Category Archives: tycoongames

Games that are or will be available on my newsite tycoongames.eu

Game art styles

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After posting my last sketch about my upcoming mystery / detective game Vera Blanc, I got some comments from people about the artstyle.

Everyone seems to love the new style, and I’m a bit relieved since it was a bit a risk to move away from manga style (even if many said that Heileen was a mix between manga and american comics).

Note that I will still make manga games too in future, but I also wanted to try a more realistic / comic style.

Especially since in that style women looks better IMHO 😀

Click on the image on the left to zoom in and look at the colors… only at the colors, eh! 😉

I played with saturation level based on suggestions of Jake, and indeed seems that it looks better to me too. I wanted to obtain a sort of comic look, but before the image was less saturated than the one I posted above, and while was ok for a printed comic I think this new version fits more a computer game.

That’s just an example of what kind of fanservice you can expect from this series – yes, if things go well I plan to make a series of games. Another decision I had to take, which scares me, is to have multiple artists work on each “episode”.

Like in comic books, where each episode would be drawn by a different artist. I had to take this decision if I wanted to release each episode at 4-5 months of distance, rather than 1 year 😐

I hope players will understand my motivations!

Regarding art, if I had the money I would make all my games looks like the picture on the right: that’s a new screenshot from Planet Stronghold game, probably the most expensive I’m making so far in term of art and coding (and I hope it will do well!).

Just for fun, I also wanted to post an image of one of my first games as indie: Universal Boxing Manager (see below).

Ok, it’s true that simulation/strategy games usually don’t need great art, however is fun for me to see how I started, and how the quality of the art in my games changed (in better of course!) over the years… 🙂
universal boxing manager pc / mac game

Moving forward with Flower Shop and Planet Stronghold

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The Flower Shop game is near completion. The farming sim is 100% done, and the game is being tested. Fixed some minor typos, and adjusted some gameplay elements, but in practice we’re waiting for 3 missing backgrounds and the beautiful (even if I haven’t yet seen it) main menu from Deji.

Also, I’m finally moving forward with my other game Planet Stronghold. I got a new artist that’s going to do all the enemies in the game. Below you see a sketch of one of the first enemies, a robot-terrorist that we could call “RoboAnt-06”. (this because it vaguely resembles an ant!)

Then she created small variations of the base model, each one with a different weapon. In Planet Stronghold the combat will be focused on damage type, there are 5 in total: energy,explosive,armor penetrating, acid, psionic. Below, a screenshot of the in-game battle showing the new robot that replaced my ugly 3d renders of the first WIP screenshots 🙂

Note how the left arm of the robot has a different weapon. The one on the left has a gatling cannon firing armor piercing ammo, while the one on the right has a powerful laser cannon! I also got 10 new shiny backgrounds for the game that will show in future screenshots (yes I gave up on the idea of using pre-rendered 3d backgrounds).

How was 2009, how I hope will be 2010

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2009 is almost finished. How it was for me? Quite good I’d say. Considering the global crisis, is already enough that I managed to “survive” as indie another year. And in europe even, where you have also to face with insane taxation and the always poor usd value versus euro!
This year I released four games: College Romance (which I didn’t write but only produce), Spirited Heart, Bionic Heart and Heileen 2: The Hands Of Fate. Four games of that quality in a year is a very good achievement for any indie working mainly alone (with the help of external people that produce assets).
Other important things that happened, both good and bad:

GOOD
– I’ve made my first fully voiced game (Bionic Heart). Was very cool, even if a bit painful to put all the voices inside the game and manage all the voice actors. Heileen 2 should have been fully voiced too…
– I’ve learned to manage lots of people and projects at once. Even right now, I have 5 projects started!
– I’ve worked with wonderful people like Ayu Sakata, Deji, Rebecca Gunter, PyTom, Steven Mane, Daniel Conlin, Lucien Dodge and more (sorry if I don’t list you all!). This is very good since I’m building a list of RELIABLE people that I will surely use again on future projects.

BAD
– I’ve learned that writing the game in italian first and having it translated in english is a really bad idea
– I’ve also learned that putting sexy girls in a game doesn’t mean it will automatically sell 😀 you need also to make a good game!
– I’ve finally accepted the fact that none of my games will ever appear on a big portal
– I’ve been disappointed by some people that disappeared or delayed some of my projects for too long

Overall though, was a good year. In 2010 I hope to finish some of the 5 projects I’ve started! The first one probably (crosses fingers) will be the Flower Shop, since in practice once Ayu finishes to put the new character in the game and sends the code back to me, I will finish the farming sim and then… we will only need the voices!

Here’s hoping that this time there won’t be any problems with the voice actors 🙂

Then, I want to finish Planet Stronghold and Card Sweethearts, a interesting VN-Poker game that is waiting for too long. And I am producing the art now for a new kind of game style that I hope will be a great success, since I like a lot writing the stories and the storyboards for it. For now I can only say that involves detectives, mystery, and a beautiful blonde girl with a French accent…

VN Series and more

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Today I thought that would be cool to have some sort of VN series. Like a TV series, several episodes covering several months. However, I’m aware that it wouldn’t be an easy task at all. I seriously doubt anyone could release a VN of decent size (at least 2-3h of gameplay) in less than 30-45 days.

Also much depends on the artist, since VNs require lot of art and I believe that artist are even more important than writers, in terms of “releasing stuff”. Of course a great writing can make the difference, but if there’s no art available, the game doesn’t get released 🙂

A way to do it could be to start producing many “episodes” in advance, so you would have “half-season” ready when you start releasing them to the public. I really think this could work, and I’m disappointed that I lack the means (financial, team, time) of trying this. However, not many people know that the game Farenheit, also known as Indigo Prophecy (I quote that often since I love it) originally was conceived as a series of episodes. Yes, exactly: they thought to use this method but even big companies like Quantic Dream had to give up to this idea (even if from what I remember, was because of publisher’s pressure). They had to cut off several chapters from the game, and make 1 big game instead of a series of games. Those were different times though, now that ESD and platforms like Xbox Live are more widespread I really think it could work well (selling downloadable packs with 1-2 chapters each for low amount).

Am I going to try this? Well, never say never, but at the moment I’m in a fun situation where I have 5 projects started, and I am stuck because I’m waiting for external people to finish their jobs on ALL of those 5 (yes, mostly are artists, in case you wondered!). Also, doing a VN or adventure game in 3d is different: once you have the models of the main characters for example, you can reuse them even if you make 10 games. Same for evironments and objects. I’m not saying it’s easier to do in 3d, but that once you build up a good collection of 3d models and you have a working engine, is surely faster to produce games in 3d than hand-drawn 2d (that’s not a big discovery).

Back to my own games, the final proofreading of all Spirited Heart texts is almost done, so I could release the beta-test version of the Deluxe version just before Christmas 🙂

What’s next ?

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Well, today got an email from Kim, the girl doing Heileen voice that assured me she will resume working on it once the finals at university are done. So I’m still confident about a late January / Mid-February release of the voice add-on for Heileen 2.

Then, the Flower Shop game is nearing completion, I’m programming the farm-sim minigame, which is turning out rather difficult (I want to make something decent to play). Deji, the game main artist, is drawing the final screens and they’re really beautiful, probably the best ones I’ve made for any of my games so far 🙂

The RPG game Planet Stronghold project is on hold for the moment, since the character artist disappeared, right when I needed some more characters to start building the main system of the game (doing missions, selecting the party, and so on). However the backgrounds are being done right now, and the sketches looks promising.

Lastly, I have a top-secret project going on for my Winter Wolves brand. Really topsecret since nobody knows about it (not even my most strict collaborators). It involves a VERY original art-style, which I think was never tried in a computer game before, and a interesting couple of… special detectives. I am trying to find the right artist for this, and I’m still experimenting with some prototypes etc to see if the result could be interesting.

More info coming soon…