Category Archives: Seasons Of The Wolf

SOTW DLC “Bad Blood” coming soon

To paraphrase what Guard Captain Daronas says in the screenshot above: “I have good news. As we speak, the last segments of SOTW DLC code are just being placed” 😀

While of course there can still be bugs, I have tested the game already several times also with the help of the writer, and so far appears to be stable enough 🙂

I am still thinking if to open preorders and beta soon, like next weekend, or try to wait and see if some more art could be ready. The biggest thing missing are the new ending CGs, and is not a small thing. Of course you could still play/read it and save just before the CG… or replay them through the gallery. I got the sketches yesterday and artist said they’d be ready by mid-April, so maybe I could wait a bit.

Anyway, last week I coded the last battle of the whole game, against this funny guy:

…and I must say that it was really a weird feeling doing it. Like placing the last stone on a house, or something like that. Sniff sniff, SOTW you’ll be sorely missed! 😉

A little burned out…

…or maybe not! Haha I already spoke in the past enough about SOTW and why in the end despite being my biggest/better game, it wasn’t worth it from commercial point of view. However another thing I didn’t consider, are the long term effects like the “burning out” that I’m suffering right now.

Being burned out after a project is absolutely normal. All the indies I spoke with, just take a break from work for 2-3 weeks or more after a game is out (except support, marketing, etc of course). But in my case ? Hmm I really have a hard time coding stuff even now, after months. Like I find a problem and my brain freeze, refuses to cooperate and I get stressed and grumpy.

And I am even taking it easy compared to my usual working schedule! so I think it was still a consequence of all the stress and work accumulated last year. The fatigue just doesn’t go away instantly, but takes time. Luckily apart SOTW DLC, the other games in progress don’t need much coding on my part 🙂

Some random news

I updated the work in progress thread in my forums with progress bars! 🙂 check here: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=3128
Of course is not like it is 100% accurate but maybe can give you an idea.

I got some preliminary scenes for the CYOA-style game I’m making, and it’s looking good.

I got the full Moirgane romance path for Queen Of Thieves! plus half of the otome one. If artist can keep it up (he finished redoing all the 3 sisters already), might be the next game I’ll be working on, depending how the new card battle framework is going.

Speaking of which, good progress has been made on that front too. There’s a basic framework working with already several mechanics implemented. I admit I borrowed a lot from Hearthstone, but also tried to add some new ideas, also because for story reason it will be different from Blizzard game, with cards that should last more and not be so easily destroyed.

Also, more writing for Nicole, Loren sequels, etc etc. I like when I get updates for all my games in a week 🙂 Stay tuned for a new character introduction for Heirs & Graces next Friday!

Heirs & Graces – Marcel

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As some of you know already, I’m developing a yaoi-only dating sim since a few months. It’s fantasy, based on Aravorn, but without a RPG part. The main character is Marcel, pictured below:

So let’s discover more about Marcel, with the introduction by the writer:

“Marcel is the only son of Lord Sandor, an extremely wealthy and powerful noble. While that should theoretically mean that Marcel grew up in a lavish environment having his every desire attended to, the reality of his situation couldn’t be further from it. Marcel may be the son of a noble but he is also his mother’s son and, as it goes, her social status is far beneath Lord Sandor’s. To save himself from scandal, Lord Sandor cut ties with Marcel’s mother when she told him she was pregnant. To make matters worse for the young mother, Maura’s parents cast her out and she was forced to try her luck elsewhere. Her disgrace followed her, making it nearly impossible for her to hold down a respectable job and eventually she had to resort to smuggling and taking advantage of men to make ends meet. Though she tried to keep Marcel out of it, he eventually took up stealing. The situation wasn’t ideal, but it allowed them to live.

By working together, the two of them were eventually able to pull themselves out of poverty. Maura now works as a tailor’s assistant and Marcel has had a few short term jobs in the past. This has done wonders for their stability, but their rocky start has made Marcel a bit cynical. He knows that things can work out, but he also thinks it’s stupid to assume they will. Marcel is able to interact normally with others, but he’s careful not to expect too much from them. After all, if you never placed your faith in someone in the first place it’ll hurt less when they betray you. This line of thinking combined with what his mother went through has led Marcel to swear of romance all together. He refuses to put himself into a situation where he gives someone that much power over him.

While Marcel tends to be overly cautious, he does occasionally take a risk. The biggest one to date is applying to work as Lord Sandor’s servant. He knows it’s a bad idea and he knows he should just walk away, but curiosity has gotten the better of him. While he doesn’t want Lord Sandor to know anything about him, Marcel does want to see the old man for himself just once. Why? Well, even Marcel hasn’t quite figured that out.“

I’ll keep posting about this game and the other characters in the next weeks. The game is still in development but is at good point (all the art is finished) so might even be out later this year 🙂

SOTW DLC “Bad Blood” progress update

This week made very good progress: the coding is almost done, and I’m only missing a few art, including the new ending CGs, which should be finished by mid-April.

I’m currently thinking if to allow the preorders and testing towards end of month even if the ending CGs would still be missing (but just that). Anyway I will obviously announce it on the social networks, blog and newsletter when the game is ready 🙂

Playing games is important & time optimization

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Playing games is important!

Yes you heard me well: is important to play games! Especially if you are a game developer like me 🙂

I have less and less free time now (in particular in recent times with everything happening all at once, Steam, iOS ports, etc) and as you can imagine, when I have some I prefer to spend it with my wife, pets and doing outdoor activities.

However, I still try to find the time to play for a few hours a week the new games. Because that’s the equivalent of “research & development” of other industries.

Some practical examples and games that inspired me while I designed and coded my latest RPG ToA: Seasons Of the Wolf:

– Guild Wars 2: from this game I grabbed the ideas of “solve all quest in an area” and “discover all locations” and so on, to get bonus EXP. From this game I also wanted to implement the idea of stat-derived enemies (no matter your level, all enemies would be a challenge) but after a week of testing I realized that it wasn’t a good idea 😀
– Diablo 3: it’s nothing new, the random items I mean, but still while playing this game I thought that would have been cool to use random items with tiers even in my games, alongside manually created ones.
– Everquest 2 and another MMORPG I can’t remember now, the idea of offering items as reward for quests. Again it was nothing new, but just playing those games reminded me of this feature.

chooseitem

And by playing Hearthstone I had the idea to change PSCD from a tower defense game to a collectible card game. So if you’re a game designer, try to find the time to play a few games. Your own games will benefit from it!

Time optimization

Speaking of SOTW, this week I made more progress on the DLC. I was a bit stuck with all the other titles for various reasons, so I thought that instead of waiting for the SOTW missing art, I could code all the remaining things using placeholder art, so I don’t waste time.

In the image above, a special event in the “Rebuild Ninim” minigame

Another thing that many indies should learn is to optimize your time. You don’t necessarily need to do things in order. So like in my example above, you can finish coding something even if the art is not ready using placeholders. Or if you’re tired/burned you can do some trivial tasks. I often do that when I’m too tired to code. Trivial tasks could be:

– webpage design: sooner or later you’ll have to do it, right? so why not create the page already? you can always tweak/adjust the texts or images a few days before the release, but at least most of the work is already done!
– product setup: doesn’t matter if you sell only through Steam, or direct, or mobile. There are a lot of steps to do to setup a new game. Screenshots, box-shots, icons, description texts, etc etc (every platform is different but you need to do them for all). This is another thing I do in advance.
– testing: I now do open-betas to test, since 10-50 people testing are better than 1 or a small team of friends. However, I always do some preliminary testing to make sure that at least the most obvious bugs are fixed. Sometimes when I am too tired to code I just start the game and play a bit to see if there’s something that I missed.
– create banner-ads: assuming you do some form of advertising, another thing you can do is designing the banners for the game ads (unless you outsource it to an artist).
– write blog posts like this one or other marketing stuff: writing is easier than coding, so I always do the blog posts one week in advance. I think that never miss a blog helped overall, on each blog post I get several views and many comments. Other things you can do is forum polls to see what people think of your next crazy idea, or anything else really, an interview, a tumblr post, or other social marketing stuff.

So as you can see there are many things you can do, even when you’re tired from coding 😉

PSCD – meet Galina

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Apparently last week’s character, Cristoph (which will be changed into Cristophe thanks to the suggestion of some French friends) has shocked some user because of his abundance of hair in the abdomen part of his body… 😀

So this time here’s a nice and kind lady, Galina. Well, maybe not very kind. Read her introduction:

Name: Galina Litvyak
Nickname: Wraith
Nation of Origin: Russia
Service Branch: Imperial Intelligence Agency
Specialty: Bounty Hunter

Description:
Considered the most taciturn member of the squad, Galina wasn’t always so reserved. In her civilian life, she was a successful bounty hunter. While she started nabbing small-time crooks and thugs, Galina’s expertise had her catching bigger and bigger game. So successful was she, she managed to bring in the head of a criminal syndicate, rupturing his organization in the process.

Unfortunately, this success marked her for death, and in a move to save her life, she joined the military. Not one to squander talent when they see it, her superiors use Galina’s to extract or eliminate personnel when other conventional means have failed.

One incident stands out in Galina’s otherwise brilliant career. While the particulars of the mission are considered top-secret, a whole noble house was brought low as a result, and Galina proudly wears the scar she earned in the course of her mission. Though Imperial medicine is more than capable of healing this wound, Galina refused, since her marking, unlike the mission details, can’t be swept under the rug.

Galina earned the sobriquet of Wraith for her ability to go anywhere, no matter how heavily guarded and achieve her aims. Adding a macabre twist, if her target must die, she will lay two old-time coins on the eyes of her victims, giving Death her due.

It would be wrong to say Galina never smiles, but her tastes runs to gallows’ humor and this is quiet acceptance of the end discomfits most of her teammates.

Short update

So…I’m again in a funny situation where several games are in the making, but each one has an aspect delaying it. One game is advanced for story/art, but behind with coding. Another is behind with art. Another with writing. And so on 🙂

For sure the essential part of (most) of my games is the writing, since without it there isn’t a story, and the game itself. What I’m going to do from now is: with the few very reliable writers, I’ll keep producing stories, so that only art/coding is missing. This way should speed up future games. One thing is to send an artist a clear list of what to do, and a deadline. Different is to commission first some things, then some other, and some other again. Also, seems that writing is the activity that takes more time for each game, so having already some plot ready it’s surely not a bad idea!

Anyways, I also realized that of the upcoming games, except for C14 Dating and Queen Of Thieves, all the others are yuri/yaoi only. It’s not bad of course, but I’ve been considering doing a sequel to my old (but still quite famous) otome game Always Remember Me 🙂 It will be different from the others since will focus on the couple life, and the final goal will be to stay together and not break up with your current partner (in the beginning you’ll be able to select your partner from the four original boys of Always Remember Me). Done this way it won’t be required to having played the previous title at all.

And the best thing is that it would be something I could do on my own (the storyboard of course, writing would be done by a pro writer) so not delaying the other projects 🙂

I’m also working hard on SOTW DLC but now I am missing some art, even if I’ve already commissioned it. If all goes well should have it done by mid-April. By popular request, I’m also going to try adding a “visual novel” mode to SOTW, so that you can skip completely the battles or a least most of them 🙂

PSCD – Meet Cristoph

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After seeing all the romanceable characters (at least in the base game… who knows, maybe if the game does well, we’ll be able to do some future DLCs!) time for the other team members. They’ll be present in the story and the fights, and each one has his/her own specialty. Let’s start with Cristoph, a “dark” character!

Name: Christoph Rousseau
Nickname: Badger
Nation of Origin: France
Service Branch: Imperial Corps of Engineers
Specialty: Mining

Description:
In almost every outfit, there usually is someone with ties to some rather unsavory people and organizations. Christoph fills this role rather aptly. If you need to get something, and can’t get it through legitimate channels, then Christoph can make it happen, for a price.

In fact, it was the search for personal wealth which led Christoph to join the military. While he doesn’t particularly care for fighting and killing, Christoph’s current position affords him too many opportunities to enrich himself.

This isn’t to say Christoph activities didn’t create some enemies, but assaulting an imperial squad is outright suicide. Those few people who did press the issue…well, Christoph definitely knows where the bodies are buried.

Some might consider Christoph a coward, but this isn’t true. He earned the nickname Badger when he was in the middle of his mining shift, when a hole appeared on the side of the passage, and an Apex warband emerged. Thinking quickly, Christoph used his equipment to weaken the ceiling, burying aliens under a ton of rock.

If Christoph has a weakness, it would be gambling. He always has a deck of cards, or a set of dice on his person, and can be found starting a pick-up game when things go slow.

Meanwhile…

Work on the other games is going forward quite well. The SOTW DLC has been fully scripted, so now is my turn to add the battles and test. It’s still missing some art though, but depending how the artists/colorist go, the DLC might be out sooner than I thought 🙂

Here’s the intro scene…but what he is writing about?

“…my terrible mistake that had almost sealed the fates of Althea and Shea”! Wow, Jariel, what did you do? Soon (well, this year, not very soon!) you’ll discover it 😉

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva