Category Archives: winter wolves games

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

Gamasutra articles about my games

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So it looks like is a two out of two. Both my games Summer Session and Heileen were featured on gamasutra by Emily Short (originally part of her ‘Homer in Silicon’ column at sister site GameSetWatch):

Summer Session – Refining Simulation into Narrative

Heileen & The Art Of Game Storytelling

Obviously I’m quite proud of that, even if the article about Heileen doesn’t really speak too much well of the game (but in a constructive way in any case). I really love telling stories, but of course my biggest barrier is the language. Anyway, I’d be also happy just to outline the main plot and have other native english writer do the rest, like if I was a director 🙂

I’ll be surely doing an Heileen 2, even if don’t really know when, probably next year. I’m about to release Spirited Heart at last, after 2 months of crazy delay for translation problems (a lesson to learn…). So I’m a bit late on my planned 4 releases this year: however luckily Ewan Grantham (the writer/programmer behind College Romance) is doing right now the first chapter of a space trilogy that I’ll publish this year, which sounds very interesting and will keep the number of games released higher (even if they aren’t written directly by me).

Right now my plan is:

mid-end of April release Spirited Heart
May/June first episode of Space Trilogy
July/August release of Bionic Heart
September/October release of a mysterious card game… 😉

but of course I know already that this schedule will be messed up completely in the upcoming months, so let’s say that I’d be happy to release at least 3 more games this year 🙂

Spirited Heart update + new game

So in theory by mid-march my new game should have been finished. And it is. The problem is that I wrote a big part of the story (the love/relationship scenes, so the most important) into my own native language, italian. I then handled them to a “translator” so she could deliver me the final texts in time for mid-march.

The result was disastrous. A translation so poor that I would have done much much better myself alone. So, I had no choice but ask another translator (a REAL one this time) to proofread again the texts, resulting in a delay of 1-2 weeks. At this point I think the game will be ready by first days of April.

Some of you might have noticed recently I switched to more casual/simple games. But fear not! I am working also on another game, similar to Magic Stones, called “5 Elements: The RPG Card Game”:

for now I’m still in the planning stage, but I can reveal some features:

– 5 elements that influence the whole game (units and spells): fire, air, nature, death, life. Your initial choice will reflect into the kind of units you can train during the game.
– you’ll create your commander choosing from three types: Warlord, Wizard and Marksman. Each type will unlock some extra powerful leveling options for your units
– several “race packs”. Initially the game will be shipped with only the human race, but I’ll release extra packs containing new cards with new races (amazons, dwarves, etc)
– leveling avatars. The cards all start based on one of the three archetypes: melee, magic and missile. Each base archetype can evolve after level 4 into a more powerful unit, picking an element. Then after the units reach level 15, can evolve into an even more powerful unit.
– I have planned 48 unique units for each race. A unit, different from magic stones, will have a full set of skill and attack options, like a real RPG character.

Ok I think that’s enough to wet your appetite 😀

A Trip To Bavaria

Last week I finished a small visual novel in flash, free to play. It tells an episode of Heileen life, before sailing to the New World. I posted it on several flash portals and also put it up on my tycoon games website. I liked doing it even if working with flash is really slow, and I don’t think I’ll make more games like that in future (of course, you never know for sure).

main300x225

My other game, Spirited Heart, is going well and is almost finished. I think I could start beta testing next month and release it early March, if I don’t get stuck in my writing! Indeed there are lots of events to create, and each events is specific to a job, and is really hard to come up with good ideas for events, but I’m doing my best, of course 🙂

I wonder if people will be ok to define that game a roleplaying game? it doesn’t have combats (I didn’t had enough resources to put those in the game), but I don’t think is an essential part for a roleplay…? basically it plays a lot like Kudos , only with different settings and lots of fantasy skills. Probably is better to call it a life-sim game.

108 different situations

What means that number? it’s the result of this calculation for Spirited Heart:

6 different boys that can be met ingame x 3 different playable races x 2 job types x 3 events each = 108 unique situations

Each situation means an event that happens if the player is doing a specific job, and that day she meets with one of the 6 boys available inside the game. Such a variety of situations hopefully means a very replayable game!! 🙂

Each event will be written accordingly to the job type, but also the race selected. Example, you work as waitress in a tavern. The character you can encounter there is Janimee, an elven bard. But each of the 3 playable races (human, elf, demon) will react differently to the situation. The human will be the “neutral” one, while the elf will always try to be polite and kind, and the demon instead will always be bad and annoying. The player will have a choice of option for each situation, and the right choice will increase the “love” value of the boy.

So if you manage to pick the right answers in the 60% of cases, you’ll be able to engage with one of them and at last get married, which is one of the possible endings for the game.

So far I only wrote 10-12 of those 108 situations, so there’s still a long way to go…!!

Spirited Heart chargen finished!

Today I finished the character generator for Spirited Heart, my upcoming hybrid adventure/RPG. To be more specific, I should say is a mix with make your own adventure gamebook and a RPG/Life simulation. There are stats, and there is a daily schedule. There will be various jobs, and you’ll be able to attend some specific school courses to improve some of your stats.

Then, from time to time, there will be random events. Lots of them, which changes based on your race/job, quite a big combination! Differently from the character generation, you’ll still have some options to choose, but some of them will be disabled if you don’t match some specific skill checks.

On the right you can see the actual status screen of the game. From there you’ll be able to select what to do, and you’ll also see the various statistics/skills.

As for game length, I was thinking something like 10 years, from 18 to 28, or maybe even less: since you play every week, each year there are 52 turns, so ten years would be 520 turns, maybe too long!

For those interested I uploaded a very rough alpha version here:

http://www.didone.com/demos/SpiritedHeartDemo.zip (Pc)
http://www.didone.com/demos/SpiritedHeartDemo-mac.zip (Mac)
http://www.didone.com/demos/SpiritedHeartDemo-linux-x86.tar.bz2 (Linux)