Planet Stronghold 2 Cast: Rebecca Fox

Fun fact: Rebecca was the first character I commissioned for this game back in 2010, after Lisa. Originally the game didn’t have a playable male protagonist, Joshua was named “Gunnar” and was a secondary NPC! Then after some feedback I decided also to add a male protagonist (Planet Stronghold 1 was my first game to feature both a male and female playable character).

Rebecca Fox

Rebecca Fox is considered to be the best scout/sharpshooter of Planet Stronghold even if Philipp might disagree. Despite what one might expect, she doesn’t come from a family with a military background. Her lineage contains famous journalists, actresses, models — nothing to do with shooting targets with deadly accuracy from long range.

Rebecca Fox is very competitive, and spends a lot of time in the gym training and honing her skills. She often encourages others to do so as well, offering to train them. She is not stupid, but sometimes she rushes into battle or takes risks that she would normally avoid trying to impress her companions and reassure herself about her abilities.

She can be quite bold, ignoring the chain of command to speak her mind. However she has never disobeyed a direct order; even when she broke up with Tom Shatz and he was her commander, she never let personal feelings endanger her companions.

Rebecca is a very confident woman, and doesn’t restrain herself from showing off her body. After all those hours spent in the gym, it would be a pity to not show the results, though in matters of love, her aggressiveness has often intimidated more than one man from getting closer.

Rebecca’s sister, Cassidy, was in the army as a field medic but was killed years ago by aliens. While Rebecca doesn’t unconditionally hate all aliens (at least not as much as Philipp does), her sister’s death left a deep mark on her, leading her to distrust most aliens, possibly more so with especially manipulative ones like Queen Shiler.

Meanwhile, work on the game continues. I basically finished the crafting system, I’ll talk about it in details maybe in a future post, but the most interesting feature is the possibility to upgrade the Rare/Legendary items, so if you are attached to a specific item you can keep using it until the end of the game (assuming you find enough resources for the upgrade process!)

Goodbye Otello

He was very sick (renal issues) since over 1 year, so this wasn’t a sudden loss. We already knew it, even if when the time comes to put a beloved pet to sleep, it’s always a hard choice.

Otello was one of my favorite cats (though I love them all), indeed he appeared in my game “Bionic Heart” back in 2008. Like in my other games, he could talk directly to the player. In one scene, Tanya (the female android, one of the main characters of that game) pets Otello (in the game I used the English variant “Othello”) saying he is a lucky cat, and Otello promptly replies with “Me? Indeed, modestly, I can’t complain about my life…”

And this is what comforts me mostly in this very sad moment: knowing that, even if he’s no longer with us, he was lucky and he lived a good life, surrounded by our love.

Goodbye, Otello

Planet Stronghold 2 Cast: Joshua/Lisa Nelson

Before you think I’m crazy, let me explain: I am going to do a series of blog posts about Planet Stronghold 2 cast, re-introducing the old characters as well. Why? Well first of all, I never did it before (at the times of making the first game, I wasn’t doing this sort of thing). Second, because over 7 years have passed since the release of the first title (PS1 was out in Spring 2011…!) I can’t say I remember clearly every detail of the characters’ background, personality, story, etc. So it will be helpful also to me. Plus, it will be an excuse to show some of the new outfits I’ve commissioned for the characters! For example the new “gym outfits” below:

During the next months I’ll introduce the old cast and also the new ones. I’ll take some breaks to do the usual end of year/new year blog post, or in case I have a new game announcement to do… 😉

Let’s start of course from the protagonist, Lisa or Joshua Nelson. I’ll write this intro as if they were both present in the story but of course, you can choose to play as either Lisa or Joshua on every playthrough.

Lisa and Joshua Nelson

Lisa/Joshua doesn’t remember much about their parents who were assassinated on the colony of Mars when they were only five. Raised in an orphanage, once they reached the age of adulthood, they joined the military.

They graduated as the top recruit of the wole military academy, and shortly thereafter were assigned to the colony on Planet Stronghold. Once there, they discovered that their father worked at the colony as a scientist, and their grandfather did as well. Albeit the official records were destroyed during a ferocious war, the legend of John Nelson is very popular on Planet Stronghold, and everyone, Lisa/Joshua included, started to think that they were the true descendant of John Nelson.

Lisa/Joshua played a key role in the events following their arrival, until they defeated the fearsome Descorian, a race of sentient robots.

Because of their exceptional performance, Lisa/Joshua were promoted to colony Captain of the colony Zero-One, while Tom Shatz, the current captain, was reassigned to Zero-Two, the second biggest colony on Planet Stronghold.

With great power comes greater responsibilities they say, and this case is no exception. The story begins several years after the victory against the Descorian, and we find an exhaused Lisa/Joshua trying to keep everything together while the colony seems to be collapsing at every turn: food and water scarcity, revolts, and mysterious earthquakes shattering Planet Stronghold’s surface.

Cursed Lands postmortem

One of the many endings / epilogues of the game. This one is not a big spoiler since we know already about Loren and Breza from Loren first game!

As promised, here is the postmortem of my latest RPG Cursed Lands. The game was released in May this year after about 3 years of development. Personally I was involved in coding and writing it from past year, starting around April/May until May this year, so I spent about one year of work on it (not always full time though, since February to May was mostly bugfixing).

The gameplay

For the gameplay, I reused my RPG engine with the changes done for Queen Of Thieves, of which the biggest were:

– no front/back row and no position swap during fights
– possibility to damage target’s defense to increase damage done and hit/miss chances reducing normal damage done
– portraits showing on the map when you can talk to a character
– non lethal battles

but at the same time I also introduced several new gameplay elements:

– “first person view” with the possibility to have bigger enemy sprites and monsters of varying sizes
– the social talent system with a series of new things like enemies attacking each other, fleeing battle, giving items to player
– the deteriorating defense system, so that over time the defense would go down as target takes hits, to avoid the battles dragging out too long
– skill checks outside the battle
– items with associated skills (like a magic book casting a spell, usable even by non magic users)

now I admit that some changes were mostly cosmetic, like the “first person view” of the combat, but I think it looks really better than before. In a way it’s like my first RPG Planet Stronghold in which you could see the enemies fully, and not just portraits. I know that some people disliked it (not this change in particular but the removal of front/back rows).

I agree that from the tactical point of view removing the front/back row is a step down, and I will probably re-introduce it in Loren 2. I’ll also try at same time to have a nice visual, so perhaps still “first person view” like in Cursed Lands, but with the enemies placed in a front/back row, and the party as well. The screen will be a bit crowded though 😉 Anyway, there’s time to think about this.

The numbers

Cursed Lands numbers are very impressive:

– a plot of over 300,000 words with a lot of branching paths
– character creation system with over 1 million possible combos
– over 100 unique item designs (not 500 as I erroneously posted on twitter a while ago)
– if we consider color variations, over 250 different items (this means I reused same icon design but tweaked the colors to create a new item)
– a soundtrack of 21 tracks + theme song
– 5 love interests for each gender (though 4 bisex characters, the nagas, Nuala and Vaeril)

it is hands down the biggest game I’ve ever made: biggest story, soundtrack, items. SOTW has more combat and enemy variants, while Loren had more love interests, but overall this one was the biggest.

Bigger is not always better

That’s what they say, right? Well, in this case of course some people liked it a lot, others were neutral, and another group disliked it. But they are just people’s opinions, what interests me mostly are the hard facts, the statistics/figures, so let’s see some numbers:

– during the first week on Steam, Cursed Lands sold twice the amount of SOTW
– during the first 3 months, Cursed Lands sold more than Queen Of Thieves in 2 years
– during its first month of direct sales, Cursed Lands sold slightly more than Loren

I don’t think comparing it to Loren is fair though, since those were really different times. Indeed Loren sold about the same amount each month for longer, while nowadays after the launch month, it’s really rare for a full price game to keep selling the same amount for many consecutive months.

So it was a success? Yes, I think it was, especially considering the big “indieapocalypse situation” and for my modest standards of course. I know other indies that made twice the money with simple porn yuri dating sims of not even 1/5 of the size of my game and, of course, zero gameplay and complex coding. I love doing RPGs so I’m a special case, but if you’re after the money I definitely wouldn’t recommend doing one!

Anyway, I am personally satisfied of the job I’ve done with the help of the various collaborators and I’d like to think that maybe one day I’ll be remembered by the RPGs gameplay and not just by nice art/sexy contents.

Love Bites postmortem

Only a few months have passed since Love Bites’ release but I can already draw some conclusions about it. I’m planning to do a postmortem also for Cursed Lands later this year.

A smooth experience

As I posted already when I announced the game official release, the whole development experience went really smooth. I already knew about the work ethics of both Miakoda (the writer) and Rebecca (the main artist), but considering they both had some serious real-life issues along the road, it’s even more amazing. But everyone involved did a good job, from Matthew (the musician) to Aleema who did the GUI and trailer, the person who scripted it, etc.

When such things happens, a game gets released in a reasonable time-frame. Yes, I know that since the announcement (February 2016) to official release (May 2018) there are two years, but honestly it’s not such a long time to produce a quality game of a good size like this one, in which you can play as male or female (Nicole took more or less same amount and you can play only as female for example).

No stat raising

This was also a new choice for me, and thinking back, I should have done this sooner. In practice I already saw many complaints for some of my past games (Nicole, Roommates) in which several players didn’t really enjoy the stat-raising part, despite being a classic of dating sims. However, reading all the feedback, it seemed clear that for the vast majority of players, not only it wasn’t a required feature, but was preventing them from enjoying the story!

Keeping my theory of the “vocal minority” in mind, I still wanted to try to not have a complex scheduler and NO stat raising at all and see what happened. It went well!

I’m not saying that I’ll never do games anymore with stat raising, since in certain situation it can work, but for normal dating sims probably not. More complex games in general like raising-sims can benefit from stat raising, in particular to unlock specific scenes or gameplay features (new job, new class, new area, etc) but for games where the main goal is to advance in the story and unlock romances, probably it’s not such a good idea.

No erotic stuff

This wasn’t really a possibility since this artist doesn’t draw adult stuff, so even if in future we’ll do more games with her art, they’ll feature  sexy content at best. Personally I still love the art style and in some cases even if there’s no frontal nudity the CG can be beautiful (if you played the game and saw for example Nadia/Brandon romance you know what I mean).

Still, I was a bit worried that this could have an impact on sales/public reception, and instead it went well. I mean, I can’t know if it also had an optional full nudity patch what could have happened 😛 But I’m still happy about the results as they were.

Conclusions

I am very happy how everything went and the game was a success in my point of view. Of course considering the rising competition and the fact that non-porn VNs on Steam have really a hard time, but especially all those things considered, it could have been a disappointment. Instead the game did better than some titles I relased back in 2016 and I was positively surprised 🙂