This week, we introduce one of the male love interest, probably my favorite 😉 The guard captain Tiberius!

Captain Tiberius Celsus

The captain of the guard has served Lord Raul for all of his adult life. He joined the city guard as soon as he was old enough and quickly rose through the ranks. Due to his tall height and build, most assume him to be a mindless thug but that could not be further from the truth. Tiberius is an extremely thoughtful person although he can come across as being rather slow because of this. He thinks things through from all sides before coming to a conclusion. This can frustrate some, but he can be stubborn when others try to force him to move at their pace.

Tiberius is extremely popular with the women of Ahkra, although as yet he is not known to have had any real relationship with any. It has led to rumours of him having interests outside of women although he has always denied such accusations when questioned. Asking him about such things is one of the sure ways to embarrass him. His female friends get very defensive when he becomes uncomfortable, so it is often advised not to fluster him in front of others.

Most people find Tiberius rather taciturn. He tends to speak little of himself, when he does speak and overall his speech tends to be to the point. His duty comes before everything so he rarely socialises except with those he knows very well indeed.

A very big PSCD update

This past week, was basically… insane 🙂 I started working full speed together with coder, and in a single week we fixed a lot of bugs and added a lot of new features to the card engine. Some of them will be also useful for Undead Lily, and the new AI system will also be reused (at least partly) in future RPG frameworks, like for Loren 2 and other games.

This of course doesn’t mean the game is ready, but at least for the framework behind it, we made really BIG progresses. I joked with coder because recently was unavailable, that if he works like that, he just needs to be around 2-3 weeks a year for me to finish a game 😉

Anyway, I also made progress on the layout. It’s still clearly work in progress, but I added some nice visual effects:

The first unit on left (Laser Squad) is invisible (there’s a moving fog over it), while the battle drone has a force shield which prevents any damage the first time the unit gets hit.

The cards can also be zoomed in to examine their stats and abilities. Not all cards have one, but most yes. It was fun to design over 120 cards (only for the Human Empire!) and several aliens:

As you can see, there’s also our friend Kaden. He is present in a main mission, but if we decide to make a small adventure also for the DLC (possible, though not yet officially confirmed) I will include also some other secondary characters which aren’t main heroes in the base game.

As you can see I’m quite enthusiast about it! I have coded 15 missions, but I know already I’ll need to replay them all once the computer AI is finished, to make more challenging battles at higher difficulty levels.

Next week I plan to take a break and go back working on Queen Of Thieves robbery missions. Doing a RPG and a CCG at same time sounds crazy? well, yes, it actually is 😀 but I’m having fun so far, so that’s all matters to me!

After the main characters introduction, in the next weeks I’m going to talk about the love interest. Let’s start with Moirgane, one of the three yuri romanceable characters:

Moirgane Mercier

More commonly known as ‘Girl!’ or ‘Hey you!’, Moirgane is the long suffering waitress at the biggest tavern in Ahkra. She has been working there for several years now and knows practically everyone in town because of it. No one has a bad word to say about her and she is very popular with her often surly employer.

Moirgane can be a little awkward when around people she is not familiar with, but she tends to warm to people quickly. She has a reputation for being kind and accommodating, something she is quite proud of although it embarrasses her to be praised in front of others. Many do not realise it, but the waitress is actually extremely intelligent and particularly gifted when it comes to working with numbers. She does not keep this fact a secret, but it so rarely comes up in conversation at a tavern that many assume she works as a waitress because she was too stupid to do anything else.

With her life largely dedicated to working and helping her family, Moirgane has almost no experience in love. She is fairly sure that she is attracted to women, but outside of that she has done nothing about any desires she has ever had. To her, she cannot spare time to indulge in love while her family needs her help. Perhaps one day she might be able to find someone to love but for now work is what she needs to keep focused on.

Quick update

This last week was busy working on PSCD again. I am at good point, my goal is to finish with the coding/design of all the cards and plot missions, then add some extra side-missions, a bit like what happens on open-world games.

In practice my main fear is that people would play the game on Easy, beat it and complain it’s too short: each battle in Easy mode could last between 8-10 minutes (on average, depends on several factors including player’s speed), so multiplied by 30 missions = around 300 minutes = 5h. This because differently from popular CCG games like Hearthstone, the computer plays INSTANTLY 😀 so you don’t need to wait for the other human opponent to make his move (which is what usually takes most time in such games).

I am talking of course about non-visual novel players, with less interest in plot. Because about that, with a plot over 200k words, a TON of characters to romance (if we include also the future DLC already announced, there’ll be more romances than Loren!), and also several choice that affects the ending texts/CGs, visual novel players really have nothing to worry about it 😉 So if you play it only as VN, it will be worth it for sure.

I’ll probably change the normal card into bronze, to make it more different from silver

But since it’s also a cross-genre with a card game, I need also to think about that. So, I was saying, the goal is to add some side missions to raise your resources/XP that will result in more powerful cards in battles, which will be needed especially in harder difficulty level, and will also increase playtime. Increase but not in a boring way, since I’ll design those side-missions with mini-goals or variant. One example would be to do scouting missions with Remi, and you’ll have Remi playable card only in those missions 🙂 and stuff like that, so that would be fun to play.

This week is the turn of another main character, Kira (the middle sister):

Kira is the middle child and often feels the pressure of such a position. During her younger days, she always found herself trapped between Joanne and Thalia when they were fighting. She sympathised with her older sibling’s desire to help them all grow up but she also found herself agreeing with her younger sister that Joanne was not their mother and had no right to act that way. In the end, she usually ended up siding with Thalia but occasionally she would agree with Joanne when their youngest sibling just went too far with her teasing.

When she was old enough to leave home, she moved to a town a few miles away from Triberg to work as a guard. She enjoyed the life very much. There was a comradery amongst the guards that she had not experienced before and it made her happy to live amongst such a large group in their barracks. Unfortunately, many of her fellow guards were into drinking heavily and Kira got into that habit too. While she is not an alcoholic, Kira finds it hard to stop once she starts. This has led to her getting entangled in several illicit liaisons with her fellow soldiers. On occasion, this led to brief but disastrous relationships, most of the time it just led to a very awkward morning and a splitting headache.

Perhaps her greatest weakness is a lack of belief in herself. Kira is rather convinced that she is stupid and that her love of alcohol just confirms it. Despite that, Kira really is not stupid but simply lacks the confidence to use what she was given. She often solved unusual cases when working as a guard but she fails to see it was because of her intellect that she did so.

As a rule, Kira finds being direct is the best course of action and his little foibles when it comes to using whatever comes to hand to succeed. She will use her strength and even her love of low-cut shirts to get what she wants. She finds it very easy to make friends although some do find her a little taciturn at times. Most of all, she badly misses the structure and feeling of community being a town guard gave her. Her sense of duty keeps her from abandoning her family’s attempts to free their mother even when it feels hopeless, however. In order to get that back, she is determined to succeed and woe betide any who gets between her and her chance to return to the life she loves.

Scripting games

PSCD intro scene it’s the only one I had actually coded so far…

I was so enthusiast last week about the good news that I actually forgot a very small detail… beside writing the stories and coding the gameplay, the games needs also to be scripted!! 🙂

What I mean by scripting? You know, every time in the game you see a new background, a character shows up, then moves on screen, changes expression, and goes away, every time a music plays or a sound effect is heard… behind it there’s scripting. All the writers I work with are quite familiar with Ren’Py so they know already how to place menu and use variables. But still, after the game has been written, and the logic/choices works, someone needs to add all those things listed above, the game scripting.

It’s really not a hard task: but it’s LONG! because you need to type all the commands and then test them to make sure you didn’t show a character flipped vertically hanging out from the roof 😀 (something that actually happened to me in some games in the past!).

So I’ve hired some people to do it for me to speed things up, this way I can focus on the game design and coding (what I can do better). In Queen Of Thieves case, the writer herself wants to script it, but it won’t delay much since all the main scenes have been written already.

In the end in last week I might have been a bit too much optimist about the times, since for example PSCD is over 200k words long, and scripting everything would probably take a month alone. Anyway, as always I’ll keep you updated on the progress!

Speaking of PSCD, in case you haven’t read it already in the forums, the generous Miakoda (the writer) offered to write more romances for the planned DLC so that there’s an even amount for all genres/combos! In practice, the DLC will have as much romances as the base game. Because of that will take longer to finish, but at least everyone will be happy.

Here’s the updated chart then:

I’ve seen some preliminary sketches for the new DLC romances and I can assure you that they WILL be worth it. Probably the best DLC I’ve done for all my games. I’ll also try to add some more gameplay/cards with it, but it’s too early now to decide.