Category Archives: winter wolves games

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

Replayability in a CRPG?

Today’s question is: does make sense to have replayability in an indie CRPG ?

After venturing deep inside the crystal castle to discuss with the supreme wizard of gameplay design face to face (that’s me looking into a mirror), I’ve come to this conclusion: No.

Let me elaborate. With a visual novel or dating sim, or even life simulation like Spirited Heart, having a gallery of several different endings could make sense. Since it’s part of their gameplay: replaying the game choosing a different path, job, skill etc. But a decent RPG should have hours and hours of fun!

Story-based RPGs like Planet Stronghold can last quite a lot of time: I am now writing the part where you venture into the wastelands, and some battles can even lead to “game over”, but in general if you lose a battle you can retry in most cases. This means that you can spend 15-20 minutes in a battle and lose it, and retry with a different party configuration / approach. Even assuming that you will win all battles at first attempt, right now there are already 30 battles in the game. Multiply 30 battles for 4 minutes each (4 minutes is an insane low amount of time, totally unrealistic!) and that makes already 2h of gameplay just for the first 3 chapters (a really low estimate as I said, since doesn’t include dialogues either). The final game will have 10 chapters.

What does this means? It means that this game once finished can last 20-25 hours or even more, like commercial AAA games. I know that SOME people probably replayed Dragon Age or Mass Effect to see different endings, but how many really? I never did that, because I don’t have the time, but even if I had it, after playing the whole game from beginning, I don’t think I would like to replay it from start.

As indie, making CGs is expensive. The ones of Planet Stronghold will be absolutely beautiful, probably the best one ever seen in one of my games. If each ending corresponds to a single CG (like happens with my other games), most people aren’t going to see them all, and that’s a pity. I feel like wasting my money for content that only a minority will be able to see.

So, I’m thinking what to do. Those CG were intented for the romance endings, so each CG would be Joshua or Lisa with one of those characters (won’t say which ones but you can guess). I thought about two possible solutions:

1) I was thinking instead if to integrate them in the story, like The Witcher did (a CG in certain specific point of the plot, with voiceovers, I think that worked really well) or 2) at least make it possible to see them allfrom a certain point of the game.

For example, while each character relationship will influence how well he/she fights into the battle, at a certain point of the plot you will be able to save and from that point you can reach any possible romance ending, no matter what you’ve done before. That way at least player could have only to replay something like the last 2 chapters or so.

I think this solution might work well and that’s the one I’m probably going to adopt, since I want everyone to be able to see all the various endings without having to replay from start.

Obviously, since you pick the gender at beginning of game, if you want to see the ending of the opposite gender you WILL have to restart from scratch with that one 🙂

Flower Shop on iPhone

Planet Stronghold status of development – September 2010

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I thought about writing each month a sort of mini-development diary about what is the current status of my upcoming RPG sci-fi game “Planet Stronghold”. I know it’s not the end of September yet but I am so busy recently that I can assure I won’t be able to make anything more beside what I’m going to write in this post.

So let’s start in order:

at beginning of the month I thought I made the game a bit too much “casual”. There was little strategy involved in the fights, so I decided to add Action Points, several different kind of attacks, and more
I then realized that, beside being a pain to code, it would have been too much “hardcore”. So I ended up with a middle solution that I believe works quite well. You have different attack types that can change a lot the course of the battle, and now each item can be used only once, then your turn ends (before you could just heal yourself completely provided you had enough healing kits in your pack)
Then I started implementing the quest and side quests. I made only one so far, as a test, and I am very pleased. Before uploading the new alpha though, I’ll wait until I have written a bit more quests / main plot story, so you can try different kind of quests. I like the fact that now you can use the heroes skills to solve certain situations instead of simply jumping straight into the battle (you can still do that, of course!)
like many RPGs, the game is mostly linear as far as the main plot is concerned, but the side quests are very open. You can complete them all, or you can ignore them all, as you wish. Some give very powerful reward items though, so I would advise trying to complete them all!
I am now at a good point: the game engine, including the battle system and the new quest/skills usage system is very stable. I believe I fixed all the bugs. I am also going to improve the barracks so that you can also choose the party formation: this way you can fight the battles with less party members and they’ll get more XP each one.

About this last point, I am still unsure if to use the Training Screen I’ve been coded though. In practice would work like this: the heroes left unselected can begin a training session so they slowly improve the skills automatically on their own. Though I am not sure would make much sense? Perhaps would be cooler to have lower level heroes to bring with you so they would then level fast when fighting higher level enemies? (it’s some sort of powerleveling that you can do in the MMOs :D)

I have to think about this! Share your thoughts if you want.

In October, I’ll surely reach a point where I can think seriously which direction to take. I could start a beta pre-order of the game, since then the game would be already quite long and don’t want to keep it public, or perhaps do a closed beta. I have also to see if to integrate some optional online features in it. I think a pre-order would be a good move so could give me an idea of how much people like the game, so I know if I can spend lot of more time/resources on it, or not 🙂

How all indie developers can get their games on Steam

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Today was talking with some other developer friends about a “hot topic”. Steam, and the difficulty to get in it.

If you’re an indie developer, at least once in your life you got a forum/post comment saying “you should get your game on Steam!”. It sounded almost as an insult, like saying “you fool, why don’t you just use that?”. Yeah, like if Steam was an OPEN platform.

Getting on Steam is really HARD, and for most indies they represent the main source of income, a bit like casual portals are for casual game developers.

There’s really no rule (for Indies) to get on Steam. Many games look very similar, yet “some” are accepted, and others not. Their selection criteria aren’t really clear to be honest.

Now, I came with a solution that I hope the Steam people will at least consider: why Steam doesn’t allow any indie to sell their games through them, as a sort of shareware vendor? We could add “Buy on Steam” button beside our usual vendors like BMT Micro, Plimus, Regnow, and so on.

And those games wouldn’t appear on Steam. They would need absolutely to do NOTHING, except create an interface for developer so they can setup their products. They could even get away with a submission fee or a yearly subscription like Appstore does.

Advantages would be for both sides: indie devs would finally be able to tell to the users who ask if they can buy from Steam “Yes, here is the link.”

Steam could get “free money”, and honestly they would get the most advantages from this idea. They could also be surprised by how some apparently unknown games sells, and maybe “promote” the best selling “underdogs” on their main games catalogue.

I see really no downside to this idea. Now I hope someone at Steam looks at this post, and at least takes in consideration this suggestion 😉

What is a “casual RPG”

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As you probably know, I’m working on a RPG game called “Planet Stronghold”.

I am trying to do something slightly different with this RPG. I would even dare call it “casual RPG”, since it misses some of the classic “hardcore” gameplay elements. In particular:

there is no in-game currency. You can’t sell or buy weapons. This is probably the biggest difference from… well, ANY rpg I’ve ever played. What does it means? That you’ll have several weapons and armors at your disposal, but you won’t have to buy them. To get the best ones, the only way would be to solve some quests you’ll encounter through the story.
there is almost no “permanent death“. You can’t really “lose” in the game. This is also very different even if something similar could be already found in recent casual RPG like Torchlight, for example. In my game, if you lose a battle you’ll simply have the option to fall back and try it with a different team/equipment configuration. Of course there will be a few exceptions: in some particular plot situation you’ll face a hard battle but you’ll be warned to save before it. But I hate the mechanic of “save/try/reload” that is used in many RPG just to give the players the illustion that the game is longer (but in reality you’ll spend most of the time loading and saving)
there won’t be a huge map. I mean, a tilemap or detailed map as it is in many RPG, mostly JRPG. I was dubious if to implement this or not, but given the nature of the game, I decided to skip this. Since the gameplay follows the main story, you will be able to use a small map with instant traveling between each different location to complete side-quest, but not like you do in normal RPG/JRPG. If you hated walking endless hours in those insanely huge (and repetitive) tilemaps, you’ll like my game. Otherwise…I hope you’ll like the game anyway 🙂
very few grinding. You won’t have to kill 500 rats to get to level 2. The leveling up will be slow, and you won’t get much XP from battles, but you’ll get a big boost if you solve quests. Anyway, being the game linear, I’ll be able to craft each specific battle so hopefully that should lead to more interesting enemy encounters.
There also won’t be endless random encounters, unless you choose to adventure in the wastelands (so, there will be but will be entirely optional). I understand that random encounters are a good way to raise your characters levels without doing side-quests, so I’ll leave that option available for those people who prefer to fight than solve quests.

As you can see it’s quite different from a “standard”, traditional RPG. I hope the direction I took will be appreciated anyway, so far the feedback from the Alpha testers was quite positive (many says it’s the best game I’ve made so far, even if isn’t finished yet! :D).

Note that this won’t mean that the game will be easy. It will be if you choose the “easy” option. But if you pick the “hard” option, in the game you’ll have to face some really tough fights! That’s all for now, I’ll get back to writing more plot and coding more enemy battles.

p.s. For those who like traditional RPG, fear not. My other RPG game in development, the Dungeon Crawler “Tower Of Destiny”, will be much more similar to the classic “hardcore RPGs” 😉

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva