Category Archives: Seasons Of The Wolf

A roleplaying weekend !

The game main menu, really happy about the look!

Seasons Of The Wolf: Winter Is Coming!

Haha forgive the pun 🙂 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!! 😀

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 🙂

One of the biggest enemies of indie devs: the “feature creep”!

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This shows starting conditions effect in a battle, useful to reproduce time-critical situations

If you look at the definition of “feature creep” on Wikipedia, you’ll read:

Feature creep, creeping featurism or featuritis is the ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, such as in computer software. Extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and so can result in over-complication rather than simple design.

Wise words! 😀 And indeed the screenshot above is very likely the last new feature I’ll add to SOTW. Don’t get me wrong, adding new features is good, and normally can make games better. But also, delay the game. Every new feature needs to be tested, both in functionality, and in balancing. In complex games like RPGs, often what started as a simple/innocent new feature can have repercussions later in the gameplay, screwing up the balance of the game, even HOURS later. So as you can see you need to be very careful 🙂

In the two past RPG I made so far, Planet Stronghold and Loren, had two very different approaches. In the first, I needed to get it done ASAP for money/time reasons, while for the second I could plan things more carefully. I’ve already compared the two games step by step in the past, but what I want to say here is that NOT NECESSARILY the game with more features is the most fun one. Sometimes, simplicity will lead to more accessible and fun games, reaching maybe a different target market, but not necessarily worse/smaller.

During SOTW development so far, I added many new features: item levels, randomized item creation/random loot, autobalancing enemies, isometric map, item rewards for quests, battlefield conditions and starting effects, and more (lost the count lol).

But I also TRIED to add some features, and then canceled/removed them because I realized that would take too much time to implement them correctly (like the skills with various levels of effectiveness) or that the mechanic wouldn’t be very clear to users (like the turn limit during battles).

In summary, even on this aspect of making a RPG (or any other complex game) you need to have a clear vision of what you want to do. A complex, detailed game? or a simple, very accessible game with a few rules? both ways can lead to a good game. What is worse is keep adding new features, without properly testing them, and as result building a worse game in the end.

Happy Easter

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First of all want to wish you Happy Easter! 🙂

Second, Always Remember Me is finally released on Steam, after a week of delay! Sorry about that.
Check it out here and spread the word: http://store.steampowered.com/app/291030

Seasons Of the Wolf update

As you know if you follow me in the social networks, my efforts now are all focused on finishing the first season of the RPG Seasons Of The Wolf. I’ve said it already but worth repeating: the first seasons doesn’t mean 1/4 of the game! The first is shorter than the others, even if now I’m adding several sidequests to make it longer. Also will feature only 3 characters, Althea, Shea and Vaelis, so no romance dialogues. But worry not, they’ll come later in the story.

Don’t be fooled by their cute appearance, ratmen encounters are tough!

So far coded two sidequests. Some were written with the help of an additional writer, others, shorter ones I’ll write them myself. Of course, will proofread them too 😉

At same time I’ve done some last tweaks to the game framework/rules. I can still do a few tweaks until I go on in season two. So that’s why I plan to make an open beta and let people play the first season: if there are some MINOR changes that can be done (not rewrite all the skills for example!) that beta will be good to find them out.

One of the tweaks is the cost of allocating each attribute point

For example, I discovered that the attribute points allocation needed some tweaks. Before was 1 attribute point to increase each attribute. But I shortly realized that this way, if you put ALL of them in Constitution (which raises HP) at the end of the game you would get 750HP which is a “bit too much” 😀

Same issues happened with other attributes as well, so I used an “old trick”, increasing the cost of each attribute increase based on the level (as explained in the screenshot’s text above).

Going back to work now, because I’m still trying to finish the 1st Season by end of month, even if won’t be easy 😉

The importance of randomness

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In the screenshot above, the new random items in all their splendor!

I’ve been recently playing Diablo3 on the PS3. I can hear a voice in my head saying:

“What? You’re playing!? Go back immediately to work on the games!”

But NO! Doing research is important for every business, so I decided to force myself to play it (also an excuse to use the PS3 for something since the recent PS+ games have been a bit disappointing for my tastes).

I played more and… I had the idea to implement random items on my next RPG, Seasons Of The Wolf 🙂

One of the strong points of Diablo has always been the use of the random element. I am not sure if other games before it used it so well. I fairly remember the first game, and how every match was different.

Obviously, since I make story-based games, I cannot rely too much on the randomness, since the plot follow a linear path, some locations must be fixed, the characters too, etc. I cannot also generate random maps or dungeon (at least for now!) so the only random element I could add was in the items/loot.

A test for the looting screen. Of course in the real game you rarely will get so much stuff!

And I must say that it works VERY WELL. Now whenever I kill an enemy during testing I wonder what item I’ll get – is pretty exciting! Of course the drop rate is not high, rather than flooding the inventory with garbage that you’d have to resell it immediately I decided to limit the amount, but increase the average quality.

In general the rare items are, rare, but also depends on the enemy. Boss enemies now will drop obviously higher level loot 😉

I decided to go with the following tiers: Rusty, Standard, Fine, Quality, Excellent, Masterwork, Rare and Legendary. Legendary is the only item that is not randomly generated, since I still want to have control over the most powerful items, so I’ll define those manually. They’ll also be unique and have a unique name.

To help the player recognize better the top items, the Fine/Masterwork/Rare/Legendary have a different color and a small letter with the initial of the word near the item icon in the inventory.

Overall, it took me a week of hard work (last weekend I worked 10h/day straight!!) but now that is working I must say that was time well spent! 🙂

I’ve seen the (green)light

In other, but no less important, news, three more of my games were greenlit yesterday! They are Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook, Always Remember Me and of course Planet Stronghold (was about time!).

I plan to release Always Remember Me next weekend, if all goes well. And the others coming shortly after in next weeks. Stay tuned 🙂

Winter is over! A Roommates postmortem

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Today the 21st March, is the first day of Spring!

I have to say that this was a very mild Winter, so I didn’t had to shovel snow for hours, nor had problems to drive in icy raods, and so on. Overall under this aspect was a very good Winter! Lots of things happened, first game on Steam and Roommates release. Speaking of it…

Roommates postmortem!

As you know if you follow me regularly, earlier this month I released the comedy dating sim Roommates.

Like Max in the image above, I can say that I wouldn’t be where I am right now without your constant support and motivation/push (some people are more or less nice regarding this, but it’s effective in all cases!).

Roommates is a special game, for several reasons:

was the first game to have a full soundtrack, including theme song, done by a popular group, Leetstreet Boys
was the first dating sim I made where you could play as both genders, and have a variety of romances including yuri/yaoi
was the first comedy game. Is true that many other games had many funny scenes, but if you’ve played even only the demo you can see the difference!
was my most expensive dating sim to date (full soundtrack, 200.000 words of script, 16 CGs, 27 background images, sprites with normal, spring, winter, summer clothes, etc)
was the first one that I coded using the new Ren’Py, incorporating mobile code changes directly in the script without the need to have two separate code-bases

So as you can imagine, with such an ambitious game, there were good chances that something could go wrong! Luckily, everything went rather smoothly: I’m proud to say that even after only a month, it’s clearly going to be my most popular dating sim ever!

I’m particularly happy because I also found a good and reliable writer, Michael Van Horn, who is now working on Loren’s next games. He was supposed to write Undead Lily next, but Loren has higher priority. Maybe he can still work on it after the second chapter of Loren’s saga is out though 😉

In summary: I wish all the next games’ releases would go as smoothly as Roommates! I have doubts that this will happen though 😀

Quick SOTW update

I have also good news about this game: finally finished designing/coding/testing ALL the skills of Seasons Of The Wolf!

Which means that now I can go back adding all the content for the Winter Season (the first act of the game). I am still aiming at finishing that in time for my birthday (11th April) but of course I’m talking only about the beta/preorder version.

The final / full game is more likely to be out in August/Semptember, depending how testing goes (also still have a few images and music to finish).

I have also got some new ideas on how to implement items while playing Diablo 3 on the PS3, so I need to implement that new system too. More info coming in next weeks!

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva