Who is Vera Blanc?

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In the picture on the left you see a sketch for another project of mine in progress right now.

As I said several times, I always start many projects at once because is normal that there are some “dead moments” between a production of art, voices, programming and so on. So it’s always a good idea to have another project standing by when your main one is on hold. Or simply to “do something different”. Working always on the same thing can get tiring sometimes even if you love your job like in my case 🙂

This game is going to look very different from everything I’ve done so far. First of all as you can see, it doesn’t use manga art-style. I love manga, but I like also the other comic styles (american, etc), so I decided to try making a different game. I hope people won’t buy my games only because they’re manga! :p

About the gameplay: it will be a detective/mystery story. I’m still planning it so I can’t exactly tell much about it, but there will be some mini-games inside it, similar to the recent Spirited Heart update. There will be also a scheduler, and a very simple RPG element in it (some skills to pick at startup that will influence the story slightly).

The cute blonde on the left is Vera Blanc, and she is gifted with some special powers… while the guy on the right is Brandon Mackey, his partner during the investigations. In this image they’re hand in hand but actually in the game they’re not a couple: it was a wrong sketch made by the artists but is so nice that I wanted at least to put it in my blog!

More info about this project coming soon. Now time to get back to add some more enemies in Planet Stronghold…

Planet Stronghold new artstyle

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Today I’ve received from the new Planet Stronghold artist the sketches for the characters. She worked already on a few enemies for the game, like the famous RoboAnts 🙂 But now I decided to use her also for all the game characters!
On the right you can admire the new version of Lisa Nelson, the game main character. I like her, she’s really beautiful but has also a determined expression/pose, typical of the natural born leaders!

I’m also going to replace the all-white uniforms in the game with more colored designs. I also have the “casual dressed” version of Lisa which is even more sexy, but don’t want to post everything here, you’ll have to play the game to see it 🙂

That nice looking guy on the left instead is Prince Cliff, a character you’ll meet later in the game, when you’ll encounter the Royal Family and decide if to work for them.

In my original idea you can choose if to remain loyal to the Empire (and the Royal Family) or become a rebel and join a group of native raiders on Planet Stronghold who wants to fight for their freedom.

Beside the sketches I’m also working on redesigning the battle screen to offer more fast-help, even if so far people who played it all said that the game is fairly intuitive to use: not just the veteran JRPG players but also a few more “casual” style players said it was pretty straightforward.

I’m happy since with this first attempt in a VN-RPG hybrid I don’t want really to create a complex JRPG, but build a base to make a JRPG (probably a fantasy one) later this year (or probably next year, considering how many projects I have going on!).

Planet Stronghold: How Psionic Powers work

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Today I’ve experimented with the Psionic Powers balancing. I raised one of my chars to level 25 (the highest currently attainable in the game) and checked how powerful the stats would be. This way once I know the maximum power of that power, I can simply scale down the effects level by level until level 1 (of course the power need still to be somehow effective even at lower level otherwise would be useless).

Psionic Powers in my game are the equivalent of the Spells in a classic fantasy RPG game. Since I wanted to keep the interface simple, I don’t have 50 “different” spells like in most games. Instead each Power has a value that represent the character knowledge of that specific power, going from 0 to 99 (even if at start of game each Power has a random value from 5-10).

Each Power also requires Psionic Points (which from now I’ll abbreviate into PP) to be used – sort of the Mana points in fantasy game. The difference though, is that rather than having “Heal Light Wounds” and then “Heal Medium Wounds”, “Heal Severe Wounds”, “Heal Critical Wounds”, in my game there is a different (more casual) approach: each Power has a basic “casting” value, but you can spend more Psionic Points to increase its effectiveness. The base effectiveness is influenced by the character level and the knowledge of that specific power.

A few examples with some non-definitive value:

Level 1 Psionic character wants to use the Harm Power. He can use it spending the base PP value of 5 and deal 5 damage.
Level 10 Psionic character wants to use the Harm Power. He can use it spending the base PP value of 5 and deal 25 damage (the bigger damage is because the character is higher level and has more knowledge of that specific Power).
Level 1 Psionic character wants to use the Harm Power. He can use it spending a PP value of 15 (base + 10 PP) and deal 5×3=15 damage.

So as you can see, a level 1 character can deal almost the same amount as the level 10 if he spends x 3 of PP. Of course, at level 1, if you use 15 PP you’re left with almost no PP, while at level 10 you still have a good reserve of them 🙂

I think this system will still allow a good flexivity, but without filling the character “grimoire” with 50 powers that basically does the same thing, just in different proportions!

Forums gone and Autoleveling enemies

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First a quick news: after thinking about it for several weeks, I finally decided to shut down my forums. As you can see, the blog now takes the place of the forums. So the correct URL for the blog is: http://www.winterwolves.net.
I’ve decided to replace the forums with my blog because:

  • the forums were almost empty anyway
  • the amount of spamming, despite I had tried every possible measure was insane (people spamming manually the forums – nothing you can do about that)
  • I’ve decided that I have better things to do with my time, like making new games 😀
  • people can comment and have direct contact with me with the blog anyway


update: I reinstalled my forums. Too many sites where linking to specific threads, like the walkthrough ones. So I decided to keep them, but will make them invite only. For direct discussion, better use the blog 🙂

Ok, now about the interesting stuff: I’ve been thinking to use autoleveling enemies in my upcoming RPG game Planet Stronghold. But what are exactly autoleveling enemies?
You know in RPGs, you usually start at level 1. You encounter the first enemies, and they’re usually challenging. But once you raise your level, once you’re level 10, if you get back to those level 1 enemies, they should be a piece of cake.

In my game, I’m planning to do like this: the enemies will mantain their original challenge rating even if your character/party levels up. An enemy that was tough at level 1, would still be a good challenge at level 10 (not as tough, but not totally harmless either).
Why I am thinking to adopt this system? Easy, because this way I can provide a constant challenge to the player. There’s nothing worse than having a random encounter and say “oh no, again those stupid easy enemies that will be killed with 1 hit.”
I am still thinking if to allow the player to choose between auto-leveling on/off in options for example, and I plan to use a global difficulty level for the game, so those who don’t like challenging fights don’t need to worry.

Moving forward with Flower Shop and Planet Stronghold

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The Flower Shop game is near completion. The farming sim is 100% done, and the game is being tested. Fixed some minor typos, and adjusted some gameplay elements, but in practice we’re waiting for 3 missing backgrounds and the beautiful (even if I haven’t yet seen it) main menu from Deji.

Also, I’m finally moving forward with my other game Planet Stronghold. I got a new artist that’s going to do all the enemies in the game. Below you see a sketch of one of the first enemies, a robot-terrorist that we could call “RoboAnt-06”. (this because it vaguely resembles an ant!)

Then she created small variations of the base model, each one with a different weapon. In Planet Stronghold the combat will be focused on damage type, there are 5 in total: energy,explosive,armor penetrating, acid, psionic. Below, a screenshot of the in-game battle showing the new robot that replaced my ugly 3d renders of the first WIP screenshots 🙂

Note how the left arm of the robot has a different weapon. The one on the left has a gatling cannon firing armor piercing ammo, while the one on the right has a powerful laser cannon! I also got 10 new shiny backgrounds for the game that will show in future screenshots (yes I gave up on the idea of using pre-rendered 3d backgrounds).