And now, the last character introduction for Queen Of Thieves. If you thought that Tomas Jingoli was bad, read Lord Raul’s profile…

Lord Raul Capello, ‘The Tyrant of Ahkra’

Raul is the latest head of the powerful and wealthy Capello family. They have ruled the city of Ahkra and the surrounding country for nearly twenty generations. As the next heir, Raul was raised to be merciless in the execution of his responsibilities and to brook no compromise with any of his opponents. He had maintain the pre-eminence of the Capello family at all times even if it meant trampling over the innocent. Any costs was worth protecting the strength of the family and, by extension, the country itself. Raul took to these lessons easily and quickly gained a reputation for being ruthless even by his family’s standards.

When he took over the running of the country, he quickly started stamping down on any perceived rebellion whether real or imagined. To maintain his armies, he increased taxes and began hoarding the money to pay for the many ‘projects’ which he believed would ensure that his country would be forever the strongest and most prosperous of all. While he was bringing in all this money, he was sure to send some of it to the nobility to keep them on side as he knew upsetting them could destroy his rule. This led to the poor complaining that only they were suffering from his taxes but he ignored their please. They did not understand he was ensuring their future prosperity and only cared about themselves.

In person, Raul comes across as a rather charming albeit intense person. He is utterly convinced that his actions are correct even if he can see they are hurting others. There has only been one person he has truly loved in his life and that person broke his heart by rejecting him. He has remained single ever since, apparently uninterested in finding himself a wife. The lord claims finding a woman would distract him too much from his grand work but others suspect he might have something, or someone, else that is distracting him from the important task of creating an heir.

PSCD update, and card games vs RPGs

One of the many changes: showing the enemy bounty value directly on the battle screen

So even this week I did yet-another-insanely-big update to PSCD. Seriously the changelog is pages-long!! 😀

I must confess that it’s a sort of deja-vù, it brought me back memories of last year when was going insane with SOTW. But in reality, it’s not that bad. The “self-contained” nature of the card games makes it a bit easier.

Don’t get me wrong, the PSCD system is really complex, for sure the most complex framework/engine ever made for my games (and I dare to say of all Ren’Py games, since I’m the only one using it to make unconventional games! lol).

But if I compare it to a RPG, I don’t need to worry about several things:

– characters level up. I added an upgrading system on my cards, but is only 3 levels.
– skill balancing. Each card has an ability, but it’s fixed. Compare it with a RPG, in which the party skills can change based on players choices or skills will unlock with certain prerequisites!
– inventory/items. Doesn’t matter if you have a RPG with 10 inventory slots, or just 3. Still, players can swap the items and lead to different results & combos.

I’ll stop here but you understand what I mean. Doing a card game is easier than a RPG (luckily!). I’m working hard to meet the January deadline, but I think in the next weeks I’ll slow down, since I feel a bit burned out, and I don’t want that to happen again (it happened after SOTW last year and early this year).

In the last 2 days for example I coded all the romance CGs, achievements, gallery screen and jealousy scenes, and tested them all. It was relaxing and fun, because the jealousy scenes of this game are awesome. Here’s a screenshot:

Haha I love their grumpy/angry faces! and Alex’s shocked one… 😀
(also, what is Rigel going to do with that big pipe wrench? watch out, Alex!)

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving! I am running a sale until the 1st December included, all my released titles 50% off: www.winterwolves.com

Discount is automatic, and displayed on the shopping cart.

Now that we have seen all the main characters, time to take a look also at the secondary (but not less important) ones. Let’s start with Arianna’s husband and father of the three sisters:

Lysander Spiros

Lysander was the son of a reasonably well off farmer. He grew up strong and joined the town guards as soon as he could, desperate to be more than a farmer. It was while in town that he first set eyes upon Arianna while she was walking about town with a young Raul Capello. He was instantly attracted to her and started to find excuses to meet her as he patrolled the town.

Eventually he succeeded in winning her affections and they were married. They moved to a village a day’s journey from their old home to start a new life. He became the village’s militia captain while his wife became one of the village elders thanks to her myriad of talents.

Life was good until his wife was taken away and he was left with three daughters to take care of on his own. Injury robbed him of much of the feeling in his right arm and that made things an even greater struggle for him. Gone was much of his strength and almost all of his happiness. He became a lonely obstinate man obsessed with avenging his wife but at the same time trying to do his best to be a father to his children. Many mistakes were made on his dual path but he always tried his best despite his many afflictions. The struggle has caused him to age prematurely and many assume he is much older than he actually is.

Recently he has a spring in his step that had not been seen for some time. Most assume it is the return of his daughters that has enlivened him which is partially true but not the whole story.

PSCD update

I’m working hard on the next update which will allow you to play until mission 15 (halfway through the main plot). I hope to have it done this weekend, though is taking more since I have also decided to add all the NPC sidemissions: optional side missions with a small scene for each NPC, which you can access from the map screen during the plot breaks.

Also I found out I put the team talk scenes in a wrong order, so I need also to fix that. Probably means the old savegames won’t work, sorry about that! 🙂

We’ve seen all the main characters and the male/female love interests in previous posts. But there are some more important characters to discover. First of all, the one who actually gives the name to the game:

Arianna Spiros née Mires, the ‘Queen of Thieves’

Daughter of a very successful merchant, Arianna was popular with both nobles and commoners alike. She was often seen in the company of all kinds and no one thought badly of her for it. Most famously, she was fought over by a young Raul Capello and Lysander Spiros. In the end, Lysander prevailed and Raul never forgave him for it. Arianna herself felt great affection for both of them, and likely loved both of them too, but there was something dangerous about Raul that made her decide it was better to spend her life with the poorer Lysander than live a life of luxury with the Capello family.

Arianna is a very strong willed woman with a big heart who finds it difficult to say no to people. It was perhaps why she took so long over her decision on who to marry which led to the grudge that developed between Raul and Lysander. Despite that, she still believes in doing what is right even if that means hurting those she cares for. A quality that came to the fore when Raul took over as the new Lord after his father died. He was a tyrannical ruler and Arianna found she could not turn a blind eye to the suffering as others. She took up the name of the Queen of Thieves and set about doing her best to righting the wrongs inflicted by the man she loved.

Being the Queen of Thieves came easy to her, she had been blessed with great strength, agility, intelligence as well as the gift of magic. Some wondered if she was actually the daughter of normal humans thanks to her amazing abilities. Whatever the case, she never sought to use her blessings for herself and always in the service of others. In the end, however, it was not enough and she vanished twenty years ago never to be seen again, her works left unfinished and the people still suffering under the rule of Lord Raul Capello.

PSCD beta demo out!

I’ve finally managed to release a beta demo. Please note, that the game length is still the demo length (the first 10 missions/scenes) and like in the past, I plan to continue coding the story on each update. So next big update will have up to mission 15, then 20, etc until I reach the full game length 🙂

For those who play my games most for the story, there’s a nice surprise: I have added a “visual novel mode”, so you can play the game only as a visual novel if you want. I’ve learned from SOTW that a good amount of people would have liked to read the story, but either don’t like the gameplay, or simply not have time (that would be me…) to play all the battles.

So I thought, why not make everyone happy? Like I’m doing with the romance options, trying to have something for all tastes, whenever I can will try to do the same also for gameplay. In this case, if you choose VN Mode you won’t see a single battle, or deck building screen. Since the game story is quite long (over 200k words!!) and has several interesting romances, it was a pity not let everyone enjoy it.

In particular, the otome romance of Diana with Lucius the robot is something really unique, and both funny and touching at same time. I honestly think the story is worth reading just for that (but there are also many other interesting romances of course!).

The game official page is http://winterwolves.com/pscd.htm