Category Archives: winter wolves games

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

Planet Stronghold v 1.0 released!

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In the picture above, Gilda sleeping in a “wooden drawer” we had in our previous house. She seems to enjoy it 🙂

After about 2 months of playtesting, I can officially announce the release of version 1.0 of my sci-fi RPG game Planet Stronghold! It has been a very long journey, from the “classic” early prototypes with programmer art to the final result which features beautiful manga artwork and a very detailed combat system. I started the game at the end of 2009, worked on it until beginning of 2010 then paused it to release the two Vera Blanc games. And then I resumed working on it in September 2010, and I’ve listened to all the suggestion people made in the course of those last 6 months, implementing lots of features that people requested.

Hopefully this process made Planet Stronghold a better game (I have no doubts about it) and for that I want to send a special thank you to everyone who sent their suggestions, who supported me buying the early alpha versions back in september 2010, when the game was only a few chapter long and still quite rough, and who is supporting me in any way (offering free proofread, telling friends about my site, and so on).

I don’t know if the game will be a success or not, but I’ve enjoyed making it. And most importantly it helped me build a sort of “RPG framework”, so that I’ll be able to release new RPGs in future at much faster pace! 🙂

So, for those who don’t know yet what I’m talking about, check the official game trailer:

You can download a demo at the official website: http://www.planetstronghold.com and see more screenshots and buy it on Winter Wolves main website: http://www.winterwolves.com/planetstronghold.htm

If you like RPGs, stay tuned since I have plans to create several more RPGs in the next months, alongside my other projects (mostly visual novels and dating sims). And now for those who enjoy reading postmortems:

The making of Planet Stronghold

It was the end of 2009 when I thought would have been nice to do a visual novel with some “light” roleplay elements, so I started working on Planet Stronghold.

Initially I had picked another artist, but she was lazy and uncollaborative, so I “fired” her and found a much better one (more reliable and much more skilled). A typical mistake that I always make is to be forgiving with people, but the reality is that if you’re running a business, if you’re not an amateur anymore, and you need to do things the serious way. You can still be friendly of course, but as soon as you notice people are trying to take advantage of you, don’t hesitate to put them back on track, or you’ll end up wasting lot of precious time yourself and in the end have to change collaborators anyway!

So, at the end of 2009 – beginning of 2010 I had a very simple system in place. Then I took a break to make the two Vera Blanc games, but I was still working a bit on Planet Stronghold in the “spare time”. And then, I started adding features. I had the battles, and I thought “why characters must always use one single weapon? it’s unrealistic! and voilà, I added an inventory. Then I thought “if all heroes have same skills, what’s make them different?” and again, I added the Skills system. But what is a sci-fi RPG without some fancy replacement for the fantasy RPG magic? And so I added the Psionics skills! 😀

As you can see, with such kind of games, if you like to add new features, you can basically go on as much as you want. But unless you’re mad you have to stop at one point! And indeed when I was about to implement some sort of movement system, like a tilemap I thought “wait… I need to release this game before 2012”, and so I opted for a simpler movement system.

Then I began writing the main plot which, as you probably have noticed if you just played the demo, is VERY LONG. Once again, maybe as first attempt into a new territory (for me) I made a mistake in making such a big game. Perhaps I should have made the game smaller, to test the waters first? Who knows, I know for certain that nobody can complain about this game longevity since I can say without doubt that is the longest (and also most replayable) game I’ve ever made!

From September through today, I’ve started working on the game full-time, and I decided to try the “open-alpha” and then later “open-beta” approach. If you’re making a complex game, not necessarily a RPG, I strongly recommend doing it. Some people do a closed alpha pre-orders, and that’s fine too, but I found out that by making the alpha public I got lot more feedback. Considering I’m a small indie developer, I was surprised by the amount of feedback I got, both in my forums and privately by emails!

Overall I’m very satisfied by the game – since it has already sold well during the alpha/beta stage, so means there’s some potential for VN/RPG hybrids. I could have probably done it faster using some different coding tecniques, but now at least for future games I know how to get started quickly. Also, I have to be honest, while coding it the library I choose (Ren’Py) got the biggest update of its whole history, switching from software rendering to accelerated OpenGL, and adding a new screen language format. This was a great thing, but happened right when I was stil coding the game! So I was unsure what to do, and in the end I decided to upgrade, so had to redesign some parts of the game to use the new language.

This delayed the game, even if now plays much faster even on very low-end netbooks. Future RPGs will be done directly in the new system so I won’t have those problems anymore.

Lastly, about two weeks ago I decided to try the “Steam Lottery”. Some developer friends and I have called it that way, because you never know if you’re going to be accepted by them or not, also especially because they have no guidelines, and give no explanation when your game is rejected. Since another manga game with RPG element (Recettear) was recently quite popular on Steam, I thought to try.

Obviously, they rejected it, but this time it wasn’t an immediate email, they actually asked for demo and played it! It must mean that is my best game so far, in a way or the other 🙂

Remember Me update

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In the picture above, Gilda sleeping inside a bread bag! Looks like she found it very comfortable 🙂

“Remember Me” update

Everyone interested in otome / dating sim games will be pleased to know that beside the game I published this week, Love & Order by Christine Love, I’m also making one completely on my own 🙂

It’s called Remember Me, and it will feature the same character artist as L&O, and a very extended simulation part. There’s also a custom song made for the game, which has been written / composed by the skilled Matt Myers and features the young talent singer Cristina Vee!

The story of the game starts with a dramatic event. The main character, called Amarantha (my homage to a friend developer who always supported me with precious suggestions and encouragement in past years, Amanda of Amaranth Games) is dating Aaron since about a year, when one evening during a date on the beach…

The two were walking together, hand in hand, watching as the sun descended beneath the horizon. The evening was wearing on and the warm colors of twilight were starting to fade from the sky.

Amy wasn’t sure why Osher, Aaron’s father, wasn’t approving their relationship. Maybe because of her social condition? because she had to take a part-time job  in a ice-parlor during summer, to pay for her studies?

All her thoughts would soon disappear because something worse, much worse would happen. While going back home on Aaron’s motorcycle, they had a car accident. As Amy wakes up in the hospital, she discovers thanks to the help of Eddy, a young doctor, that Aaron has lost short-term memory, completely forgetting about her and their relationship!

The game will let you pursue four young boys, each one with completely different interests, personality, and approach. The hardest task, and also the “best” ending will be to try to get back Aaron’s memories and become her girlfriend again, since you’ll have to find out a way to restore his memories. But depending on your actions, Amy could find out that after all, maybe Aaron wasn’t the right man for her, and fall in love with someone else instead (or she could also end alone – a sad ending).

The other dateable characters are: Eddy the young hospital doctor, Lawrence who works with Amy in the ice cream parlor, and Hugh, who owns a fashion shop in the town center mall. There are also other secondary characters, like the annoying Abigail, Aaron’s ex-girlfriend, who shows up in the most unappropriate moment…!

More info about each of them the next weeks.

The game will also feature a map that will let you move freely from location to location, and a time system, dividing the day in several parts: ‘dawn’,’morning’,’noon’,’afternoon’,’sunset’,’evening’,’night’.

On each place you’ll be able to do several actions that will consume one or more day time units, unlock scenes, or change your four main statistics (see the status bar on the left). So for example you might go to the library and read a book from afternoon to sunset, or even evening, to raise Culture. Note that the stats aren’t definitive yet, since I might change Culture/Creativity which are rather similar with Athletic or something like that.

There will be a morale system, so if you attempt to perform actions while your morale is low you’ll fail. There will be also money, that you’ll need to use to do several actions in the game like going to the pub, buy stuff in the mall, and so on.

And there will be much many other hidden things in the game 😉 And don’t worry about the writing, since this was completely outsourced – written by a native English speaker, and I’ll have another review the whole game texts again just to be sure there aren’t any typos!

I have no estimate release date yet, but if all goes well I think end of March might be LIKELY, but not 100% sure.

Love & Order preorders available!

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Love & Order pc/mac/linux

Yes, finally the game Love & Order, written by C. Love, is available for pre-orders purchase! You can see more screenshots and information about the game and the characters at the official page. Beside producing the game, I’ve also tested it a lot, and I can say it’s really fun and it will keep you busy for quite some time while you try to discover more about the mysterious abandoned case and at same time, pursue all of the four dateable characters 🙂

Love & Order has also an official forum now – so if you have any feedback, comment, suggestion, bug report (let’s hope not!) or anything else,  stop by my forums and write something!

A little of postmortem info about this game. I contacted Christine back in summer 2010 shortly after her game Digital: A Love Story was out. After playing it, I immediately recognized the potential that she had as game developer 😉 And since I’ve learned long time ago that my world-domination plan cannot be fulfilled alone, I asked her if was interested in writing a game for me. We exchanged a few emails and she asked what kind of game I had in mind, so I told her about several possibilities. One of them was:

“I was thinking instead of school, would be nice to have as setting work (like an office job) and have some mystery (not necessarily a murder or anything, but some mysterious event).”

And that’s how it all started. A fun excerpt from one of her emails was:

I would think maybe four dateable characters (is that a good number? three men and one woman? I really wouldn’t want to write a completely straight heroine), plus a couple of other people who work there.

(obviously had no problems with that!). There was a lot of initial brainstorming and then from about July or so it was all in her hands. She coded /wrote it while the various artists worked on the backgrounds and the character art (the character artist is the same of Remember Me, which should also be ready next month… or so).

Obviously Love & Order is quite different from Digital:A Love Story and I hope people won’t even try to compare the two games, since is like comparing apples and oranges. Our goal with Love & Order was to have a fun otome / dating sim game, with a bit of humour, mystery and lot of romance, and I think the result turned out quite good.

That’s all for now, ah no wait – I couldn’t make a friday blog without a cat picture! Here it is:

my cat Grillo seems to think “Love & Order is an awesome game, everyone should buy it!” 😉

Announcing Queen Of Thieves game

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Here’s my cat Leon sleeping seen from a very fun perspective 😀 It’s one of my favourite pics of my cats.

In the image above instead you see the three main characters of my new game “Queen Of Thieves”. Before you say “what, another game in production!” – just know that all those games I’m announcing are just in the EARLY STAGES. It means that this game might be not ready before Christmas! Remember Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook? I announced it in July 2010 and is not out yet… and that’s just an example 🙂

So, don’t get too excited or start thinking “how can he make so many games” and so on. Simply, nowadays if you want to survive as full-time indie you either have to make a BIG game that must also be successful (and it’s very difficult) or produce games at faster pace. Since I like to create stories and design gameplay, the latter solution fits me more than the former.

By the way don’t worry – I will write the main plot of Queen Of Thieves but the actual dialogues will be written by a native English speaker. I’m thinking about the same person who edited Vera Blanc texts since she did a very good job.

So what’s the game about? Without revealing too much, the story is about three girls who gets their mother killed when they’re young (I might change this and have her imprisoned rather than killed!). Her mother was the famous Queen of Thieves, so when the three girls grow up they’ll pursue the same “career” as their mother, with the help of Sambo, their father, who runs a shop in town.

The three girls are from left to right: Thalia, swift rogue, Joanne, powerful wizard, and Kira, deadly warrior. They’re all of three thieves, but each one has a specific training, what would be a Class in a RPG. Indeed this game will have strong RPG influence even if I am not sure yet it will be a real RPG. There will be battles but I’d like it to have more gameplay elements beside battles, so for now I’ll classify it as “strategy game”.

So I was saying ,each girl is a thief, but every one does it her own way. Thalia is the most close to the classic thief, and her skills involves sneaking, hiding in shadows, lockpicking, backstabbing, using light armor and dual wield and so on. Joanne is a wizard so can use magic for most of her task like opening door/locks, levitating, becoming invisible, charming guards, etc. Kira instead is the classic tough warrior: she’ll prefer to bash open door and locks, and will be able to defeat guards fighting them.

The main idea of the game is that you have to do both “solo” missions, so you can pick any character you want and have a very different gameplay experience, and have missions where you need to use all of the three characters, taking advantage of each class-specific skill.

Okay, that’s all for now, I’ve revealed even too much about this game! 😉

Friday catblogging – Finishing a RPG, starting a new one

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In the picture above, Grillo & Leon when they were two small kittens in my old home. They used to sleep together to stay warmer 🙂

As I’m writing this post, I’m doing the final touches to my Planet Stronghold RPG. I hoped to have the final build by now, since I set my own deadline to the end of January, but we’re almost there. In the next few days I’ll release the beta version 0.9, which will be the final build except for:

  • some unproofreaded texts
  • might have some plot holes or small bugs (despite the testing, there might be some small mistakes here and there)
  • some missing voices

That’s it, as you can see nothing really big is missing. The final release is estimated for mid-February, though you can already buy the game now for $19.99 and save $5 on the final game price (once it’s officially out the price will be $24.99).

As the blog post title says, I’m finishing a RPG (Planet Stronghold) and starting a new one. This new RPG will be called “DIM: The Insurrection” and you can see a preview art below, with some characters that will be present in the game:

for now I don’t want to say too much, also because we’re just in the early stages, all I can anticipate for now is:

  • the main character is the cute girl in the middle, named “Kareta”
  • as you might notice the game features many hybrid human-feline races 🙂
  • it will be completely written from scratch by native English speaker, so no more “good game, a pity about the writing” complaints 😉
  • will obviously feature battles and a spell system based on four elements + life and death
  • will be written in Renpy and be available for Pc, Mac & Linux
  • will probably feature some map system. Not sure yet if a tilemap or something different, we’re experimenting right now!
  • will have cutscenes and less texts than Planet Stronghold. Will be a more mainstream game, not related to the visual novel world
  • the battles will be more cinematic, featuring many custom scenes
  • depending on the final texts size might even be completely voiced (though perhaps the voice pack might get released at a later date)

That’s all for now! Stay tuned because next friday I might even announce the official release of Love & Order. Or at least the pre-orders 🙂