Friday catblogging too

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One of the first shareware games author, Thomas Warfield, had the habit to post pics of his cats every friday on his blog. I think is cool, so I’ll declare Friday the cats day for me as well! I’ll also post a status of all my active projects at same time so even non-cats lover can find something useful 🙂

In the picture above, taken in my old home, you see from left to right: Fiore (which sadly left us before we could move), Grillo and Batman (yes, the black cat name is Batman for real!).

Status Update

Planet Stronghold – currently writing the various romance subplots, and I also finished coding all the locations of the various races. Depending on which side you pick inside the game, you’ll have either to submit all the races, or reunite all of them under one alliance.

Remember Me – not much done code-wise, but arranged a deal to have a real song inside the game, which should feature the great actress/singer Cristina Vee. Also, lots of new chibi are being produced for the game, which will substitute text buttons for the choices you’ll be able to do in the game. You can easily describe this game with just one word: CUTE 😀

Love & Order – Christine Love is working on this one, and rumours says it should be ready before Christmas! I haven’t seen much of it myself, but what I saw is really good. The gameplay style will bring fresh air into the classic Dating Sims system.

Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook – is coming along nicely, even if we had some troubles with the BG artist (but we already found a new one). It could be ready around Christmas too but I don’t want to hurry things, so is more likely to be finished like the first episode around end of January 😉

Topsecret game about Heileen – I haven’t decided yet if to go on with this one. As I said, it wouldn’t be a VN though. Hint: Let’s just said that recently I replayed a lot some old Sid Meier’s games…

Topsecret 3d game – This could be a remake of an old game I did. It would be a full 3d game made in Unity3d (not by me of course, I can’t code 3d stuff!). If this becomes reality, probably will be my first game to end on Steam.

Planet Stronghold 0.7 and pre-orders

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Planet Stronghold pc/mac/linuxAfter another month of work and many bug fixed and new features added, I can finally announce the alpha version 0.7 of my upcoming sci-fi RPG game Planet Stronghold! 🙂

First of all, the download links:
http://www.didone.com/testing/PSAlpha07.exe (Pc)
http://www.didone.com/testing/PSAlpha07.zip (Mac)
http://www.didone.com/testing/PSAlpha07.tar.bz2 (Linux)

The new version has many improvements and most importantly provides you more hours of fun. The story plays until the end of chapter 4, titled “The Choice” (I don’t want to spoil the fun, so you’ll have to play it to understand what is the choice about).

The game also now behaves like a demo: you can get the game now for only $9.99 instead of waiting the official release (which is scheduled for January 2011). Why I am doing this? For several reasons:

  • because this way people who are eager to play can get the game at half price (once it’s officially released, it will be priced $19.99 if not more, depending how long the game is after I finish writing the whole story).
  • player can send me their feedback through the game official forums. Not talking just about bug reports (that’s what pre-orders are usually for) but I encourage people to share their thoughts also on the gameplay, interface, and so on. I won’t rewrite the game from scratch, but I’ll read and listen to any suggestion (I’ve already changed the game quite a lot based on users feedback)
  • lastly, because pre-orders are trendy and cool 😀

In the next weeks/months I’ll keep working on it, writing more story and adding new enemies, weapons and armors. The current plan is to finish the version 0.8 for the end of November, the 0.9 for the end of December and as I said the official 1.0 release in January 2011.

So, if you want to support the development of this game, please visit the official site and download the demo or pre-order the game. The game right now for practical reasons uses a simple one-time activation, but the final version will likely use a simple fullversion no-DRM download.

Which kind of games sell more?

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That’s a question that many game developer ask or just wonder about. I just realized that through the course of years I made games of very different genres, so I checked some stats and came up with the following “ranking” which I hope will be useful to someone:

  1. RPG (roleplaying) games (included my games Magic Stones, Spirited Heart and hopefully will include also my upcoming Planet Stronghold)
  2. Dating Sims – (included my games Summer Session and Flower Shop)
  3. Sports Simulations – (included my games The Goalkeeper, Universal Soccer Manager 2 and Universal Boxing Manager)
  4. Visual Novels – (included my games Heileen 1 & 2 , College Romance and Bionic Heart)
  5. Strategy/Simulations – (included my games TV Station Manager and Supernova 2: Spacewar)

those represents total sales though, and are somewhat misleading because there are other factors to consider. First, in the visual novel category there are 4 games but the sales difference vs the strategy/simulation isn’t so big, so each individual game on average sold less than the strategy/simulation ones. Second, I should also consider ROI for each game. How much time I spent vs the revenue obtained for each game? I never calculated it exactly but I can fairly accurately say that the first titles (sports simulation) were the best ROI for me (took me 3-4 months each). But it could be so only because they’re also the oldest titles 🙂

Anyway, that’s more a fun statistic than anything to be taken too much seriously, but even talking with other programmers, it seems clearly that RPGs are the best selling genre for indie games. Probably because there aren’t many around (if you exclude RPGMaker ones, otherwise there are a LOT! :D)

Dating sims share also many elements with RPG (statistics, dialogues, relationships, etc), while sports simulations are very hard to make, but can provide good revenues if they’re original enough. Visual novels can be profitable if made quickly and without spending too much on assets, and strategy/simulation last place is really to be taken with a grain of salt: after speaking with many devs who shared revenues with me privately, if you do a good 3d strategy game this genre can easily beat all others, on par with RPGs.

Vera Blanc: Full Moon on iPhone / iPad and web

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Vera Blanc in Full Moon
Just a short blog post to inform everyone that the game Vera Blanc: Full Moon is now available for the iPhone, iPad, and as a webgame.
Check the links below:

The web version in particular is quite interesting since it plays until the demo ends, and you can then purchase the game and enter the purchase email and resume playing the game immediately. Let me know what you think about this solution since I might adopt it even for future episodes of Vera series (which won’t be out before next year, as I said).

Replayability in a CRPG?

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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 🙂