to finish the beta version of Heileen 3: Sea Maidens, the yuri version of Heileen 3.

Direct download link (BETA)
http://www.macgames.biz/games/Heileen3-1.1d.exe (Windows)
http://www.macgames.biz/games/Heileen3-1.1d.zip (Mac)
http://www.macgames.biz/games/Heileen3-1.1d.tar.bz2 (Linux)

Buy/Preorder links
http://www.winterwolves.com/buy.php?prod=17030053 (normal yuri version)
http://www.winterwolves.com/buy.php?prod=17030054 (yuri version with Bonus Content. Note that the Bonus Content is IDENTICAL to the “otome” version, so if you already bought that, you already have all the extra content!)

 

Discounts
Anyone who bought already the normal version has the right to a 50% discount (that is what I’ll offer as bundle once the yuri version is officially released, a discount of 25% on the whole order so it’s the equivalent of 50% of one item). So if you bought the normal version already simply email me and will send you the discount code 🙂

If you find any bugs feel free to report them in my forums here:

http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2823

Note that the new downloads contains both the otome and yuri versions, similarly to what happens for Spirited Heart. Also there are new scenes for the otome version too.

Other games

Now that Heileen 3 is getting towards the final release, I am going to get back to the other games. The next one to be released should be Bionic Heart 2. Then there are several games in the works, and one of the most important is Planet Stronghold 2. Speaking of it, check this interesting sneak peek of Lisa romances:

Lisaromances

I will post the Joshua sneak peek as soon as artist finishes the last CG scene, Joshua/Cliff 😉 but rest assured that they’re very good too. Meanwhile the coding and design for the new RPG framework continues, and next week I might officially announce a new RPG game… stay tuned.

2013 the year of challenges

5 Replies

Happy New 2013 to everyone!

Before making this post I’ve read what I wrote last year, calling 2012 the “year of relax”: https://www.winterwolves.net/blog/2012/01/2012-time-to-relax/

Well, definitely it wasn’t a relaxing year, even if I released only 3 games (I consider The Castle Of N’Mar, Loren’s expansion, as a separate game because of its size!).

It wasn’t a relaxing year because was worried that with Loren I tried to bite off more than I can chew, and I also had to make a real marathon to finish Heileen 3 in time for Christmas.

Looking back to that post, it’s a bit funny to observe how many titles that were already in progress at those times, from Planet Stronghold 2, to Nicole, to Roommates, are still in progress right now! But well, making games takes time! And in particular if there are problems. And as you can imagine, there are ALWAYS going to be problems! 😉

Good news

Anyway, I have some early good news for this year: Heileen 3 yuri version is at very good point, and I might start the beta testing even next week, since I’m aiming to release it around the mid-January.

More good news are that even Bionic Heart 2 is at good point, I’m only waiting for the proofreader to finish checking the script, and I have 90% of the art & music finished already.

The RPG challenge

As for the future games later this year, I’m really eager to start working on Planet Stronghold 2 even if will be a real challenge, because has much more features compared to the first title, and also compared to Loren. Some features include:

  • a small but detailed colony building simulation (think of it like a sort of Sim City on a very small scale) that will impact the gameplay (but I am thinking to make it optional so that you can skip it if you want)
  • lots of weapons that can be used with dual wield (like two pistols)
  • weapons with different ammo types (in the first game the ammo was unlimited). So the combo of possible weapons and ammo is very big!
  • more use of the non-combat skills in the various missions of the game
  • lots of more art, including some extra “talk poses”
  • full soundtrack of 10 songs

and so on, so as you can see is a very big project.

Being able to work on the RPG and at same time still follow the other projects will be a challenge as well, since differently from what happened with Loren, I don’t want to “abandon” completely all the other games while working on the RPG. It won’t be easy at all, but I will try!

The appstore challenge

The biggest challenge though will be to see what happens with the Windows/MacOS situation. It’s fun how some fellow indie devs who before ignored completely the question, are now starting to panic because they get emails from customers saying “the game doesn’t run on Mountain Lion, says the download is corrupted!” or they get big warning screens from Windows 8 when trying to open/install a game.

What’s going on? Well in practice, unless you were a bit prevident like me and codesigned all your game apps/installers, the end users are going to see scary messages from their favorite OSes (except Linux of course!) telling them that they’re trying to install the worst evil on Earth: an independently produced game!!! :O

And that’s not a good thing because this way small indies like me can continue to survive and rescue stray cats and dogs! Fools, you should help the already rich corporations to become even richer! They’re going to spend the money in a much better way, like buying a new Ferrari 😉

Ok, jokes apart (I was joking in case it wasn’t clear!!) the situation is definitely NOT good for indies like me who can’t get on Steam. The long term alternatives to retain our freedom exist, like using HTML5 engines, but that means that instead of seeing 3-4 games a year from me, you’d see 1 a year at most (they take much longer to make). I really hope the new appstores won’t become the only way to distribute apps on Windows/Mac computers, since that would mean no freedom to choose which language to use (python), which content to put in my games (no sexy stuff is allowed on appstores), and maybe have them rejected lots of times for silly reasons like happened to A LOT of friends on the various iOS/Win8 appstores.

Anyway, at least for now codesigning the executables will let you play all my games even on the new versions of the OSes. But I’m pretty sure that a big challenge for us indies lies ahead…! Better be ready for it 🙂

Continuing romances from previous games

1 Reply
Romances

In the image above, you see the “Romances Graph”, a thing I like to make for all my RPGs, since romance plays an important role in all my games 🙂

In practice describes all the romance options available when playing the game with both characters (genders).

Those of you who played the first Planet Stronghold game will be happy to know that I’m not writing it myself 😀 so you can expect a much better writing this time! Aleema is in charge (same writer of Loren Amazon Princess) and from what I’ve seen so far, it will be awesome. Maybe it’s because I’m a fan of sci-fi but reading the intro scenes got me the chills!

There will be time to talk about the new, refreshing plot (which will show the main character not as the classic “invincible hero”, but more his/her human aspect) but for now I want to talk about the great idea the writer had, to continue the previous game romances.

I must say in the beginning I was scared since was something I never tried to, and was unsure about how/if that could work. But now I’m sure it was a great idea!

For those worried about keeping 4-5 versions of the first game save files, no worries: I’ve decided that is pointless to do that. I mean, since the only information passed from the first game to the sequel is who you were loyal to (Empire or Rebels) and who you romanced (which character), I thought to just show that as choices to pick during the character creation, as seen below:

Romancechoice

It’s much simpler to do that 😉 in the same screen you can choose the difficulty level, your class and other stuff yet to be coded. As always remember that the screenshots posted here are all work in progress and might differ a lot from the final version.

So, based on your initial choice, the game changes, showing different scenes for every romanceable character. For example below is a screenshot from the Joshua/Rebecca intro:

Romanceintros

which you won’t see if you picked another romance or for example Lisa. This leads to a lot of variety and increases the game replayability by A LOT! 🙂

At same time, it makes everything feel more epic. It’s hard for me to describe with words, but instead of starting from zero, is like if you continue a story that apparently only ended a few years ago (of game time). Some romance intro are tender and romantic, other are tear-jerking, other are passionate, and so on. It’s refreshing for once to start one of my games with an already established relationship, and makes you even more attached to your character and his/her partner.

Obviously you can pick the choice to have no previous romances, and also you’ll be able to break your current relationship later in the story and pursue a new character. It will be interesting to read those scenes as well 🙂

Next time I hope to be talking about Heileen 3 and show you some of the rules for Planet Stronghold 2, since I’m still working on those. But I can say that differently from the first game it will use a perks system and lower scale skills.