Category Archives: sketches

Frozen development!

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In the image above, the view from my office window!!!

The title is a joke but explains well my current situation. I’m working on several games, mainly Loren RPG, and every 2-3 hours I go outside with temperatures ranging from -4°C to 10°C (even during the day) to shovel an incredible amount of snow!

It has been snowing since the first days of February, and this situation HAS slowed down considerably my development, since beside the time spent shoveling, when I get back to work I’m exhausted 😀

Anyway, I got almost all the items artwork for Loren, and hopefully by next weekend I’ll have it all. Code-wise we added some more features, like the possibility to randomize a bit each vendor. So the items on sale will change through the course of the story, based on your progresses and the current equipment you have.

Also, each vendor has a specific “lore”: the human town of Grimoire is specialized in heavy blade and armors, while in the capitol of the Elves, Grandtree, you can find many excellent bows and magic items.

Not only RPGs!

But progresses are being made also in other games, in particular Heileen 3 and Amber’s Magic Shop. For Heileen 3, I got a bunch of sketches for all the ending images, and I can assure you that some are VERY interesting…! The writing is also at a good stage, the writer reached the 60th scene, so more than half is finished!

Now admire an image of Morgan in a more casual outfit. What do you think, girls? 😉

Morgansexy

I must also say that even if the writer isn’t a native English speaker (so had to ask a friend to proofread the script) her writing is really very funny, and perfect for Heileen 3 mood. I laughed lots of times reading some of the scenes she wrote, in particular those with Juliet and John 🙂

For Amber instead I got already the lineart of many of the characters. As I said, I was lucky to be able to hire Loren’s artist again, and the results are great. They’re still uncolored, so for now will just post an image of Vin, the witch and adoptive mother of Amber:

Vin

I really like her “floreal dress” 🙂 but even the other characters are all quite cute. Once I have the finished colored images will post more previews!

Announcing Queen Of Thieves game


Here’s my cat Leon sleeping seen from a very fun perspective 😀 It’s one of my favourite pics of my cats.

In the image above instead you see the three main characters of my new game “Queen Of Thieves”. Before you say “what, another game in production!” – just know that all those games I’m announcing are just in the EARLY STAGES. It means that this game might be not ready before Christmas! Remember Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook? I announced it in July 2010 and is not out yet… and that’s just an example 🙂

So, don’t get too excited or start thinking “how can he make so many games” and so on. Simply, nowadays if you want to survive as full-time indie you either have to make a BIG game that must also be successful (and it’s very difficult) or produce games at faster pace. Since I like to create stories and design gameplay, the latter solution fits me more than the former.

By the way don’t worry – I will write the main plot of Queen Of Thieves but the actual dialogues will be written by a native English speaker. I’m thinking about the same person who edited Vera Blanc texts since she did a very good job.

So what’s the game about? Without revealing too much, the story is about three girls who gets their mother killed when they’re young (I might change this and have her imprisoned rather than killed!). Her mother was the famous Queen of Thieves, so when the three girls grow up they’ll pursue the same “career” as their mother, with the help of Sambo, their father, who runs a shop in town.

The three girls are from left to right: Thalia, swift rogue, Joanne, powerful wizard, and Kira, deadly warrior. They’re all of three thieves, but each one has a specific training, what would be a Class in a RPG. Indeed this game will have strong RPG influence even if I am not sure yet it will be a real RPG. There will be battles but I’d like it to have more gameplay elements beside battles, so for now I’ll classify it as “strategy game”.

So I was saying ,each girl is a thief, but every one does it her own way. Thalia is the most close to the classic thief, and her skills involves sneaking, hiding in shadows, lockpicking, backstabbing, using light armor and dual wield and so on. Joanne is a wizard so can use magic for most of her task like opening door/locks, levitating, becoming invisible, charming guards, etc. Kira instead is the classic tough warrior: she’ll prefer to bash open door and locks, and will be able to defeat guards fighting them.

The main idea of the game is that you have to do both “solo” missions, so you can pick any character you want and have a very different gameplay experience, and have missions where you need to use all of the three characters, taking advantage of each class-specific skill.

Okay, that’s all for now, I’ve revealed even too much about this game! 😉

Flower Shop spin-off

I can officially announce that the original team (me, Ayu Sakata and M.Beatriz Garcia) started working on a spin-off of The Flower Shop 🙂

I call it spin-off and not sequel because, even if you’ll re-encounter several characters from the first episode (Uncle Sam, Clara, Marian, and so on) the point of view, the minigames and several other aspects will be completely changed. The first major change is the point of view or perspective: you’ll play as Natalie, a cute young girl which you see sketched on the left of this post by Deji (Garcia nickname).

As you might have noticed from the kind of clothes she is wearing, is definitely NOT summer anymore: it’s cold, it’s winter! The game indeed takes place at end of autumn/beginning of winter (we’re still planning the story so that’s why I’m so approximate) and will see Natalie helping Susana in the flower shop. So the farming-sim of the first game will become a “flower raising sim”, but there are other minigames and metagames that will be present. And they’ll be perfectly integrated with the story! This means that you’ll be able to spend the money you’ll earn in a very interesting way (I don’t want to announce it yet but is really a neat idea) and it will definitely affect more the endings than reaching a minimum earning thresold like was in The Flower Shop.

The game will be called “The Flower Shop: Winter in Fairbrook” (working title, subject to a possible change) and of course, being a spin-off, it means that it’s a completely stand-alone game: those who played the Flower Shop will be pleased to see again some characters and “familiar places”, but the new players will be able to experience the game completely even if they haven’t seen/played the first one.

I can speak for all the team saying that we’re very excited to work on this game, which should be out soon, probably after the summer!

The last heroes

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!

Unique powers

I resumed working on Planet Stronghold after a hiatus of about 3 months (during which I planned the first 2 Vera’s episodes, and wrote the first one currently being proofreaded). The pause was good though, since I also had time to play the two latest Bioware’s RPGs, Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 2. In particular this last one, since it shares the same kind of setting (sci-fi) with my game.

Inspired by them,I decided that just generic/standard psionic power would sucks 🙂 I want each character to have at least one unique power.

They were already different each one from the other, because of the various skills (some could have high medicine skill, other high repair, and so on) but what makes really a cool RPG (or game, in general) is the unique powers, each character having his own personality/use within a party.

So I’m going to assign to each character in the game a special power, related to the combat of course. I am also going to rethink better the rock/paper/scissor system of the combat since in the first battles wasn’t really evident. Today also got two new sketches for new enemies from my artist:

The game art-side is almost finished, just need some more enemies and a few other characters+the rebel/alien race which inhabits Planet Stronghold. Once all art is done I’m going to work on it at full speed 🙂