Changing your mind

Before I explain, let’s start with some famous quotes:

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” – Albert Einstein
“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” – George Bernard Shaw

I agree with them completely, and this applies to game development as well. What I am referring to, exactly?

The “indie freedom”

You probably hear around the net the story that indies means independent, so are free to do what they want. Well, yes as indie you’re free to do any game you want. However if you want to survive doing commercial games, you CAN’T do what you want 😉

I don’t mean that you need to do what some “developers” do, that is looking at the top selling games and cloning them (also because very often this system doesn’t work at all). But I mean listening to your customers’ feedback, and analyzing sales to understand what people want, and not just what maybe a “vocal minority” says.

For example after the past year I clearly understood that what made people love Loren wasn’t the RPG part, but the story/romances. I understood that while SOTW was my best RPG, it wasn’t my best game (or at least the most popular). And so on.

Changing your mind means changing direction, and create the future games adapting to the market and what (the majority of) people want. Obviously, you can also just follow your personal interest and do niche products, as long as they provide enough income to support you (sadly with SOTW wouldn’t have been the case).

Prototyping and testing

This is not really new, but worth repeating for the few people who don’t know about it: an essential process of developing a game is brainstorming, testing the ideas and keep the good ones (at least the one you think are good of course).

For example, I’ve recently resumed coding Queen Of Thieves, in particular the “robbery missions”.

timelimit As you can see in the screenshot above, I thought to use a very common stealth mechanic: each action would generate noise (even if in the game Joanne will use her magic to reduce it) and so it could increase by triggering traps, or fighting (guards, watchdogs, etc).

The only way to reduce it was to hide and wait, using time. Finally, you would have a certain amount of time to complete the robbery, before morning arrives.

The idea seemed fine: but when I asked for feedback in forums, I had the first doubts. People complained saying that it could lead to a luck-based gameplay, and as a consequence not really funny. I thought that since the mission are randomly generated, it wasn’t a big deal, but decided to make a few tests myself, and I discovered that indeed was a bad idea!

First because of what people said (good/bad luck would have too much weight) and also because the size / amount of rooms of those building won’t be really big. So the “hide and wait” mechanic was also a bit pointless if you could explore the buildings in 10-12 moves 😀

The result is that I’ve immediately discarded the idea, without even needing to do any public testing. Yes, I’ve changed my mind!

Making “tough business choices”

Somewhat related to the first point, I also realized in the course of the last two years, about certain choices that had to be done, despite I wasn’t really happy about it. The first one was to reduce the amount of complexity in games, a bit because they weren’t helping sales, but also because I was getting burned out while working on them.

It’s better to release a few more simpler games, than none at all for a year (like past year!). Also, even if you like a particular genre, but it’s hard to make and there’s the risk of getting you burned out, you need to take that into account. That’s why I’ve decided to keep making RPGs, but not so often as in the past.

Another “tough choice” I had to make was to treat people professionally and expect the same in exchange. If someone suddenly stopped responding, or delayed too much a project, in the past was chasing them, trying to understand what was going on, trying to motivate them, etc.

Thinking about it, I was a bit of a fool, and wasted of my own time. If someone that’s being paid to do something behaves that way, it’s his/her problem and not mine. This also led me to do some “selection process”, so the people I’m working with now are much more professional than what was happening in the past, and as a consequence more reliable 🙂

What makes a good game?

13 Replies

Yesterday the sky was particularly good looking!

First of all: Happy New Year! I am writing this blog when in some places is just a few hours after midnight 🙂

The tradition as the first blog post of the year is to list the possible releases. But I just did that in the previous blog post, and since in the last years when I did it, it didn’t really bring much luck, I’m happy to write about something different this time!

During the holidays I took time to think and read some users comments. Some complained about my potential interest towards making more shorter/smaller sized games. Other said a good story must have some crazy elements to it, others mentioned Roommates as a great example of a good dating sim story. Some people complained about specific characters of specific games or praised for the same reason other characters.

So I asked myself this question: what makes a good VN/dating sim/story based game?

The base idea

The first thing I do when I decide to make a new game, is think about the base idea behind it. Sometimes, I have a scene/character in my mind, and I base everything around it or use it as starting point to get inspiration. Bionic Heart for example: I had this crazy thought “what if somehow a sexy android entered forcefully your life, and your girlfriend didn’t know about it? and if one evening your partner was going to have a romantic dinner in your apartment, where your sexy android is hiding?”.

I thought the idea had a lot of potential, both hilarious, sexy and rather unique. Then I started to think about the rest of the story.

So, while in general there can be even stories based on the classic “college dating sim”, I think the starting idea is one of the most important things when creating a new story for a game.

The characters

Then of course, the characters. As many pointed out, Loren’s setting was nothing particularly original. It was also my first game set in Aravorn, and I hadn’t yet done any research/world building. Everything was a bit rough 🙂 Still, the characters were rather memorable (Draco, Mesphit, Chambara, Loren herself, Karen, Rei… the list goes on) and made that game one of the most popular I made.

SOTW, while focused more on the gameplay, was appreciated too for the characters. Rowinda and the volcano joke will remain forever in my head… 😀

PSCD, while is not yet out at the time of writing this blog, has really some great characters. A great character is not only someone with special powers (Graciela) or particularly good looking (Charlotte/Rigel) but also a “cool” and “pro” like Galina, or a rebel like Kaden 🙂

My conclusion is that even if you can’t find a very original idea, you can still create something good by building interesting characters.

And last but not least, the writing!

talkingfood
Even if is still in beta, PSCD is getting already a lot of praise for its writing!

The writing of course is another very important aspect. Roommates is a dating sim set in college. Original? Not really. The characters are the classic archetypes: there’s the shy girl with glasses (Anne), the nerd/serious guy (Dominic), the hot latina (Isabella), the crazy artist (Rakesh), and so on.

Yet, it’s my most popular dating sim so far! Why? because of the excellent writing. Don’t get me wrong, even many other of my games have good writing! I’m just using this as example because it is really the best combination of classic/unoriginal setting with awesome writing. Already a game like Nicole had a more original setting/plot setup that this one 😀

Of course, other aspects matter too

I have been talking about the writing but of course art, music and gameplay are very important too. But here I wanted to focus mainly on the story-part of the games.

Of the games that will be (hopefully) out this year, I can say that I’m quite enthusiast of all of them, because one way or another (great characters or original idea or good writing) should be a worthwhile addition to every VN/dating sim/story-based game fan 🙂

So, onward to 2016! My new year’s resolution will be to release at least 3 games. Considering both PSCD and C14 Dating are at such good point, I think this time I should make it 🙂

2015 The Year Of … No games!

40 Replies

In the photo above, my cat Grillo under a small Christmas tree 🙂

Haha the post title sounds a little scary, doesn’t it? 😀

But it’s actually the pure truth. This year, as you might know, I didn’t release any new game, since I don’t consider SOTW DLC a “full game” (even if was moderately long), and while PSCD is almost done, it’s still not officially out. Dead But Alive wasn’t made by me so doesn’t count.

Luckily, I still managed to stay afloat because of all the games I made in the past, but my income basically dropped more than half vs 2014! Though I had no hopes to match that year again, getting 14 games both on Steam AND iOS at once… was some rather unique combination!

SOTW DLC

Talking about the only released game, SOTW DLC, while doing it I realized the big mistake I did with SOTW main game. Yes I know that many people love it. I love it too! But from now on, for obvious budget/time reasons, but also because I don’t want to get burned out, my future games will be much more story focused. Gameplay, sure, but not too complex or breaking the narrative too much.

Back to the post title, what are the reasons behind the lack of releases? Keep reading.

Reasons behind this

Anyway, this is what happened this year: I’ve invested a lot on producing new games, and this also include getting back to work on some old games like Queen Of Thieves or Undead Lily. In practice, I decided was time to finish what I started YEARS ago! Since I don’t like to leave unfinished projects.

It was a very good year because finally I found out several people who I can count on. Artists, writers, musicians, coders. People who are reliable. Wait, I know what you’re thinking: if those people are reliable, how comes that you’ve not released any new games this year? Well, it’s because some of them were busy on long-term projects (like Loren 2) others were hired only recently (you can’t expect to write a 200,000 words game or draw 16 CGs in 4-5 months!) and in general, the quality and amount of content in my games has increased a lot, as you’ve probably noticed.

A bright future!

So while is true that there was no new game out this year, 2016 is looking to be a really “fun” year 😉 Here is what I have estimated. Of course, nothing is set in stone, in this world is really hard to meet the deadlines and there’s always some unexpected problem, so take this list with a grain of salt, but here it goes anyway:

January (end of it) – PSCD base game
February/March – C14 Dating
March/April – PSCD DLC (which will be 1/3 of base game so not so small!)
May/June – Never Forget Me and/or Heirs & Graces
July/August – Queen Of Thieves (this depends mainly on testing so it’s hard to give an estimate, but I really hope will be out by next Summer!)
Fall – the CURSED GAME and/or Undead Lily
Winter – Summer In Trigue

Then, at the end of year, I’ll collapse exhausted and die 😀 haha joking, of course I’ll need also to reserve some time to take breaks between each game release, to avoid being burned/stressed out. So obviously I won’t release ALL those games above!

But even if I’ll manage to release only half of the games listed, it would still be an amazingly productive year compared to 2015. So, here’s hoping.

And the list above doesn’t even include some secret projects I’ve been working on since a while… so depending how things go, there might be a few surprise announcements!

Happy New Year!

Happy Holidays!

32 Replies

This year the latest blog post of the year will be the Friday 25th, so I’m wishing you happy holidays now 🙂

About the future : 3 points to survive

I’m going to review this year in the blog post next week, but here I want to talk about the necessary changes I’ll need to do in future.

You may have heard the word “Indieapocalypse” around the net. What is it? Well, some developers (I’m among them) have this theory that it’s going to be a tough future for indies, since the quality bar has raised, the market has been flooded, prices have collapsed, and exposure is really hard to get.

All those things are happening at same time.

While I’m not a big/famous indie, I’ve noticed this phenomenon myself too. Personally, I never had much exposure (I wasn’t on Steam until last year!) but what really changed is the prices drop and the market flood. I honestly think it’s an uncommon situation that will settle itself in the next 4-5 years (lots of devs entered the market thinking to make big bucks, but when they’ll see how hard is to just break even, they’ll probably quit and do something else). But the real challenge will be to survive those next 4-5 years!

Yes, because while for now things for me are “OK”, if the current trend continues like this, I would be likely forced to shut down everything next year around this period or early 2017. And absolutely don’t want ever to write a blog post called “I’m quitting the game business”! 🙁

Note added later: it sounds scary but to continue like this, means I shouldn’t release any game even in 2016. I’m fairly confident that it won’t happen! 🙂 However, I need to do some adjustment to my workflow, described below.

Point 1 – release games more often

If you have noticed, my newer games feature a LOT more content than before, and I kept more or less the same prices as before. But what I really need to do, is go back to releasing at least two games in a year. That is of course impossible, if one of those two games is a big RPG like SOTW, or a complex card game like PSCD 🙂

Which means, I really need to go back making more visual novel/dating sims. I have already a lot of them started to be honest (as you might know) but I need to get personally involved in some. Never Forget Me is one of those: I did all the storyboard myself, which was quite helpful for the writer since she is almost finished in about 10 months (and she had some troubles during Summer, otherwise would have been faster!).

This method works well because writers don’t need to imagine each scene or think about the story or anything else: I do that, and then they expand the storyboard I write. Luckily I don’t lack imagination, so I can do the storyboard rather quickly: I did Never Forget Me in a month. Of course writers still have a lot of freedom about writing the scenes. But is definitely easier for them this way.

So in the coming years I will need to make sure to have at least 2 games out each year, like I always did in the past.

From what I’m writing it seems that making a good visual novel or dating sim is easy: not at all!! But it’s just that… compared to a RPG/card game or similar, it’s honestly MUCH easier, for obvious reasons (think that just the balancing part of SOTW took me 4-5 months… lol).

Another possibility of course is to still do the usual games, but on a smaller scope. Long Live The Queen by my dev friend Hanako is the perfect example of something smaller, but still definitely fun to play.

Point 2 – I’m done with bundles

One of the big mistakes I did in the past 2 years was to do too many bundles. I thought it was harmless and a way to get more fans/attention, but the long term impact of doing too many is really disastrous and apparent now. No surprise there, it’s all my fault. So it’s safe to say that you’ll never see again another “Winterwolves Bundle” because was a total loss of money for me, thinking long-term.

The only bundle I might still consider is Humble, but anyway it won’t happen as often as before for sure.

Point 3 – moderate discounts

I still want to offer discounts to people, since I know not everyone can afford to buy my games at full price. However even in this case I need to be a bit more careful, and never go higher than 50% discount. Why? also because luckily there are still several people buying the games when they’re just out at full price, and I want to “reward” them. It’s not cool to see the game you bought at full price discounted by 50% shortly after. To be fair, I always waited at least 1 year before doing a big discount (for example SOTW was out in November 2014, and the first 50% discount was indeed last month, not sooner).

So it’s not like I’m doing what too many other indies do, starting to discount the game already after 6 months. But in future I’ll stick to smaller discounts and go up to 50% only when a title is really old.

Conclusions

The points above might make me look like a greedy person. The reality is that it’s what I think I need to do to survive 🙂 I see a dangerous trend recently in which everyone is bundling and discounting everything, without thinking about the future. And while I don’t know about the others, I plan to stick around for several more years to come.

The Queen Of Thieves – Lord Raul Capello

5 Replies

And now, the last character introduction for Queen Of Thieves. If you thought that Tomas Jingoli was bad, read Lord Raul’s profile…

Lord Raul Capello, ‘The Tyrant of Ahkra’

Raul is the latest head of the powerful and wealthy Capello family. They have ruled the city of Ahkra and the surrounding country for nearly twenty generations. As the next heir, Raul was raised to be merciless in the execution of his responsibilities and to brook no compromise with any of his opponents. He had maintain the pre-eminence of the Capello family at all times even if it meant trampling over the innocent. Any costs was worth protecting the strength of the family and, by extension, the country itself. Raul took to these lessons easily and quickly gained a reputation for being ruthless even by his family’s standards.

When he took over the running of the country, he quickly started stamping down on any perceived rebellion whether real or imagined. To maintain his armies, he increased taxes and began hoarding the money to pay for the many ‘projects’ which he believed would ensure that his country would be forever the strongest and most prosperous of all. While he was bringing in all this money, he was sure to send some of it to the nobility to keep them on side as he knew upsetting them could destroy his rule. This led to the poor complaining that only they were suffering from his taxes but he ignored their please. They did not understand he was ensuring their future prosperity and only cared about themselves.

In person, Raul comes across as a rather charming albeit intense person. He is utterly convinced that his actions are correct even if he can see they are hurting others. There has only been one person he has truly loved in his life and that person broke his heart by rejecting him. He has remained single ever since, apparently uninterested in finding himself a wife. The lord claims finding a woman would distract him too much from his grand work but others suspect he might have something, or someone, else that is distracting him from the important task of creating an heir.

PSCD update, and card games vs RPGs

One of the many changes: showing the enemy bounty value directly on the battle screen

So even this week I did yet-another-insanely-big update to PSCD. Seriously the changelog is pages-long!! 😀

I must confess that it’s a sort of deja-vù, it brought me back memories of last year when was going insane with SOTW. But in reality, it’s not that bad. The “self-contained” nature of the card games makes it a bit easier.

Don’t get me wrong, the PSCD system is really complex, for sure the most complex framework/engine ever made for my games (and I dare to say of all Ren’Py games, since I’m the only one using it to make unconventional games! lol).

But if I compare it to a RPG, I don’t need to worry about several things:

– characters level up. I added an upgrading system on my cards, but is only 3 levels.
– skill balancing. Each card has an ability, but it’s fixed. Compare it with a RPG, in which the party skills can change based on players choices or skills will unlock with certain prerequisites!
– inventory/items. Doesn’t matter if you have a RPG with 10 inventory slots, or just 3. Still, players can swap the items and lead to different results & combos.

I’ll stop here but you understand what I mean. Doing a card game is easier than a RPG (luckily!). I’m working hard to meet the January deadline, but I think in the next weeks I’ll slow down, since I feel a bit burned out, and I don’t want that to happen again (it happened after SOTW last year and early this year).

achievements

In the last 2 days for example I coded all the romance CGs, achievements, gallery screen and jealousy scenes, and tested them all. It was relaxing and fun, because the jealousy scenes of this game are awesome. Here’s a screenshot:

Haha I love their grumpy/angry faces! and Alex’s shocked one… 😀
(also, what is Rigel going to do with that big pipe wrench? watch out, Alex!)

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva