Love Bites – Introducing Nadia

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intro_nadia
This will make many male players happy! Nadia is a COUGAR romance option!

If you played my older games like Heileen or the famous Loren Amazon Princess, you already know about Lora and Karen, two cougar romance options: but only for female players. So this is officially the first time that there’s a cougar romance for males! Hurrah!

Her name is Nadia. Now, let’s introduce her properly:

Nadia Murphy
Age:  38

A vivacious woman, Nadia is a professor of Mythology and Occult Studies at the local university.  Nadia is a favorite among her students.  Her classes are as likely to do hands-on fieldwork such as investigating supposed haunted houses as they are to regurgitate facts from a textbook.

This isn’t to say Nadia doesn’t have her detractors.  Some of this comes from academics who suggest it tarnishes the university’s reputation when some of their faculty participate in pseudo-science at best, and utter lies at worst.  

These complaints usually go nowhere, though.  For one thing, Nadia’s scholarship is impeccable in her formal papers.  For another, the more ‘fannish’ books she writes bring a level of fame and revenue that the university definitely desires.

This state of affairs amuses Nadia, though, for as she personally knows, magic is real and a source of real power for those with the will and knowledge to wield it.  This isn’t to say Nadia has no use for science, far from it.  After all, if you must defend yourself, a gun is much easier, and less taxing to use than setting someone on fire…and much easier to explain if you come down to it.

However, with great power comes the chance of temptation and corruption and magic is no exception.  Nadia’s spirit guide indicated she had to come to town, and safeguard it as beast she can.  Sometimes this means taking a book out of circulation which could summon an actual demon, to finding a cure for some fool whose curse backfired.

Despite her seeming popularity, Nadia can be rather lonely.  After all, it’s one thing to show an interest in New Age nonsense, but if you actually prove it…well, people have a low tolerance for anything out of their understanding.  Of course, the sort of person who’d go dancing skyclad doesn’t often make for the best company.

Lately, Nadia’s been feeling greatly disturbed as she’s found evidence of someone working illicit magic, but she can’t figure out who.  Whoever this person is, though, has to be a person of power to keep themselves hidden from her investigations.

Nadia is keeping a special eye out since all her predictions seem to focus on one of her former students, a red-haired individual she found rather charming if otherwise unremarkable.  However, just because someone doesn’t seem out of the ordinary, this won’t stop fate from slapping them around.

Progress update

For those who don’t read regularly my forums, I’m making very good progress scripting the romances of Queen Of Thieves. Some funny screenshots below:

slapped

awareness

relationship

I should be finished with the yuri romances by the end of month. That doesn’t mean the game is ready, but a very big part of it yes. It’s just missing some extra CGs/scenes, and the coding of the final battles.

Heirs & Graces is being coded too right now and looks like it could be out in the next 2-3 months 🙂

Love Bites – Introducing Viktor

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First of all, PSCD is now out on Steam, so if you bought direct you can redeem the key as usual from this site: http://bestanimegames.com/steam/

And now, let’s introduce another character of Love Bites:

Viktor Hammond
Age:  21

Viktor is among the rarest of people, those who are aware of the supernatural, but remain essentially human.  Often such individuals transcend their human self, whether by becoming something decidedly non-human, or else pick up torches and pitchforks to hunt it down.

Viktor is neither; instead, he is a scientist, documenting all that he notices until he can reveal it at a later date.  

Initially, he was one of those skeptics who would laugh at someone if they mentioned believing in ghosts, or having seen a UFO.  

However, his certainty suffered its first crack when he went on a ghost-hunt and encountered a real ghost.  At first, he assumed he was the butt of some elaborate practical joke, but his fellow classmates were just as astonished with what they witnessed.  In fact, the only person who didn’t seem surprised was his teacher at the time, Nadia.

Viktor eventually wrote the incident off…until, one night at a bar, he noticed something strange with the bouncer.  Whenever he greeted people at the door, the peoples’ breath would coalesce in the warmth, but not the bouncer.  Ever observant, Viktor couldn’t help but notice the reflection of the customers in the window…but the bouncer didn’t have it.

Remembering the ghost incident from earlier, Viktor realized there was more going on around him, and decided to dedicate his life to the paranormal.  While retaining his major in physics, his grades are starting to flag…and irritating his family in the process.  Considering they were covering his college tuition, they figured he was throwing away his future…and their money.

This was a blessing in its own way.  Before, Viktor was quite reclusive, but if he wanted to continue his studies, he would have to interact with the rest of the world.  He enjoyed the independence this fostered, and he wouldn’t go back.

It’s not that Viktor is a party animal, but if he wants to learn more about those who aren’t quite human, then its best to study them in their natural environment, as it were.

With the widening of his world-view, Viktor has come to reconsider just what is science.  After all, it isn’t like the two realms have to be divorced; chemistry arose from alchemy, and astronomy from astrology.  Perhaps those who thought they could reanimate the dead might not have been as wrong as they thought…

Other games

I’m making good progress in all the other games: Heirs & Graces scripting is going at good pace, same for Queen Of Thieves (I’m reviewing all the scenes/choices and adding relationship changes and other stuff). Writing is going well on the other games like Undead Lily, Roger Steel and more.

And in case you didn’t know, C14 Dating beta is at a very good point. It’s already completely playable without errors, people are only finding minor stuff and typos, so if you want to check: http://winterwolves.com/c14dating.htm

Trying “something different”

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Love Bites character introduction will continue in next weeks, don’t worry 🙂 Today instead I wanted to talk about the current status and my future plans.

But first a short announcement! C14 Dating is now officially in beta! Which means you can preorder the game and play immediately using the beta link on my forums. Check the official page now: http://winterwolves.com/c14dating.htm
If all goes well the game should be out of beta at end of the month or early April 🙂

All is well!

First of all, despite what I’m going to say I want to reassure everyone that all is well for me, despite the lack of releases last year, and the delays I had. I have now found a good group of people to work with, and unless some of them quit, I think I should be able to keep producing my current kind of games for years to come (as long as people keep buying them! :D).

However, I feel the need to try doing “something different”. As I posted in forums a few days ago, I will still keep doing my usual visual novel/dating sim/RPGs. That will never  change. But a bit for my “indie growth” and also to have games that I can develop more independently, I will TRY (since I am quite rusty and not sure what I’ll actually manage to do) to make different games.

So it will be like: I’ll release my usual 2-3 games a year (this year might be more, but it’s really a rare occasion and not sure when this will happen again!) and maybe 1 “different game” every 2 years or so.

I will always keep as priority my current game types, but in the past often I had some “dead periods”, where every writer/artist/musician had a task to finish, and my job was simply to manage everything, since I couldn’t go on with the game(s) until I had the new assets (art, writing, etc).

Before, I used to start new games since I don’t like staying idle (I love doing games but in general as a person I really hate doing nothing, I must always keep myself busy!). The problem is that in the past year I found this has several downsides:

  • first of all, it adds yet another game to manage, with the usual problems
  • it also adds more expenses! art, music, writing
  • can slow me down MORE, if all people start sending me art/writing/music to check at same time! (it’s also very stressful)

As you can imagine, it’s not like adding a new game in progress brings me more revenues, until it’s done. In the immediate, brings only more work and management. So uh, yeah, you cannot start new games continuously as a solution to fix the “wait problem”! Because then if you do that a lot, it can happen like now, when I am overwhelmed by people sending me stuff all at once and (rightfully) asking to be paid for their work 😀

What is the solution then?

That’s the question that I’ve been asking myself in the past weeks. And I think, at least I want to try, that the solution might be to have a game in which writing is not needed, or the scope must not be “Epic RPG with 150 different battles, over 112 unique enemies, 90+ skills, random item generator, improvedAI, isometric map” (yes, I’m talking about you, SOTW!).

Now you might be wondering: “weren’t you burned by the coding? didn’t you said you wanted to make simpler games?”. Indeed, I am. I believe (I could be wrong of course, but I think not) that the main problem of games like SOTW was that there was just too much work, too many skills, battles, custom conditions, etc. and all of this, on top of the story part!

I believe that it should be possible to pick different game types and plan cleverly the design, to actually have to do less work. I have already some vague ideas, which of course will need to be developed and tested more.

It might be a different game style, or an art style. Rogue lite/like (however you want to call it!), strategy/wargames, pokemon-battles style, life sim, match3/RPG combo etc but even pixel art games (I’m not trying 3D, too hard for me). I’m leaning towards games without a story, but even a pixel-art adventure: it would still have much less text than a visual novel for sure! 🙂

The main advantage is that I need to commission only the game art/music, and then I could code those games in full autonomy without need to wait for text, or if it’s still a story based game, the reduced length wouldn’t make me wait for months to get the writing done (and it’s not a problem of slow writers, to write a good story simply takes time).

The big disadvantage of course is that my current public is probably not interested much in games without romance/story, so promoting it would probably happen mainly on Steam.

Anyway I want to make a few attempts and see how it goes. After all, I wouldn’t have made Planet Stronghold and then Loren if I never tried to make something new, besides my usual VN/Dating sims!

In summary: nothing changes vs now, I’ll still do the current game types, but will stop starting new games continuously whenever I have a moment of “free time”, and work on those “other games” instead, hoping that they’ll bring some extra revenue on the side (instead of adding another project to manage and to pay writer, artists, etc).

Love Bites – introducing Brandon

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As promised last week, now it’s the turn of Brandon. And he’s not hiding anything either! (well technically he is, but let’s keep this blog “clean” :D)

Brandon Lawrence
Age:  22

The older half of fraternal twins (Kaitlyn is his younger sister), Brandon is a recent graduate with a degree in criminology who’s just now starting to take the first steps beyond university.  

Given his physique, most people assumed he played football while in college, but Brandon would explain that lifting weights actually helped him graduate.  His friends would teasingly say that he must be a straight A student then.

Long term, he’d like to attend law school, but that takes some serious money, and Brandon was feeling a little burned out with school anyways.  So, he managed to line up a job, but it won’t start for another three months.  

As a result, Brandon is currently living at home and hopes to find enough work in the summer so he can afford a place of his own.  

However, all is not as good as it seems.  Though everything seems to be going well in his personal life, Brandon has started to notice odd things happening around him.  Whether it was the young lady who didn’t cast the shadow…or the elderly man whose eyes gleamed in the dark.

Brandon isn’t sure whether he is seeing things, or he might be the victim of an elaborate prank.  Either way, he can’t let it dissuade him from fulfilling his short term goals…

Other games update

C14 Dating “private testing” continues, I just talked with the writer/coder and they are aiming to finish the 1st March! So it means that shortly after the public beta in my forums will begin. As always check twitter/forums to know about any news.

In the last two weeks I also started scripting myself Never Forget Me, the sequel to my popular game Always Remember Me (my very first otome and dating sim game!). I’ll talk about it in detail in a future blog post, for now here’s an… interesting screenshot!

eddyamy

Everything is going well, but I’m taking the opportunity to make a list of art missing as I script it, so even if I finish the scripting, I’ll still need to wait for the artist to do the new art. I expect the game could be out around this Summer, of course depending how the other things go.

I’ve been thinking a lot about future games (I mean, after I finish all the ones in progress now) but I’ll talk more in detail in a future blog post 🙂

Love Bites – introducing Kaitlyn

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Here’s the first introduction, Kaitlyn. Why is she in underwear? Well in the announcement post I already showed the two other outfits, so I thought to do an innovative thing: “intro underwear”! Now the cool guys introduce their story characters in underwear, to show they’ve nothing to hide ;D

I will do the same also for Brandon (the male protagonist) but not for the love interests 🙂

All right, now let’s see what the writer has to say about Kaitlyn, the female protagonist of this game:

Kaitlyn Lawrence
Age:  22

Kaitlyn, the younger fraternal twin of Brandon, just graduated with a degree in chemical engineering.  She was fortunate to procure an entry level position at a pharmaceuticals company, but her new job won’t start for a few months.  As such, Kaitlyn’s trying to earn what she can while staying at home, so she could have her own place.

It isn’t that her parents minded her presence, but Kaitlyn wants to spread her wings, and show that she can make it on her own.  Ultimately, she wants to be her own boss, but that dream is much further down the line.

Now that she’s out of school, Kaitlyn would also like to relax a little.  Especially during her last year of school, she had to give up much of her free time in order do as well as she did.

Kaitlyn is now wondering whether all this studying was good for her, though.  Lately, she could swear she is seeing things, things which might be tricks of an exhausted mind.  For example, as she was getting a cappuccino, Kaitlyn thought she saw a ghostly figure in the mirror behind the barista, but a quick rub of her eyes showed nothing there.

Kaitlyn doesn’t know whether there is something more going on, or she is just more observant of the unusual lately.  Whatever the answer, there are more important matters she must devote her time to…

Other games update

Good news, C14 Dating beta should be ready by end of this month, and the final release not much far away (of course depends on how many problems people will find during the beta testing!).

Meanwhile Heirs & Graces and Never Forget Me (Always Remember Me sequel) are already being scripted. The former has all the story and art done (but still missing the music), while the latter is missing a few scenes and some artwork. For both I still need to design the scheduler/stat raising part though.

The Queen Of Thieves got all the yuri scenes scripted but I need to review them all, and it’s still missing a few art and scenes as well. My idea is to release Heirs & Graces and Never Forget Me first, and then work on finishing this game since doing a beta testing of a RPG is always a complex/stressful thing to do, and I need to be 100% focused on this task only.