A cute weekend

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The official trailer for Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook redone for Steam launch

This weekend will be full of cute stuff. First of all, one of my first non-otome dating sims, Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook, will launch on Steam today.

New members of C14 dating cast revealed!

Those are secondary characters, but still important for the story. I am officially in love with Joan, because… freckles! 😉 Click each portrait below to see a full body image!

sherriSherri Keller
Occupation: Professor (anthropology department)
Languages: English, French
Melissa’s professor and mentor, who specializes in zooarchaeology and human remains. She will be supervising Melissa during the field school and providing feedback on her performance. With her informal method of teaching, students find it easy to seek her guidance.

rosemarieRosemarie Brenner
Occupation: Archaeologist and lithics expert
Languages: German, English, a little Dutch
Originally from Germany, Rosemarie joins the Calen Cave team during the summer excavations. Although she may clash with the staff over ideals and procedures, she’s dedicated to her work on stone tools. She’s energetic and demonstrative, with a teasing side to match.

joanJoan Petit
Occupation: 1st year music student
Languages: French, some English
Joan is a bashful, but amiable girl, and Chantal’s close friend. She is currently learning English, but will often get lost during conversations, leaving Chantal to translate for her.
Plays flute.

dupontAugustin Dupont
Occupation: Chief archaeologist
Languages: French, English
Head of Calen Cave, Augustin has been supervising the excavation for over twenty years. As the leading expert, he’s devoted to meticulously recording the history of the cave. Although passionate, he can be strict and overbearing depending on how the students perform.

chantalChantal Masson
Occupation: 1st year archaeology student
Languages: French, English, a little Spanish
Chantal is a frank girl who’d rather be diving for shipwrecks than be stuck digging in a dank cave. She can be blunt at times, but she’s supportive of her friends.

 

The game is still in the works, but could be out sometimes this Summer. More info in the next weeks 🙂

A game that instead has been finished is Autumn’s Journey. Is not my game, but many people who collaborated/partnered with me in the past/present worked on it:

– Deji – she did most of the art of the game, and she worked on my Flower Shop games, did some extra sprites for Spirited Heart yuri, and of course she’s working on C14 and will also do sprites for Spirited Heart 2. One of the best manga artist around 😉
– KittyKatStar – She wrote it and helped Arowana with some of the coding. For me, she worked on Heileen 3 yuri romances, she is writing C14, will write some of Spirited Heart 2 romances, and helped editing a lot of games including the upcoming SOTW. A hard worker! 😀
– Arowana – she coded and edited the game and she started to collaborate with me recently, coding/editing SOTW and C14
– Nellie –  She helped with the GUI, organized the music/voices, and drew chibis. When working for me, she did the Heileen 3 chibis.

So what are you waiting for, go check it. Is free 🙂

And last but not least, to celebrate this cute weekend, here’s the romance scenes sneak peek for Seasons Of The Wolf, currently under development 🙂

sotwromances

Planet Stronghold on Steam

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As you probably are aware already if you follow me on the social networks, my sci-fi RPG Planet Stronghold is now available on Steam. Above you can see the game trailer (the info at the end is outdated though, the game is also available on iOS).

I’ve already talked in the past about the game, in particular shortly after I released it, and is fun how Steam rejected the game back in 2011, and now 3 years later there it is! They have underestimated the power of the Wolves! 😉

Jokes apart, while I still consider Loren my best game, I’m quite affectionate to this one for two reasons: was the last game I wrote completely on my own (however is better if real native English writers take care of this aspect now!) and the first RPG/VN hybrid I made, which saved me from a sure bankrupt and put me back on track to stay indie for more years.

Seasons Of The Wolf Beta

Meanwhile, SOTW beta made a lot of progress in this last week. I admit I am a bit burned out because of how many bugs I fixed and how much balancing tweaks I made!!

First of all, while the stats-derivation method was delivering really well balanced fights (as expected) it had a huge problem: since everything was based on players behaviors, I had no reference for the battle difficulties. I couldn’t tweak a battle, I couldn’t lower or increase HP, Attack, Speed of the enemies because every time they would be different for every player 🙂

So, I had to discard the system after a few updates. Oh well, I’ve tried. Live and learn!

Then started to rebalance the game again, but I forgot a small detail: the level scaling was off, so the difference of difficulty between Easy and Nightmare wasn’t big (and instead, should be VERY big). So I had to rebalance the game completely for a second time!

At one point I even took a screenshot of all the 4 difficulty mode of a boss enemy to compare the differences:

balancing
The Huge Kodiak is a boss battle in a sidequest

…yes as you can guess, I went a bit insane 😀

All of this while fixing at least 5-6 major bugs daily (in first days even 10-15!!). It is good of course, and now that I have a much bigger following is even expected, but it was quite exhausting for me. Anyway, now everything seems to be working, so I can move on coding the second Act of the game.

I’m probably going to open preorders once I have finished the second act (and is in beta) so I’m at a good point of the game.

Stay tuned because next week will resume talking about C14 Dating, the new upcoming otome game 😉

A roleplaying weekend !

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mainmenu
The game main menu, really happy about the look!

Seasons Of The Wolf: Winter Is Coming!

Haha forgive the pun 🙂 But yes, the first act/season of the story is now available for beta-testing ! I am quite enthusiast of the result, and hopefully you’ll like it too. In this first season, for plot reasons you can play only 3 characters, but don’t worry, as story goes on you’ll recruit the others.

As you can see from the main menu image, the official title is Tales Of Aravorn: Seasons Of The Wolf. Why? Because I want to enter the Guinness World Records for the longest game title, that’s why!! 😀

Talking seriously, the “Tales Of Aravorn” will basically be a series of games all set in the same fantasy game world, featuring references, cameos, etc of characters and places from other games.

Beside this one, there is already in the works the two Loren games (Reign Of War, Reign of Peace), and Amber’s Magic Shop. Plus Queen Of Thieves, which I haven’t forgotten, even if I put it on hiatus (I can’t work on so many games at once anymore, I’m getting old!).

The game version already reached 0.75 (at the moment of writing this post) and had a lot of initial bugs fixed. If you want to read more and download the beta, check my forums here:

http://www.winterwolves.net/viewforum.php?f=40

I haven’t opened officially the preorders since I think is a bit too early – I don’t know yet when the final game will be released, probably in the next 3-4months but with RPGs you never know.

Today my other RPG Planet Stronghold was also supposed to go live on Steam, but there’s a big sale going on at the moment, and besides I’m also broken after fixing all SOTW bugs, so I decided to postpone the release to next week! Sorry about that, but will be just a few more days 🙂

One of the biggest enemies of indie devs: the “feature creep”!

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initial
This shows starting conditions effect in a battle, useful to reproduce time-critical situations

If you look at the definition of “feature creep” on Wikipedia, you’ll read:

Feature creep, creeping featurism or featuritis is the ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, such as in computer software. Extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and so can result in over-complication rather than simple design.

Wise words! 😀 And indeed the screenshot above is very likely the last new feature I’ll add to SOTW. Don’t get me wrong, adding new features is good, and normally can make games better. But also, delay the game. Every new feature needs to be tested, both in functionality, and in balancing. In complex games like RPGs, often what started as a simple/innocent new feature can have repercussions later in the gameplay, screwing up the balance of the game, even HOURS later. So as you can see you need to be very careful 🙂

In the two past RPG I made so far, Planet Stronghold and Loren, had two very different approaches. In the first, I needed to get it done ASAP for money/time reasons, while for the second I could plan things more carefully. I’ve already compared the two games step by step in the past, but what I want to say here is that NOT NECESSARILY the game with more features is the most fun one. Sometimes, simplicity will lead to more accessible and fun games, reaching maybe a different target market, but not necessarily worse/smaller.

During SOTW development so far, I added many new features: item levels, randomized item creation/random loot, autobalancing enemies, isometric map, item rewards for quests, battlefield conditions and starting effects, and more (lost the count lol).

But I also TRIED to add some features, and then canceled/removed them because I realized that would take too much time to implement them correctly (like the skills with various levels of effectiveness) or that the mechanic wouldn’t be very clear to users (like the turn limit during battles).

In summary, even on this aspect of making a RPG (or any other complex game) you need to have a clear vision of what you want to do. A complex, detailed game? or a simple, very accessible game with a few rules? both ways can lead to a good game. What is worse is keep adding new features, without properly testing them, and as result building a worse game in the end.

Happy Easter

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First of all want to wish you Happy Easter! 🙂

Second, Always Remember Me is finally released on Steam, after a week of delay! Sorry about that.
Check it out here and spread the word: http://store.steampowered.com/app/291030

Seasons Of the Wolf update

As you know if you follow me in the social networks, my efforts now are all focused on finishing the first season of the RPG Seasons Of The Wolf. I’ve said it already but worth repeating: the first seasons doesn’t mean 1/4 of the game! The first is shorter than the others, even if now I’m adding several sidequests to make it longer. Also will feature only 3 characters, Althea, Shea and Vaelis, so no romance dialogues. But worry not, they’ll come later in the story.

powerratmenDon’t be fooled by their cute appearance, ratmen encounters are tough!

So far coded two sidequests. Some were written with the help of an additional writer, others, shorter ones I’ll write them myself. Of course, will proofread them too 😉

At same time I’ve done some last tweaks to the game framework/rules. I can still do a few tweaks until I go on in season two. So that’s why I plan to make an open beta and let people play the first season: if there are some MINOR changes that can be done (not rewrite all the skills for example!) that beta will be good to find them out.

attributecaps
One of the tweaks is the cost of allocating each attribute point

For example, I discovered that the attribute points allocation needed some tweaks. Before was 1 attribute point to increase each attribute. But I shortly realized that this way, if you put ALL of them in Constitution (which raises HP) at the end of the game you would get 750HP which is a “bit too much” 😀

Same issues happened with other attributes as well, so I used an “old trick”, increasing the cost of each attribute increase based on the level (as explained in the screenshot’s text above).

Going back to work now, because I’m still trying to finish the 1st Season by end of month, even if won’t be easy 😉