The four cute ladies you see below are the main female characters of my upcoming game The Flower Shop.
From left to right: Jill, the main character current girlfriend, Susana the flower shop girl, Clara the neighbour’s daughter and Marian who runs the local library. Of course there are also other characters in the game, but I wanted to show those 4 since are ready 🙂
It has been a busy week! I organized and worked on all my currently active projects, and they’re many! The summary is:
Bionic Heart – Today got some new voices for Bionic Heart, so we’re almost finished with it. I’m really looking forward to this release! I already sent out the beta demo out to some people and so far got very positive responses.
Planet Stronghold – I asked Deji if was possible to do some digital coloring of some old sketches another artist sent me. He is talented but he doesn’t have any digital tablet so isn’t able to do digital stuff…! I also found a character artist, she does an interesting realistic/soft-shading manga art, I think would work well in a space game.
Tower Of Destiny – Just got the new build of engine from the programmer. With it I should have enough to start creating the game maps. I’m going to add a graveyard to that town map I already posted before. Once it’s done I’m going to post another video on youtube 🙂
Heileen 2 – I’ve just commissioned new art. The game will feature some really nice art, and some small nudity too. If I have to label a game under 14 for the content, then it better be not just for the texts/description! Everything will still be of course very raffinate and soft like in the first episode. Will post more screenshots, and when the voiceover by sakebento is ready a short video maybe.
The Flower Shop – I got Marian sprite, and is really cute. I want to post shortly a sort of summary with all the characters in the game, like I did for Heileen and Bionic Heart (“The Cast”). Deji drew some really cute girls, hard to pick one…! 🙂
and there’s still another mysterious card game I’m working at which made great progresses recently too! I’m going to officially announce it when I have made a video or taken some screenshots.
I’ve realized that while I announced the game on lemmasoft (a forum for visual novel fans) I never announced that I started working on it in my own blog 🙂 shame on me.
I don’t want to spoil too much the game plot, but will be based on a set of tarot cards that Heileen finds in the island where she shipwrecked together with… other people 😉 She will be able to use those tarot cards to dream and revisit some special moments of her past. At moment of writing I plan to have 7 episode for each card. Since each card represent the capital sin / virtue, it means 7 x 7 = 49 “ministories”. In the background though there will be the main plot of the characters and their journey to try to leave the island, and the result of each dream will interact with the real world in a fun and cool way 🙂
The screenshot in this page shows the “dungeon crawler engine” I’m going to use. As you can see it can render well even outdoors 🙂 Of course, it is not a last-gen engine with shaders and stuff, but what is important is that is built in a way so that I can develop the game very quickly!
Based on a mix of python and C++ (with PTK support), is extremely powerful because lets me change stuff on the fly and just hit a key to reload it – no need to restart from scratch everytime 🙂
So far I didn’t manage to create a decent-looking forest, but maybe will retry again. Meanwhile, the city town is looking cool, and with a few dynamic lighting placed correctly and a night theme it could look much more scary than in that screenshot.
I have already the story and characters in mind, but I don’t want to reveal too much. It will be something different from the standard RPGs anyway 😉
I have yet to receive all the voices for Bionic Heart. The total voiceovers size is now around 120mb…! 8)
In retrospect, probably wasn’t a good idea to wait and have the game fully voiced on release. I mean, the voices really change the game completely: on the other hand, they also delayed the game release (was ready in the beginning of June). And even after I receive them all, will need to retest the game again because could have miss some lines and so on. I really hope in the end all this effort will be worth it in term of sales.
The actors did an oustanding job so far, so certainly isn’t their fault for anything. Simply if I make voiced games in future I’ll need to start the voiceovers as soon as the scripting is done (before getting the final art). Or maybe I should avoid adding voiceovers to such HUGE games! 😀
Another good news is that I am having a friend of mine doing a “dungeon game engine”. So yes, FINALLY Tower of Destiny will see the light! I have only a very early alpha version of the engine but it already rules. Full 3d means that I can move and even if the movement is “in blocks” (with turning of 90° degrees), being in full3d means that is very fluid, can have dynamic lightning, animated textures, and many other features.
I can’t wait to finish some projects I still am working on right now to concentrate 100% on that game. Finally, doing a dungeon crawler RPG is a reality! Hurrah 🙂