Category Archives: planet stronghold

making of online games, a newbie perspective

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If you’re a player, this is going to be a bit tech-boring post, be warned 🙂

I wanted to share what I’ve learnt so far from the release of my first Public Alpha of my game Planet Stronghold. Was a good choice to make it a downloadable? What if was a webgame coded in Flash /JS /Unity ? This is what I think are pro and con of each:

  • the problem of updating: I coded an autoupdater in python. It SHOULD be cross-platform and work everywhere. The first version was a bit bugged and missed some error messages. I don’t have any real statistics but from what I gathered from testers, my guess is that only 10-15% of people couldn’t use it for one reason or another. Still, it’s a good percentage of people!
  • With a webgame, the full asset/code gets updated on SERVER, so there’s no possibility that it fails: that’s a BIG advantage if you’re interested in making a online/MMO game. However be warned, the bandwidth use is going to be HUGE, since most browser have a very small cache of 50mb which means players are probably going to redownload the whole thing everytime.
  • Unless you use JS, you can have pretty much all effect you have with Renpy (with Flash), or a 3d engine (with Unity3d), online. The problem is that python is really one of the best RAD languages, that is most top games like Civilization, The Sims 3 or even Google uses it internally. Damn it, if only there was a working python to SWF compiler…!!! Any coder who’ll make that will be covered by gold, mark my words 🙂

Also, it’s SUPER EASY to make mistakes with online games. A first thing to do is NEVER mix your test server with the live server. For example I uploaded a wrong file last night, and the autoupdater would keep looping, thinking it’s always 1 version below the latest one 😐 Luckily for me Ayu was testing the game and reported the bug, which was only a wrongly uploaded file on server…!!

So for now I’ve learned lession number one. Always do your test in local, and if you really must, have a BACKUP SERVER to do your own tests. Never test anything on the “live” server!!! 😀

Planet Stronghold Public Alpha 1

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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!

The last heroes

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Rumi Planet StrongholdOr better the latest heroes to be drawn for Planet Stronghold are on their way. You can see Rumi on this post on the right, she is a Psionicist and she’s blind since she was born. Once colored I think will be an awesome addition to the pool of characters already present in the game.

If I have some time next month probably will make a page on the official game website with the whole cast of characters you’ll meet in the game. Almost all are heroes you can control in the battle, but there are a few exception like the Royal Family (King, Queen and Prince) and some very minor robot servants.

I’m really pleased of the final appearance of Planet Stronghold, is probably going to be one of my most beautiful games, at least in term of artworks! Of course I’ll do my best to make even the story and the gameplay to be as good as the visuals 😉

A few last words about the beta testing which should start hopefully next month: in the first phase (open beta) you’ll be able to download the game, which has an autopatcher/updater system so that everytime you launch it, will notify you if there’s a new version available, and download it. I plan to make this part of testing free, until at about 20-30% of the game, then the closed-beta will start and people who want to experience the game immediately will be able to pre-order the game at discounted price and download it immediately with the autoupdater.

During the beta I hope people will send bug reports and/or make feedback comments to my forums to help me increase the game quality.

Once the game is finished (ended the closed beta-test phase successfully) will be released normally as my other games. I know other devs that had great results with this system so I’ve decided to try it myself!

We need more singleplayer CRPGs!

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Yes, as the title says. I’m talking about indie scene, of course, even if the same could be said even for mainstream games.
Recently, thing are starting to change. Not just Bioware, with their Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, or Bethesda with Fallout, but also other new entries like Drakensang, The Witcher, and so on.

And in the indie scene? Yes even here. Almost everyone knows about Spiderweb, Basilisk games and their Eschalon series is getting known, Amaranth with their Aveyond series, Aldorlea and their various big/small RPGs, and so on.

And I? I am working on it, I swear. Is quite funny to think that, despite RPGs being my favourite kind of games, I never released a real one!!  The closest is Magic Stones but is more a strategy game with RPG elements than a pure RPG.
So this year I decided to do a real one. That’s why I started writing the RPG engine behind Planet Stronghold. I picked sci-fi settings for several reasons: first, the sci-fi setting is underused. There aren’t many good sci-i RPG, so I have less competition 🙂 But also because I like the setting in particular.

Second, the engine can be easily adapted to a fantasy setting. So while this first game will be sci-fi (and if does well I hope to release a sequel), I can easily change the art and tweak a bit the attack system (to include melee attacks, spells, and so on) and make a fantasy RPG.

What is more important to me though, is the story. That’s why I’m trying to write a good story, with uncommon characters. Not just “the good” and “the evil” characters, but simply factions fighting each other, every one with their motivations.

I gave up the possibility to choose between male/female character in the beginning since would require too much work – so the main character will be a female, but I’m sure that male players won’t complain to play as her 😉 Anyway, in the game you’ll control a full party, so while the story will be told from her perspective, you will still be able to control a range of different characters.

There’s still much work to do before the game is released, but slowly, step by step, I’m building my system that will be cross-platform (pc/mac/linux) and will also be able to retrieve updates automatically and also notify the user of new downloadable content patches availables (I plan to release several add-ons in the months after the game release).

Today for example I added a new thing in the inventory screen: instead of just showing off the items as a 1 line text description+some icons/stats, I display them as BIG icons that make the inventory screen look really polished IMHO (enlarge the screenshot in this post to check for yourself.)