Category Archives: winter wolves games

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

Remember Me pre-orders available!

Is going to be a hot spring

In the picture above, Lilli sleeping over some straw 🙂

Spring is my favourite season. The blossoming flowers, the nature that wakes up, warm but not too hot climate (at least, for now) and so on. They say that the season you like most, is the season you’re born in. Indeed, next monday will be my birthday…so maybe is true! I have lots of things going on, so this post is going to be made in form of “news”. First news is…

Loren to be a manga game too

Yes, after thinking about it a lot, and after seeing that the actual comic author wasn’t doing a great job (sigh…) I’ve decided to use manga art even for this game. I am not sure yet who will do the art but is likely will be the same artist of Undead Lily, so I’ll need to finish that game first (since artist still need to do a lot of art for that game).

I realized I was about to make the same mistake I made with Vera Blanc, but at least this time I changed direction in time 😉

I’m also going to change the gameplay, from card-rpg battle to some more real-time stuff and perhaps even isometric battlefield! But right now is too early to talk about it, since the game is officially on hiatus for now.

Remember Me out very soon + new title!

My new life / dating sim will be almost surely out for pre-orders next weekend (of the next week I mean)! I have finished testing the romance arc of Lawrence, so there are only 3 more characters to check. Obiously the pre-order version might contain a few bugs and some unbalanced gameplay, and the texts won’t be completely proofread, even if the main story was written by a native English speaker, so there are only minor things that aren’t proofread.

Yesterday spent the whole day testing it and I believe is going to be a good game, the “normal” endings are easy enough to get, once you find the right dialog choices (like in my other games) but the special ones are going to be tricky. You’ll need to understand which actions raises which stats, and is going to be fun to discover them all (some happens only at specifc day/hour).

Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook out… this summer!

Technically might be out even this Spring, since Summer starts the 21st June and if I understood well, Ayu of Sakevisual wants to have the game ready by the first days of June 🙂 You can see a nice gallery of pictures of the game below… this otome game is going to be quite interesting!

So far the word count amounts at around 25,000 words, which is not bad already. There is going to be the usual farming sim, this time with flowers instead, but have yet to discuss about this with Ayu so don’t know exactly how it will be done. More detailed information about this game will come in the next weeks!

So… what’s the plan again?

The new release schedule is:

Mid-April – Remember Me pre-orders
End-April – Remember Me Official Release

End-May or Early June – Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook

I’m going to list only the games almost ready from now on, since for the others in production many things can happen that can change completely the schedule. I’m also probably going to find the time to release an add-on for Planet Stronghold sometime before next Summer! Featuring the so-much-requested romance options: Lisa – Prince Cliff and Joshua – Queen Shiler!

Loren Amazon Princess game features revealed!

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In the picture above, a big close-up picture of my cat Nina. I wanted her to be present in the game Remember Me, but she’s quite hard to draw. The resulting sprite inside the game only vaguely resembles her… 🙂

Today will talk mainly of the decisions I’m making for my next RPG called “Loren – the amazon princess”. But first a quick update about my next otome / life sim game:

Remember Me

Things are going smoothly – all the texts are done, and are being proofread again (even if they were already written by a native English speaker!). I have still to link all the events together, make sure everything works as it’s supposed (some scenes happens only after others) and other minor things, but seems very likely that will be able to do pre-orders at mid-April! 🙂

Loren – the amazon princess

In the picture below, the two playable characters: Saren, the human male slave and Elenor, the elf female slave.

I am still writing the plot/storyboard that then will be transformed into script by writers. But I want to talk about the rules first. I’m still brainstorming the ideas but that’s what I have so far:

shared inventory. After finishing Planet Stronghold, I had the chance to play some recent RPGs and… well, having a separate inventory for each character is really bad 🙁 In this game, I’ll have a shared inventory!
character customization. Each character will have access only to a specific weapon, like Dragon Age 2. I know this might sound limiting, but in my case I’m doing this for budget reasons: having different sprites drawn with each possible weapon is out of discussion. I think though that it makes more interesting the gameplay and gives each character a specific set of skills related to his weapon choice. For example, Loren will be a massive damage dealer: she uses two swords (dual wield power!) and does tremendous critical strikes. The downside of course is that she’ll have low HP, but thankfully your player character will be a healer!
character creation. Again, not much freedom for race and name – for plot reasons you’ll have ot be either Saren (human male slave), or Elenor (elf female slave). Also, you’ll be a healer. You might wonder then “wtf I cannot even choose my class!”. Yes, but you’ll be able to choose the specialization skills. Even if you’re primarily a healer, at low level, as you go on you’ll be able to become several different things: a sort of Templar (warrior/healer) that fight and also heal a bit, a sort of Druid (wizard/healer) who can cast offensive/buff spells and heal a bit, or you can choose to keep your path and become a powerful healer. So as you see, you still have a choice at later levels
skill system. I absolutely fell in love with the multiple tree/branches skills! I want to use that method in this game. I have already started designing them and I’m quite happy so far about the variety and results. Each character will have a common skill based on the class (warrior, magic user, scout) and a unique personal skill set, so each character will be somehow unique 🙂 I think this feature should make the game much more replayable since you might want to experiment with all the various characters skills.
romance. There will be of course romances subplots! The main one will be between Loren and your Playable Character, but I plan also to allow some other romance between other minor characters. They’ll be optional like in Planet Stronghold, but I’m not sure yet they’ll have specific quest too.
endings. I’d like also to have several different endings, I mean quite different between each other. But is perhaps still a bit too early to talk about this (also, I won’t really talk about this since don’t want to make spoilers!)
battle system. This game is more for the “hardcore fans” than casual RPG player, so I’m thinking to move from the first person view of Planet Stronghold and try some card-RPG battle view. You can see a very ugly looking (hey it’s programmer’s art) test layout below:

I’m going to do this for several reasons: more epic battles, you can fight against 12 goblins if you want 😀 Also, more tactical choices and the position will influence the battle. The first rows will be the one in direct contact, but all the heroes in the second rows won’t be directly attackable by enemies unless they have ranged attacks. Also, I can have area of effect spells/skills, and you can swap positions of the heroes, like move in the back lines if your fighter is injured to heal him, and so on. Will be much more fun I think, even if inevitably is going to make battle more complex (but as I said, I think the target market for this kind of game will appreciate it).

That’s all for now, as you can see there’s already quite some features to talk about 😉

Announcing a superheroes game!

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In the picture above, Gilda in a very cute and funny pose/expression. She’s adorable 🙂

In this other picture instead you see the “good” superheroes, led by that mysterious undead girl, who is indeed called “Undead Lily” (cool name for a superhero, eh??). If you’re put off by the nudity of some characters don’t worry, in the game they’ll be covered “by default” and you’ll have to enable the sexy version in the options!

The game is obviously in a very early stage, meaning that actually there’s only a few pictures and a storyboard, and nothing else. With this game I’m going to mix some genres again, this time a real-time RPG battle system (think about Final Fantasy) with a more strategic / simulation part where you have to manage your heroes headquarter, building new weapons, researching new stuff, and so on.

The main gameplay of this title would be something like this (I am still brainstorming, if you have any suggestion feel free to post in my forums!):

you would have to control a team of good and a team of bad superheroes. I think this aspect would be quite fun. In practice the starting plot condition would force the two teams to work together, even if obviously they are opponents.
each team is made by 5 superheroes, associated to one of the following elements: Death, Life, Fire, Air, Water, Earth (the elements will be also key component for a rock-paper-scissor mechanic in the battles)
At a certain point, the teams will split again. Each team will be lead by the Death character, which for the good side is Undead Lily, and for the evil side is “Big Blind”.
Except those two fixed characters, you will be able to recruit a team based on your relationship values with each of the remaining heroes. The relationship will start neutral and change during the first phase, using the usual relationship system present my other games. Most of the choices will be mutually exclusive, since you’ll be forced to have one of the two heroes for the four remaining elements.
This should guarantee a good replayability since everytime your choices might be different and you might end up with a different team of heroes.
From this point, there will be another good part of the game/story that will see you face the other team and other creatures, and this is also where the strategy part will take place: each team will have a headquarter where they’ll be able to research new blueprints, build new weapons/items and train some unique superheroes skills. To do that, you’ll need resources that you will gather with the fights – so in practice it will be somehow an equivalent of the crafting you see in the fantasy RPGs.

That is the basic idea I have for the game. Of course, from now until the game gets finished (I believe might be next year!) things could change a lot!

One thing is sure: I’m finding myself a lot “burned” after making Planet Stronghold, so the RPG, and simulation part of this game will be very simple/casual, like Spirited Heart for example. I think (and so far my sales data confirm this) that I make my best games when I don’t excessively overcomplicate them. Considering that adding more details/stats/complexity also takes more time in coding and testing, you can see that I’m not really motivated to try making something as complex as Planet Stronghold anytime soon! 🙂

Every moment of your life is a simulation

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In the image above, Lilli the cat sleeping inside a vase. She found it comfortable 🙂

Yes, every moment of your life can be simulated. Every action you do has consequences, that depends on your stats and skills. If you decide to play an action game, and you don’t have enough hand-eye coordination, you’ll have less chances of succeeding than someone else who does. If you don’t know Enligsh, you’ll have a very hard time to play my games. If you don’t have internet, you cannot read this 🙂

Those are just some (silly) examples, but if you look at the Remember Me galery above, you can see that I am trying to simulate almost every aspect of a young lady in the modern times, even when you end the playing day and you go to sleep, it’s a simulated event: you can have a good night, you can dreams, you can have nightmares, and so on. I’m particularly satisfied by how the game is coming along and I really hope that the cute artwork won’t turn more “hardcore” players away because behind it there’s a very complex life simulation, that can be enjoyed by any kind of player, I think.

In the gallery of pictures you can also see the new dialogue layout, which finally replaced my poorly done orange box (typical coder art) that you saw in the first game screenshots!

I’m still working on the game, and I have no estimate release date. However there are several features that are already in place:

– 8 different romance ending + 1 ending alone
– every game day is divided into several parts: dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, late afternoon, sunset, evening, night
– town map from which you can visit several different locations
– each location has several actions available that change based on: time of the day, required actions, plot status, your skills, and more (some of them will be fun to discover)
– the usual relationship system between you and the other characters in the game
– you can raise your stats doing specific actions in certain locations
– a mall where you can buy stuff. Some useless, other really useful for the game (some even required to unlock certain path with some characters)

I’ve instead given up the idea of doing an ice-cream minigame, because it really doesn’t fit much in this kind of strategy/simulation game, and beside it has already been done lot of times, I want to make something more original, so I’d rather add more options/paths than spend my time in doing a sort of time management game.

I’m quite pleased since this game started as a simple dating sim, but it turned into something like my fantasy game Spirited Heart, but set in modern times 🙂

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva