Category Archives: planet stronghold

Planet Stronghold on Steam


As you probably are aware already if you follow me on the social networks, my sci-fi RPG Planet Stronghold is now available on Steam. Above you can see the game trailer (the info at the end is outdated though, the game is also available on iOS).

I’ve already talked in the past about the game, in particular shortly after I released it, and is fun how Steam rejected the game back in 2011, and now 3 years later there it is! They have underestimated the power of the Wolves! πŸ˜‰

Jokes apart, while I still consider Loren my best game, I’m quite affectionate to this one for two reasons: was the last game I wrote completely on my own (however is better if real native English writers take care of this aspect now!) and the first RPG/VN hybrid I made, which saved me from a sure bankrupt and put me back on track to stay indie for more years.

Seasons Of The Wolf Beta

Meanwhile, SOTW beta made a lot of progress in this last week. I admit I am a bit burned out because of how many bugs I fixed and how much balancing tweaks I made!!

First of all, while the stats-derivation method was delivering really well balanced fights (as expected) it had a huge problem: since everything was based on players behaviors, I had no reference for the battle difficulties. I couldn’t tweak a battle, I couldn’t lower or increase HP, Attack, Speed of the enemies because every time they would be different for every player πŸ™‚

So, I had to discard the system after a few updates. Oh well, I’ve tried. Live and learn!

Then started to rebalance the game again, but I forgot a small detail: the level scaling was off, so the difference of difficulty between Easy and Nightmare wasn’t big (and instead, should be VERY big). So I had to rebalance the game completely for a second time!

At one point I even took a screenshot of all the 4 difficulty mode of a boss enemy to compare the differences:

balancing
The Huge Kodiak is a boss battle in a sidequest

…yes as you can guess, I went a bit insane πŸ˜€

All of this while fixing at least 5-6 major bugs daily (in first days even 10-15!!). It is good of course, and now that I have a much bigger following is even expected, but it was quite exhausting for me. Anyway, now everything seems to be working, so I can move on coding the second Act of the game.

I’m probably going to open preorders once I have finished the second act (and is in beta) so I’m at a good point of the game.

Stay tuned because next week will resume talking about C14 Dating, the new upcoming otome game πŸ˜‰

A roleplaying weekend !

mainmenu
The game main menu, really happy about the look!

Seasons Of The Wolf: Winter Is Coming!

Haha forgive the pun πŸ™‚ But yes, the first act/season of the story is now available for beta-testing ! I am quite enthusiast of the result, and hopefully you’ll like it too. In this first season, for plot reasons you can play only 3 characters, but don’t worry, as story goes on you’ll recruit the others.

As you can see from the main menu image, the official title is Tales Of Aravorn: Seasons Of The Wolf. Why? Because I want to enter the Guinness World Records for the longest game title, that’s why!! πŸ˜€

Talking seriously, the “Tales Of Aravorn” will basically be a series of games all set in the same fantasy game world, featuring references, cameos, etc of characters and places from other games.

Beside this one, there is already in the works the two Loren games (Reign Of War, Reign of Peace), and Amber’s Magic Shop. Plus Queen Of Thieves, which I haven’t forgotten, even if I put it on hiatus (I can’t work on so many games at once anymore, I’m getting old!).

The game version already reached 0.75 (at the moment of writing this post) and had a lot of initial bugs fixed. If you want to read more and download the beta, check my forums here:

http://www.winterwolves.net/viewforum.php?f=40

I haven’t opened officially the preorders since I think is a bit too early – I don’t know yet when the final game will be released, probably in the next 3-4months but with RPGs you never know.

Today my other RPG Planet Stronghold was also supposed to go live on Steam, but there’s a big sale going on at the moment, and besides I’m also broken after fixing all SOTW bugs, so I decided to postpone the release to next week! Sorry about that, but will be just a few more days πŸ™‚

Planet Stronghold deluxe version available

I know many people after last week post are eagerly awaiting Bionic Heart 2 release. I asked Aleema to take care of it, since I was really burned out from weeks of continuous testing. I’m sure she’ll do a good job and I think the game should be out before the end of month!

Meanwhile take a look at the screenshot below:

createitems

It’s from the deluxe version of Planet Stronghold which is currently in beta testing, you can download it here: http://www.macgames.biz/games/PlanetStronghold-1.5.2-all.zip

What is this deluxe version? I needed a break from the testing, so I thought to update this old game with the latest Ren’Py version (which should improve the speed by a lot).

Since I was there I also decided to do a real update, consisting of:

  • removed the “super easy” difficult level, since even at Easy mode the game was easy enough, and added a new Nightmare mode, which could also be called “prepare to die”. Since there seems to be a new trend in making very-ultra-difficult games, I thought to do my part too!
  • but the real new feature, depicted in the image above, is a new screen that you can access by visiting the laboratory where Lucille is. You can ask her to build weapons and armors using “metal scraps”, which you can obtain looting enemies and salvaging other items you have. Some items are worse than those you can get through questing, others are better. You’ll have to find out which ones, there are about 80 new items πŸ˜‰
  • last but not least, a new GUI for the game, as you can see from the screenshots below:

The update is free for anyone who bought the “Official Strategy Guide” for the game. If you have bought only the base game you can get the strategy guide here: http://www.winterwolves.com/buy.php?prod=17030044

That’s everything for this week. Work on the other games continues, and I hope to have new interesting updates next Friday!

Loren Amazon Princess vs Planet Stronghold

As you can guess from the title of this blog post, I’m going to compare the two RPGs I made (so far). I’m not comparing them to decide which one is the best, because it wouldn’t be fair πŸ˜‰ I mean, Planet Stronghold had a budget of 1/4 of Loren, and was made completely by myself, so it wouldn’t be fair to be compared to Loren.

I’m going instead to examine the various gameplay element based on customers feedback and random forum/blog post I’ve encountered searching for my games around the net. For each point I’ll give my personal opinion, but I’m quite sure that it mainly depends on your tastes!

From now on I’ll refer to Planet Stronghold as “PS” and Loren Amazon Princess as “Loren” to save time!

The Inventory

PS uses a “classic” system: each character has his own separate inventory, they can trade items but for example if you didn’t select a character in the party, his items are unavailable during the mission.
The equipment slots are only 3, weapon, armor and usable item.

Loren uses a more “modern” system: shared inventory between all the characters. It’s less realistic, but more practical to use (minimizes the amount of clicking you need to do).
There are 13 equipment slots and a much more intuitive inventory system.

My opinion: there’s no doubt that Loren’s inventory is much more practical. It might be less realistic, but it has so many improvements over PS that is the clear winner here.

Vendors, items and impact on gameplay

Because of the setting, PS doesn’t have currency, so you get new items automatically as you progress in the story, and through special quests. Since PS uses a finely crafted combat system, where each battle was tested well, I think the weapons and armors have more impact on the gameplay than in Loren, albeit there are only 40 different weapons/armors. This also because I used a “low-HP” system, where even 5hp of damage difference matters a lot especially in the early battles.

Loren has currency, and through grinding you can afford to buy better equipment even if the best stuff is found in the quests (in particular the new character personal quests of the expansion).

Loren has a very big database of items, reaching almost 1000 different weapons, armors, usable, gems, etc. So much more variety.

A mistake I made in the design of Loren was to have weapon damage as a proportional result of the character skills, and use many hit points for each enemy/character. So in practice the impact of the weapons statistics while still noticeable, is not that big. In a game where enemies can have from 80 to 500hp, the difference between powerful weapons and medium weapons can be of less than 15-20hp on each hit. Luckily, elemental damage still applies, so there’s still some strategy involved.

My opinion: I think PS is slightly better than Loren, even if depends on your gaming tastes. In PS you need to find better weapons to win the hardest battles, on Loren is more about the skill combinations you use in battle.

Battle System

PS has 4 vs 4 battles. There’s less strategy related to positioning on the battlefield, since there isn’t a front and back row. The mechanics though, as noted above, seems to work well, in particular the aggro system.

Loren has a much more complex battle system featuring a 6 vs 6 fight, with a front and back row.  It has everything a fantasy RPG is supposed to have, including buffing, healing, area of effect attacks, guard other players, many types of attacks, and so on.

My opinion: They’re two different experiences. In Loren you can have more variety of tactics, battles tend to last longer especially at hard difficulty. Battles in PS in general are quicker, because there are less units on screen and except some special cases, enemies can’t resurrect allies. Loren has more variety of strategies and combos, but I don’t mind PS different approach.

Classes, Skills and Quests

In PS there are 4 classes: Soldier, Scout, Guardian and Psionic. The skills are 23, including the psionic skills. They use a big scale system, so values 0 to 200. On each level up you can assign skill points. The main problem is that the impact is not extremely noticeable. If you add 3 skill points on Sniper Weapons you’ll get +1 damage on each attack. Which is not really much. So takes several level ups before you see the effects of your choices.

The max recruitable characters are only 8, but in any case the characters have the same skills (even if different classes). So there aren’t character unique skills like in Loren.

One thing that was really appreciated by players is the impact of the non-combat skills on the gameplay. During several points of the game, you can decide to use a skill to perform a specific task, changing the result of the mission. A door might need Lockpicking to be opened, you can throw a grenade if you have enough knowledge of Explosives, and so on.

The quests have more variety, since depending if you play as the Empire or the Rebels you’ll see the same enemies but have very different goals to accomplish.

In Loren, the system used is the skill tree. There is a base Class (Warrior, Thief and Mage) and a specialization Class with a unique skilltree containing 5 skills. The total recruitable characters including the expansion is 14, so you have a very good variety of skills and attacks!

The story is more linear than PS (except for the expansion), so it’s more like reading a good book and fight battles at certain intervals. The fact that there aren’t non-combat skills limits the roleplay part to only the battles.

My opinion: In this case I think they both have pro and cons. The PS skills system is good because has a series of skills that can be used also outside the combat. It’s optional of course, but is interesting in some quests being able to use Explosives, Survival, Charisma skills to avoid a battle or see a different outcome. Something that Loren missed. On the other hand, the big-scale skills of PS didn’t work really well, while Loren’s skilltree was better. I think the ideal solution is a mix between the two, with lower scale skills (0 to 10 or 20).

Romances and Relationship System

PS has less romance options than Loren, but the dialog choices that increase/decrease the relationship are non-trivial and better integrated into the story. There are several points in which picking a choice will increase the relationship in some characters and decrease it in others.

Loren has a LOT of romance options, a much longer romance path (and of course much better writing!) but as many people complained, is like playing with autopilot: to increase the relationship with a character will be enough to pick the dialog option  “(Romance)”. While there are some occasions where other choices impact the relationships (like fighting Krul or not will impact your relationship with Amukiki) in general there’s less freedom.

My opinion: In this case, the system used in PS is better, because is non trivial and also more realistic: taking a stance on a particular topic is very likely to create friends and enemies, like in the real world. Loren’s approach is more casual, and even if I decided to make it that way on purpose, probably it wasn’t a good idea.

In Conclusion

I’d like to add that making the “perfect RPG” is hard, also because every RPG player has a different idea of what is the perfect RPG. Loren might have been better with non-linear quests and non-combat skills, while PS could have used more variety of skills and combat actions, and a better writing.

I’d say that while Loren is very complete RPG under the combat aspect, and has much better story (in particular the romances), variety of enemies, is much longer, Planet Stronghold has more gameplay elements: beside the battles indeed, there are the skill choices, the minimap exploration with random places, the training facility where you can train your characters, and so on.

So in the end when I hear some people saying that one of the two games is better than the other I think it mainly depends on what you’re looking for in a RPG game. Personally, I like both games for different reasons πŸ˜‰

Doing a sequel is not easy as it seems

…at least for indies who doesn’t make games with the only goal of money! πŸ˜‰

It’s quite common in the mainstream gaming to see titles like Quake 4, Might & Magic 8, and so on. But in most casesΒ  (not the one I mentioned though) the software house make sequels just to capitalize on the game name, maybe releasing a product that is even worse than the original.

Now, so far I only made one sequel which is Heileen 2. Guess what? sold worse than Heileen 1, even if in this specific case I know why (the story was too serious for the target market, indeed with Heileen 3 it will be much more light comedy).

With a visual novel or dating sim though is easier to make sequels, with a RPG like Loren or Planet Stronghold is much harder. I am making Spirited Heart sequel right now, and it’s relatively “easy” – I’m going to keep all the old dateable boys and add more (maybe as expansion, not sure yet).

But what I mean is – adding extra characters in such games is just a matter of adding some dialogues, because there wasn’t a “main plot”. Each characters was a separate story, and since you can replay it several times to get all the endings, it was something very different from Planet Stronghold or Loren, where the characters were inserted in a main plot with an ending.

So I’m pretty sure that no matter what I’ll do, some people will complain because character XYZ who they loved in the first game, isn’t present in the second. Others will complain and demand that the sequel’s story starts where the first game ended, remembering all the big choices they made and the characters they romanced. And so on. As you can see, making a sequel for a RPG is definitely not an easy task, unless you set it several years away in future (so you assume all the original characters are dead!).

I believed that yesterday I finally found the right romance setup for Loren sequel, which will happily feature almost all the romances of the first game, excluding only Karen. It was harder than it sounds, really!

Mortesarcasm

As you can see in the image above, Mother Morte has a nice sense of humour

Regarding the expansion, just today I finished testing the Dwarven Mines, one of the new locations, and it seems well balanced. There is still some stuff to write and script (adding images to the story) but it seems that the expansion MIGHT be really out the 15th of August! I hope to talk about it in next Friday blog post πŸ™‚