Category Archives: winter wolves games

news about my games, updates and patches I’m working on, and ideas for new games

Planet Stronghold Public Alpha 1

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I’m proud to finally announce the first public Alpha of my next game Planet Stronghold. For those who don’t know what it is, I’m currently also building the official website which will also contain more info about the story and each character, but for now I can tell you what you’ll find in the game:

  • a manga sci-fi roleplaying game – with beautiful art and really varied characters (not all the same good-looking boys/girls you find in manga games)
  • two different heroes to choose (male / female) – The choice will only impact the romance and few situations in the game, but the statistics / skills / gameplay will have no differences
  • battle system – similar to those you find in JRPG titles and a gameplay similar to adventure games
  • romace option – romance was always present in all my recent story-based game and this won’t be an exception, including new homosexual romance option for both the male / female characters! The romance is entirely optional so if you’re not interested in it, you won’t see it at all (you won’t have the chance to stumble in it by accident)
  • relationship system – with any of the 8 charaters beside the main hero. Keep them happy to increase their skills, piss them off and if you push it too much they could even leave your party!
  • autoupdating – I’m experimenting with an autoupdate system that should allow me to release updates on server-side, and players to download only the changed part. No more “redownload the whole game to get latest update” like before! 🙂

Instead what you won’t find on the game:

  • tilemaps – if you’re a RPGMaker fan, sorry to disappoint, but I really preferred to concentrate my time on writing the story and characters interactions than mapmaking. There will be  a generic map to move from a location to the other though
  • puzzles – since I’m building this game system from scratch, for this first game I want to concentrate more on the battles, the skills, the statistics and variety of enemies, than puzzles. However I’ll have an interesting character training system. More on this later.
  • offline play – to play most of the game past the alpha version you’ll need to be online. Partly to protect me from piracy, but also to offer new features like achievements, autoupdates, new missions / maps / weapons / items and so on.

Are you still here? Good because now comes the good part, the download links:

http://www.didone.com/games/PSDemo.exe (Pc Version)
http://www.didone.com/games/PSDemo.zip (Mac Version)
http://www.didone.com/games/PSDemo.tar.bz2 (Linux Version)

I absolutely love to get feedback on gameplay and/or any bugs you encounter. Especially for the mac and linux platform, since I have already many testers on Pc! The build uses a very new version of Ren’Py game engine so you should be able to play with openGL acceleration enabled (press key F to go fullscreen).

Thanks and I hope you’ll enjoy the first alpha, even if is quite short for now 😀

Making story-based MMOs ?

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It sounds impossible, doesn’t it?

While talking with some other developers last day, it appears clear that to survive in the struggle that is happening right now in the shareware games (in which we are seeing the return of middlemen, cutting indie revenues even more) there’s only one effective way: do online / MMO games.

As a player personally I hate them. I was a long-time player of Everquest, but when I started working I didn’t had hours to spend (waste) into that kind of game anymore. Anyway, as developer, I can clearly see how this is the only viable solution for long-term revenues nowadays.

Problem: how do I integrate online/multiplayer/MMO with a story-based game ? I’ve come up with some ideas, nothing really new of course:

  • making simple flash / JS singleplayer online games – this would mainly have the purpose to eliminate completely piracy, but no particular advantages for the player
  • do some sort of series of games centered around a character – somewhat similar to what I’m doing with Vera Blanc, but not simple offline downloadable games, but a series of games connected each other, using achievements and maybe even some RPG elements. However this is a big risk since if the first episode for some reason doesn’t sell, it’s really not worthwhile to continue the others
  • a MMO based on missions, each mission with a story, still playable as single player, maybe with some limited player to player interactions (but not real-time) – I like this idea, like a collection of stories, each story representing a mission (like in a fantasy or sci-fi RPG) that the player must complete, playing as single player game

I think it is possible to come up with something like that, keeping in mind to focus on the single player experience. I would love for example to do a sequel for Bionic Heart, but apart some art problems (I would still need to wait for the artist Rebecca to be free, which will be next year anyway!!) I would need more guarantees to make it. The first game was VERY popular amongst male, sci-fi userbase, as much that I got lots of emails asking me about a sequel. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, there’s also lots of piracy in that market segment: so much that clearly damaged the direct sales, demotivating me from even just considering the option to make a sequel!

This is one of the most common situations for a developer and I hate it: have a game that has a good following of “true-fans” (people who would instantly buy a sequel) but that unfortunately has also a lot of piracy, so that makes me think twice before starting a sequel 🙁 So it’s really not a surprise that many of my developer friends completely abandoned the road of single-player offline games, and I believe many will in the near future.

I would love to start something new like this. Imagine a normal game like my others, but that could connect and auto-update, downloading new chapters, books or missions. I could add the new content anytime, after 2 weeks, after 1 year, of the initial game release (of course with some sort of notification like email/newsletter). Each content could be only a small fee, so there would be less risk for me and less money to pay for the player.

Yes I like this solution, maybe I could try it already with my next game Planet Stronghold… by the way an alpha is coming out very soon!

Is worth having a Flash version of your downloadable?

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That’s one of the most frequent questions I see asked around in game development forums. I released in May a flash version of my downloadable game Spirited Heart, so thought to share some info about it.

The stats are quite clear (timeframe, 2 months):

gameplays: 60-70k estimate (mochi-ads is 55k, plus a few more thousands in Kongregate, Newgrounds and other portals I submitted my game to)
unique visitors to my site:  12,886
tracked sales: 7 !!

As you can see, the visitors to sales ratio (called also CR, conversion rate) is 0,05%! Well below the standard CR of downloadable demos that is around 1% (actually, for my game it’s 2,6% well above average). If we calculated the people per sale ratio from everyone that played the game, we would get 1 sale every 10.000 players 😀

And I even put lots of “nag stuff” in the game, in several parts there was a hint that certain game functions would be available only in the “Deluxe Version” and not in the free flash demo.

That said, I probably made some mistakes in it: putting too many “hints” that the game was only a “flash demo”, pissed some people off and especially on Kongregate I got very low rating only because of that. Also, the flash market is known to like more male-oriented games (zombies, blood, violence!) so my game was badly targeted also for that.

Still, even if my game was played by 7 milion people (that would be a TOP record!) according to those visits/buy ratio I would have got “only” 700 sales, or translated in money, about $15000. But just so you know, Desktop Tower Defense, one of the most popular flash games of all times, made 15million plays. So getting 7 million would be almost an impossible task unless you have something really UNIQUE.

Based on this, the conclusion would be quite easy: is NOT worth it. However, I know some other devs doing online only games or browser MMO got much better results than me. So is correct to say that making a flash version of your DOWNLOADABLE game is a bad move. But for a online/browser game that could be very different.

Vera Blanc: Full Moon is out

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Vera Blanc pc/mac/linuxI’m very happy to announce that finally this game is out. I’m quite proud of it, because I think is something new, for the art-style and also a bit for the gameplay (a mix with visual novel/mystery/minigames).

Those who want to skip the rest of this blog post can head straight to the download links on the official game page.

Now, a bit of background / making of this game. I always loved comics: indeed, as soon as I was 5-6 years old I started drawing them. As I grew up, unfortunately I moved away from them, until recently when I started being an indie developer and in 2008 made the first visual novel / manga games.

I like manga art style, but I also like the standard comic (more realistic) style. I also believe that for this kind of game, which has a strong supernatural and mystery setting (and also a bit of horror), the manga would have been a bit out of place. So I think this other style fits the game perfectly.

The making of has been divided into 3 stages:

  1. game conception: I remember I pitched this game style/character to a developer friend of mine who expressed some interest in entering the visual novel / dating sim area, but then changed idea.  I thought it was good and worth a try myself, so I first wrote down a storyboard in Openoffice, containing all the game details (character, story, objects, events, etc).
  2. coding/writing: this was the most fun part, coding all the various minigames and write the story. Writing the story was really hard though, because of the many different paths the player can take. It caused much headache, indeed in the sequel that I’m writing right now I’m going to make it more linear, also to make it easier to test.
  3. testing/proofreading: this was the less fun part. The game was started the 1st february and finished the 1st april. So took me two months to make. It is ou now, the 1st July. All this time was due to delays in proofreading (and also some testing of course). No need to say, I am really eager to resume working on less text-intensive games!!! 🙂

If you follow my tweets, you already know that I’m writing the second episode (I am at a very good point). So if you liked this one, you know that another one should be out very soon (this time the proofreading stage should take much less time).

And after the second? I don’t know if I’ll make a third yet: as you might imagine it largely depends on the sales of the first two episodes, so if you enjoy the game and want to see more, spread the word about it! 😉

Living in a fantasy world

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Who wouldn’t like to? Stop playing the Sims and enjoy a fantasy life with Spirited Heart!

Ahem, sorry about the ad. I wanted to talk about the spin-off of my fantasy life simulation game which I released last year. First of all, I’m still in the early stages so is hard to tell when it will be finished. Previously I said maybe for Christmas but at this point I doubt it, since I want also finish Planet Stronghold first.

I can reveal a bit more info about the game itself. While Spirited Heart was set in the imaginary town of Triberg, and the whole game took place there, in this spin-off there will be already a major difference: you’ll be able to relocate in any town of a whole region. Have yet to decide how many towns there will be, but is very likely the amount will be around 20 or so.

This choice won’t be purely to provide more content, but will greatly influence the whole game, for example:

  • some towns will have exclusive crafting materials. For exeample they will be built nearby mines of various precious metals, essential for certain jobs
  • some will have Masters of certain skills, for example Master in Tailoring. During the game you’ll be able to train and learn skill like before, but to unlock special skill levels you’ll need specific trainers found only in certain towns
  • each town will have different quests: yes, there will be combat in the game! \o/ I always wanted to introduce combat, so people won’t describe this new game as “it’s a visual novel with RPG element” but as true RPG! 🙂
  • based on your character race, season, origins there will be a specific “global quest” that will involve performing certain tasks spread through the whole region
  • being the game online-based, new towns with new features can be added anytime to the game

About the last point, I already explained how this game will take advantage of the online feature. The game on each run will auto-update itself, to provide the user with the latest version available. At same time will notify of new features like new towns, quests or items. That is my goal for this game, to start moving finally to the new era of online games. So, except for last minute technical difficulties, the game will be online only (a big step for me, but I feel is necessary for this kind of game).

As you can see from the thumbnail on the side, I’m also investing lot of money on assets to produce a game with great art. I really believe this will turn out to be one of my most beautiful games 🙂

The title and everything in that picture is just a mockup, so definitely a Work-In-Progress! But I think it already shows off the kind of art you can expect in the full game.

That’s it for now, I’m really eager to begin working on this game, but since is probably my most ambitious game ever, I’ll take it easy and cure it in every small details!