Category Archives: Undead Lily

Next week you have a meeting with Nicole

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Nicole_OPver2.mkv_snapshot_00.18_[2013.10.09_17.12.02]
A screenshot taken from the game trailer. Apologize for the blurriness 😉

Yes you heard it well, next week (weekend probably) you have a meeting with a certain Nicole! Those are bold words, I know, but if I check the project status:

  • all writing completed: check
  • all texts proofread: almost (Sarah is checking them this weekend but she’s basically done)
  • all art done: check
  • all music ready: check
  • all GUI/icons done: only a few gift items are missing, but is not a problem, I can start the beta anyway even with temporary art
  • coding: need to finish implementing the online shopping and the gifts, but in a week it should be no problem

Of course in case wasn’t clear, I’m still talking about the beta testing version, but in this case should be very close to the final product (probably only some minor tweaking on stats/money/relationship and difficulty levels).

The goal is to have the game on sale for Halloween. Even if seems far away, I know from past experiences that it’s going to be very hard to release it officially before that date, but we’ll try! 😉

At least once this game is out I won’t say anymore every year “damn I wish I had a game good of Halloween!”. And when Undead Lily is out, I’ll have two! Speaking of which, below you see some nice (and not so nice, like the Harpy) card creatures:

creatures
From left to right: the Nymph, the Harpy and the Mermaid

Of course there’ll be a variety of genders from the classic mythology, those are only the ones which were done first 🙂

That’s all for now, going back to work on Nicole, I have a new deadline to meet!

Looking at the bright future

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HORIZON
My cat Gilda is looking at the future with optimism

This year was a bit of a rough year for me (though obviously, it could be MUCH worse in general!). The main problem was all the events that happened in real life, and that influenced this year releases (or lack of).

The year is not yet over: but if I compare it with previous years, in 2012 by now I was about to release Loren’s expansion after releasing the main game. In 2011 I had already finished Planet Stronghold, and other cool games like Always Remember Me.

Sadly, it seems that this year I’m going to miss the “release of a new RPG” milestone 🙁

Anyway, the future looks brighter! Read below.

Nicole status – almost done!

Nicole seems very close to completion: I have all boys route finished and the mystery path done by 60-70%. There are still several scenes missing, and also some art, but I think worse case in October the game should be out with all the promised content and gameplay changes (if you’re curious check my forum thread here: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=39&p=19101#p19101).

Roommates update

Yesterday I also got all the backgrounds for Roommates! Even if I’m considering adding a couple more. The new “steamy beach sex scenes” (which aren’t porn, but very hot!) are at good point too, about halfway done. If things go as planned it could be out around Christmas or early next year 🙂

Undead Lily and the return of CCG

There has been a recent interest/return of CCG, which stands for Collectible Card Games. I also have some cool memories of one of the first games I made, several years ago, called Magic Stones, which was indeed a sort of mix between a RPG and a CCG.

Together with Roommates writer (who will write Undead Lily too) we started brainstorming the creatures list for Undead Lily.

UL - Sylphv2
A sketch of the Sylph creature

There are going to be 12 base creatures for the 6 elements, plus other cards (spells and some extra combo creatures). Writer counted 114 different creatures cards, so there should be a good variety!

Some of the creatures include: Griffon, Harpy, Mermaid, Shark, Ifrit, Salamander, Giant Mole, Purple Worm, Tree-ent, Giant Ant, Ghouls, Vampires, and more. I’ll post more previews as I get them.

Obviously I’m talking about a game that will be out not sooner than next year Summer or later 😉

Seasons Of The Wolf update

This week for various reasons was unable to work at all on SOTW, but I plan to get back on it next week. I was planning to have a sort of battles preview at end of month but that probably won’t be possible, since I want to redesign a bit the skills, adding a few more variety. In practice now there are 5 skills each, with 3 degree of power. So you could say 15 skills each character, but in practice is 5 unique skills each one with 3 power variants.

I was thinking instead to eliminate the various power levels, or use them only for non-scaling skills. For example, if we take two healing skills:

A) Healing Balm – heals 30% of character’s total HP
B) Minor Heal – heals target character by 25HP

For B we could have Major Heal that heals 50HP, while for A, as the character HP increases (presumably by leveling up) the spell power will automatically increase.

The writing and art production is going well, and I think that for sure in October I should be able to show something (sort of alpha version, to get feedback on the battle system changes).

Greenlight

Speaking about RPGs, in case you don’t know, recently Valve Greenlit a lot of games, and for the first time my RPG Loren Amazon Princess is around rank 85-86 in the top100. Still a long way to go, but now would be a good moment to vote for it using the link below:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92923628

No need to say that getting a game on Steam would mean I could afford to invest a lot more in my games, making them even better 😉

Undead Lily gameplay

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undeadlilybattle
This is a mockup of the battle screen I made yesterday

How is Undead Lily going to play? I think the best definition is a mix between a strategy game and a RPG. I mentioned CCG (Collectible Card Game) before, but to be fair I don’t plan to have 200+ cards/avatars like those games do 🙂

Current plan is: at start of the game there’s a world map (being the underworld will be particular) with the two opposing factions on the extreme spots. The map will have a terrain, meaning that each cell will be linked to one of the 6 elements of the game: Life, Death, Nature, Fire, Water, Air.

There will be some “Power Nodes” cells, that once captured will give you more power (have yet to decide how it will impact the game). Capturing / conquering all the nodes would give victory to one side.

There are 6 characters on each side, and you can bring 3 to battle at time. I’m thinking that the main character (Undead Lily & Ace) must always be present, while you can decide who will be the other two battle members.

During the fight, there will be 3 roles: Summoning, Offensive and Defensive Aura. The character with Summoning role will be able to summon the avatars on the battlefield. The other two will provide a permanent bonus for the battle. For example in the screenshot above: Undead Lily does the summoning. Aquaria will provide a bonus attack to all targets, Ash will give a fire shield to all your avatars so enemies hitting them will suffer damage.

Still thinking if to allow the player to switch the superheroes role during the fight or not.

Thanks to the writer for this suggestion, it was very interesting ! 🙂

The bonuses will scale up as the superheroes gain more levels.

Of course the fights will be simplified, not like Loren. All the cards/avatars will attack the enemy in front of them (with some exceptions) and once they kill it, the next attack will hit the superheroes behind it. A mechanism common in those card/RPG games. Once all the heroes of one side run out of HPs, that side has lost.

So that’s the plan right now 🙂 there’s a small problem though: the battle screens were done by the artist, following my indications, so that there would be a lower part of it that would fit a one vs one battle. That means that it would be a bit problematic to fit a small army of 5-6 avatars.

I’m currently thinking if to put the avatars in rows facing top to bottom (blue arrows) or left to right (red arrows). The blue arrows would be the more logic solution, but the problem is that I want to have the superheroes on the left/right side of the screen, so I think that might look awkward to have the avatars fighting top/down and the superheroes left to right 🙂 Anyway, that’s not a big problem, the hardest part will be to design all the avatars and the battle rules. But that’s also the most fun part 😉

Where On Earth Is Undead Lily?

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Room_Aquaria
Do you recognize her? it’s Aquaria, one of the superheroes of the Undead Lily game

In the blog title, I paraphrased the famous game “Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego” 🙂 The reply to the question Where On Earth Is Undead Lily could be “she went on hiatus for a year or two but now she’s about to come back!”.

Yes, because finally all the backgrounds for the game are finished (that artist was busy doing Loren GUI and other things, so wasn’t his fault), and even if I asked the original character artist to redo the final romance scenes, work on the game can start already.

I’m still in the planning stage for now, but I really think that I’m going to make it a bit different from the original idea. A tag-team battle, arcade style wouldn’t really be simple to do in Ren’Py, and since those games are all about the animations, it’s definitely not a good idea. So I’m just going to make it more RPG-esque! 😉

In the game there are 12 characters, 6 “evil” and 6 “good”. That would be already enough to do a classic party-based RPG. However, since there won’t be a real exploration but more like a sort of big “map” where you move your units each turn (who remembers the old game “Archon”?), I think I’m going to make it similar to a collectible card game, where each character can learn to summon creatures to help them in battle, starting from low level ones to big powerful ones.

So the idea for now is to allow a party of max 2 superheroes, each one able to summon several “elemental minions”. Or maybe only 1 superhero each battle, as always will have to see while playtesting what is better.

Anyway that’s the initial idea for now 🙂

I’ve been also experimenting more with the “topsecret” RPG set in Aravorn. I had a brilliant idea (modestly MOUHAHA). Take a look at the screenshots below:

thiefattack warriorattack

As you can see, the position on the battlefield will have a big impact on the gameplay, and the Thief will have a special bonus vs the Warriors being able to always attack without penalty any enemy, no matter their position. This small change should lead to interesting decision during the battles, and finally give some use of the thieves in the front line.

I had other ideas like some random special zones on the battlefield that would give bonus/malus (like a rock area that increases defense, a mud area that slows character down). But have yet to see if they’re easy to implement. Anyway as you can guess I’m having some fun experimenting! 😀

But that is just a side-project. On Planet Stronghold 2 side, Anima is going forward coding the new RPG framework that will be awesome, with lots of new features, while Aleema is doing her great job as always writing the story. I can’t wait to reach the demo stage with this game to show it to everyone 😉