Queen Of Thieves now officially out!

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Above you can see the game official trailer!

I am very proud to announce that my new RPG/Dating sim “Queen Of Thieves” is now officially out for desktop platforms! You can check the game official page and download a demo here: http://winterwolves.com/queenofthieves.htm

Like always, a Steam and mobile release is planned, but will come in the next months (hopefully before Christmas, though not sure).

Better late than never

This is the first game of my series called “Better late than never” ™. Haha jokes apart, it’s one of the many games I announced back in 2011, that for a reason or another were delayed until now.

To be honest, to make a good RPG, you need at least one year of work just for the design, skill balancing, enemies, encounters, and other mechanics. So it’s only late by 4 years 😉

This game was intended from the beginning to have a more “casual/accessible view” on the RPG world. Sure, there’s the Nightmare difficulty mode which it’s still, well, a Nightmare to play. But in general the approach is more similar to Loren than SOTW. Following the majority of complaints, I have designed this game so that:

  • there’s no time limit. You can grind as much as you want. The final boss battles are designed for a party level 30, but you can grind up to level 35 if you want!
  • there are more rock/paper/scissor mechanics. There’s guard skill like in the past, but now there’s also a skill that can break the guard. You can cast fire spells to a target, but if you hit it with melee, you’ll get burned effect. And so on.
  • the party is fully healed after each fight, not like SOTW
  • there’s again a skilltree system, with two different skill trees (offensive/defensive) for each sister
  • there’s a lot of characters to romance: since you can play as all the three sisters, and each can potentially romance two characters each, there’s a total amount of 6 straight + 6 homosexual romances, for a total of 12!

There are also a couple of new features that I’ve introduced in this game:

  • the inventory has 5 slots, 4 armor and 1 for a weapon. Less than Loren and SOTW.
  • in addition to this, the armor pieces are only aesthetic: instead you can socket gems in them to add stats. So you can customize your character’s appearance AND the bonus stats you get from each piece of armor.
  • there are some new starting conditions: like Ambush that lets you move before enemies, or (based on the story choices) in some battles one of your party members might start injured, etc.
  • there’s no front/back row. This to make the battles last less than before.
  • except for a couple of fights at the end, there’s no game over. You’ll always manage to escape the battles if you lose.

So as you can see, definitely a more casual/user friendly approach. I dare to say that between the ones I’ve made, this game is the most appropriate for people new to RPGs.

However as I said don’t be fooled: if you play even only in Hard mode, the fights won’t be a walk in the park! If you’re not familiar with RPGs you should play in Easy mode. Or if you don’t like RPG at all, maybe play in “visual novel mode”.

That’s all for now. I hope the game does well, since it’s well written, has nice art/music, interesting gameplay and I enjoyed doing it. I really like doing RPGs, even if they’re really time/money draining, and generate stress anyway (lots of testing is needed).

But in the end, I think it’s worth it 🙂

Heirs & Graces now available on Steam

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Yes, finally my yaoi dating sim Heirs & Graces is out on Steam! Get it now here:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/482990/

it comes with a 10% launch discount. I think it’s fair, since it was originally released on my own site at beginning of June, so 3 months have passed 🙂

As usual those who bought direct, will be able to redeem a free Steam key from tomorrow at this URL:

http://www.bestanimegames.com/steam/

In other news, I have been working like crazy on Queen Of Thieves recently, and I did a lot of updates on the beta, which is at really good point in my opinion. You can find more info about the game and play the beta demo visiting my forums here:

http://www.winterwolves.net/viewforum.php?f=32

Please note: the game is content complete, and I’m only doing tweaks to the RPG gameplay right now. If you’re only interested in the story, and you plan to play it in “VN Mode”, you can safely buy it now, since that part has been finished and working since July 🙂

Amber’s Magic Shop: Introducing Daniel

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intro_daniel

Time for another introduction: Daniel the apprentice mage!

Born to an Elvish mother and a human father, Daniel is Haros’ son and Amber’s first friend. The two of them work together as apprentices under Haros until their adult years. Their paths take them in different directions, however, and eventually the two drift apart.

A couple of years after Amber becomes an alchemist, Daniel rekindles their friendship. He is now a well-respected mage in the local Mage’s Guild and rising quickly in the ranks there. The Half-Elf eventually recruits Amber to help him create the Elixir of Life although he refuses to explain why he wants it. He claims it is to impress his superiors but Amber suspects he is lying.

Daniel’s main weakness is his pride. He believes that he is better than anyone. This is true for the most part although it takes him a long time to admit that Amber is a better alchemist than him. His main comfort is that at least he can use magic and she cannot.

Although he rarely talks about it, he often feels alienated from those around him. He is the only Half-Elf in Icesilia and he often feels like he cannot fully relate to either side of his mixed bloodlines. It is perhaps why he gets on so well with Amber who has a similar problem.

Amber’s Magic Shop: Introducing Amber!

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intro_amber

Let’s start introducing the cast of this game, starting obviously with Amber herself! In the image above you see the young and adult version. There are more clothes besides the two shown above 🙂

Abandoned as a baby in the woods to the south of Icesilia, Amber was found and raised by a witch called Vin. She spent all her life in the woods, never venturing beyond its borders at the insistence of her adoptive mother.

The Dark Elf grew up wanting to be a witch like her mother but Vin would not allow her to practice magic, instead concentrating on teaching her how to brew potions and other aspects of alchemy.

When Amber turned sixteen, her mother announced it was time for her to see the world and she had arranged an apprenticeship with the legendary mage Haros of Icesilia to help her become a true master alchemist.

Amber has a natural talent for Alchemy. She has a knack for finding ingredients and a phenomenal memory that allows her to remember anything she has read. As a person, she tends not to show her emotions all that much and her natural expression tends to give the impression she is in a bad mood all the time.

In truth, she is actually quite a positive person although she is terrible at showing it.

Patreon and future blog updates

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This is going to be a weird blog post. I want to get straight to the point: I opened a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/winterwolves where I’m going to post some juicy stuff/previews, including unreleased art, or talk about the games not yet officially announced. I am also going to post in the blog every two weeks from now on.

But…why?

I know you might think I opened a Patron to get some money. That’s for sure, but it’s not just about the money, it’s also about time.

The most precious thing we have is time, and making a blog post like this one, or image previews like my famous “romance sneak peek” or “romance graph” and so on, takes time. You need to open the various sprite images, scale down, cut the portrait, put them in the grid, add a text, nice effects etc etc. One hour is gone and you don’t even notice it!

Then, there’s also other things. Maintenance for example: unfortunately running your own site needs attention. I need to update the blog/forum software, do backups, approve posts, etc. Another issue are images that gets deleted after a while. A while ago I posted all Loren 2 “camp talk” images in forums, but the original hosting places deleted the images, so now they’re not available anymore (I’ve reposted them all already in the Patreon).

What I’m trying to say is that by using Patreon to post such things, I’ll eliminate a lot of problems and issues that keep me busy, and at the end of the month they add up! Imagine even only an hour a day – that’s 30h a month “wasted” doing other things, while I could have used them to do game development instead (that’s what most people are interested in).

Lastly: lack of ideas. I don’t know how many other developers have a blog/diary where they regularly post every week. Recently I was struggling to find ideas, find something to talk about. I asked writers to make the characters introductions for future games, to help fill some blog posts. But many times I had to stop and think for hours about what to write!

In summary, I think we can all agree that it’s better if I could save all those hours I usually spend on admin/maintenance and thinking about what to write in the blog, and instead work on the games, right? 🙂

If you can’t afford to pledge, don’t worry!

Of course I’m aware that not everyone has the money or is simply not willing to support me on Patreon: so it’s perfectly normal to just keep buying my games (which is the most important thing). The Patreon page is for those “super fans” who want/can support me even more, and in exchange get to know firsthand about the new stuff or see exclusive content.

But the games themselves will remain the same as before, I’ll put the same efforts in making them, no matter if you’re a patron or not 🙂