Today we’re talking about the last male romanceable character of the game, the mysterious Melvin. Here’s how the writer introduces him:

Melvin Thorburn

Very few people in Ahkra really know Melvin. He is the scion of a long-standing noble family although rumours persist that he is the last of his line, and his estate is essentially empty except for him. His family fell out of favour with Lord Raul due to issues dating back to Melvin’s childhood, and it appears Raul has little interest in burying the hatchet. Mostly, he is seen visiting various business in the city, and buying all sorts of strange items that may no logical sense when put together. No one quite knows what he is up to although there are many who are curious.

Those few who have interacted with Melvin find him rather charming albeit somewhat vain. He tends to agree with any compliments given to him and has gained quite a reputation as a womaniser. Many do fall for his good looks and charming words, thinking they have won the heart of a noble, but all have ended up disappointed when he vanishes after a night of passion.

Some have noted an undercurrent of rage that can be heard in his words, especially if the topic of Lord Raul or the Queen of Thieves comes up. Most assume it is just his anger at his family’s treatment at the hands of Raul or that his family was one of the many victims of the Queen of Thieves. Whether that is true or not, Melvin has no interest in answering.

PSCD – alpha preview version

If you follow me on twitter or read my forums, you know that last weekend I was able to put up an alpha preview version of the game. Since then, this week I am working hard to finish the beta version of the first 10 missions (which will also be the final demo length of the game) for this weekend.

I am at good point, but I spent a bit of time to add some polishing (the basic battle attack animations) and a detailed tutorial on the first battle which should let players who aren’t familiar with such games to understand the basics mechanics.

I am unsure if I’ll manage to finish the demo for Sunday, but of course I’ll try. As always check my twitter or forums for more up to date news! Enjoy some screenshots of the game various features below:

In the deck screen, you can upgrade any card to silver or gold status, increasing its stats

The team talk screen is where you’ll get to know better your teammates and other NPCs

As you know, I like strong female characters in my games. Mary-Ann surely fits the description completely! Below the official intro by the writer.

Mary-Ann Folami

When Mary-Ann was an infant, her grandparents and parents left the Broken Lands to settle in Ahkra. Her grandfather started a forge in service to Lord Raul’s father and soon her family began to prosper. That ended shortly after Raul came to power. Her grandfather had died by then and Raul had little interest in the services of Mary-Ann’s father. They were cast out of his castle and were left to man a forge in the city. Gone was the creation of unique weapons and armour, replaced by horseshoes and other simple things that any competent blacksmith could make.

Shortly before turning eighteen, Mary-Ann’s parents died and she found herself alone. She decided to take over the family forge and has served as the town blacksmith ever since. Mary-Ann is extremely gregarious and very good at her job also. She is very popular in Ahkra and she often likes to take advantage of that. Deep down, she yearns to do more than what she does now: however she understands that she cannot abandon her family’s legacy.

Mary-Ann is infamous for her sexual appetites and has had a string of female lovers. It is well known she has little interest in serious relationships but most of her former lovers say that blacksmithing is only one of her considerable talents…

PSCD pre-orders and incoming beta

The game will offer some OPTIONAL side missions for those who want to “grind” 🙂

I sent a newsletter last week, offering the possibility to preorder PSCD. The game temporary webpage can be found here: http://winterwolves.com/pscd.htm

My plan was to release a beta demo at mid-November: however things have been going very well, so I think I might be able to release either a shorter demo this weekend, or the beta demo early next week.

Beta demo doesn’t mean the full game, since I am still missing some GUI art, and I also need to code the advanced missions and test/tweak.

I don’t plan to release the game this year, especially considering how crowded it seems to be (both other indies and AAA companies are releasing a lot of games in the next weeks!) but I will probably complete the full beta version before end of year. Which means you could play the whole game in beta in a few weeks from now 🙂

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.