Looking at the bright future

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HORIZON
My cat Gilda is looking at the future with optimism

This year was a bit of a rough year for me (though obviously, it could be MUCH worse in general!). The main problem was all the events that happened in real life, and that influenced this year releases (or lack of).

The year is not yet over: but if I compare it with previous years, in 2012 by now I was about to release Loren’s expansion after releasing the main game. In 2011 I had already finished Planet Stronghold, and other cool games like Always Remember Me.

Sadly, it seems that this year I’m going to miss the “release of a new RPG” milestone 🙁

Anyway, the future looks brighter! Read below.

Nicole status – almost done!

Nicole seems very close to completion: I have all boys route finished and the mystery path done by 60-70%. There are still several scenes missing, and also some art, but I think worse case in October the game should be out with all the promised content and gameplay changes (if you’re curious check my forum thread here: http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=39&p=19101#p19101).

Roommates update

Yesterday I also got all the backgrounds for Roommates! Even if I’m considering adding a couple more. The new “steamy beach sex scenes” (which aren’t porn, but very hot!) are at good point too, about halfway done. If things go as planned it could be out around Christmas or early next year 🙂

Undead Lily and the return of CCG

There has been a recent interest/return of CCG, which stands for Collectible Card Games. I also have some cool memories of one of the first games I made, several years ago, called Magic Stones, which was indeed a sort of mix between a RPG and a CCG.

Together with Roommates writer (who will write Undead Lily too) we started brainstorming the creatures list for Undead Lily.

UL - Sylphv2
A sketch of the Sylph creature

There are going to be 12 base creatures for the 6 elements, plus other cards (spells and some extra combo creatures). Writer counted 114 different creatures cards, so there should be a good variety!

Some of the creatures include: Griffon, Harpy, Mermaid, Shark, Ifrit, Salamander, Giant Mole, Purple Worm, Tree-ent, Giant Ant, Ghouls, Vampires, and more. I’ll post more previews as I get them.

Obviously I’m talking about a game that will be out not sooner than next year Summer or later 😉

Seasons Of The Wolf update

This week for various reasons was unable to work at all on SOTW, but I plan to get back on it next week. I was planning to have a sort of battles preview at end of month but that probably won’t be possible, since I want to redesign a bit the skills, adding a few more variety. In practice now there are 5 skills each, with 3 degree of power. So you could say 15 skills each character, but in practice is 5 unique skills each one with 3 power variants.

I was thinking instead to eliminate the various power levels, or use them only for non-scaling skills. For example, if we take two healing skills:

A) Healing Balm – heals 30% of character’s total HP
B) Minor Heal – heals target character by 25HP

For B we could have Major Heal that heals 50HP, while for A, as the character HP increases (presumably by leveling up) the spell power will automatically increase.

The writing and art production is going well, and I think that for sure in October I should be able to show something (sort of alpha version, to get feedback on the battle system changes).

Greenlight

Speaking about RPGs, in case you don’t know, recently Valve Greenlit a lot of games, and for the first time my RPG Loren Amazon Princess is around rank 85-86 in the top100. Still a long way to go, but now would be a good moment to vote for it using the link below:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92923628

No need to say that getting a game on Steam would mean I could afford to invest a lot more in my games, making them even better 😉

Creepy stuff!

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If you follow me on the various social networks you probably already saw the two videos below:


Nicole mystery scene video, part one

Nicole mystery scene video, part two

Scary stuff, eh? 😀 is one of the scenes of the mystery path of Nicole dating sim otome version, which should hopefully be out at end of month or beginning of October (there are some last minute things still to finish).

For those who don’t like scary stuff, you’ll be able to play the game with the mystery/scary stuff, or like a regular otome dating sim. Though so far based on the feedback people seems to enjoy that kind of things, at the point that I’m seriously considering doing a horror game in future!

Meanwhile, somewhere in Aravorn…

Seasons Of The Wolf development continues. I finished the inventory screen and the skills screen too:

traits
The new skills subscreen of SOTW

I am still pondering some changes to the skills, not to the system (I’ll use the same skilltree system as Loren) but maybe I’ll add more variety of skills since there are less characters in your party.

As for the Traits, they are permanent bonuses that you’ll unlock once you reach certain values in your character’s base attributes, which you see on the bottom of the screen. Obviously unlocking them all will be impossible so you’ll have to plan your strategy accordingly 😉

That’s all for now, I’m pretty busy so this was a short post. More news about the other games coming soon!

Hey guys let’s do some GUI!

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One of the best blog post titles ever 😀 (no not really)

For those who don’t know what GUI is, it stands for Graphical User Interface, and in practice you see it every day when you use any operating system. It’s the windows, buttons, arrows, scrollbars, etc artwork.

In games, in particular in strategy, simulations and RPGs, GUI is very important. It must be nice to look at, but also it must be user-friendly, since players are going to use it A LOT.

So this week I worked on Seasons Of The Wolf GUI. I have yet to finish redesigning the skilltrees, but having a graphical representation of the character screen will help me, get me the inspiration.

The character screen is composed of two static parts: one on the top, showing all the party members with the “classic” HP/SP colored bars on the sides, and two buttons to close the screen. And one on the left, where the currently selected character is shown in big, along with his basic info: HP/SP, Name, Class, Level, Experience Points.

On the right instead the content changes based on the active “subscreen”, which can be one of the following: attributes, skills, inventory & quests.

attributes
The familiar attributes seen previously, with a quick help on the bottom of the screen

itemcomparison
The inventory screen, which I need to redesign unfortunately…

The attributes subscreen is done, the inventory is at good point but I need to re-arrange the layout. In the screenshot above it seems to work fine, but the problem comes when you examine an armor: there isn’t enough space on the bottom of the screen to display all the armor stats, which are more than the weapons 😀

Luckily I can just rearrange the various windows/buttons, so while is still quite some work, is not like I need to redo it completely  from scratch.

I plan to finish it this week and begin working on the skills next Monday… I think it will keep me busy for at least two weeks though. At least after that is done, I’ll be able to start putting all the content in, so I’m not too far behind schedule! 🙂

 Other news

I got last scenes for Jeff’s path of Nicole otome dating sim, so we need to work on the mystery scenes and add some last minute art. It might be finished by end of this month as I hoped 🙂

As you know if you read the forums, decided to get another writer to help Aleema with Planet Stronghold 2 so she can begin working on Loren next game already. Since is a big game, this way might be ready in a not-too-distant future!

Promo sale & Roommates video preview

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Back To School promo

In case you missed it, despite the newsletter and all the social network promotion I did, you can use the coupon BACKTOSCHOOL during the checkout process to get 50% off any of my games.

Doesn’t work on Cinders since is not my game, and with bundles because they have other predefined discounts. So for example if you want both Flower Shop games you have to buy them separately, using the coupon every time.

Expires Sunday 1st September!

Roommates update

Today I thought I would be able to talk about SOTW skills, but had other problems to solve this week, so wasn’t able to do it in time. However, it was a very productive week for Roommates and I was able to make the video below:


This intro video provides just a glimpse of the crazy humor present in the game!

I plan to do more videos like that in next months, introducing each character of the story separately.
The writer has finished editing 2/3 of the game, and I hired Aleema to finish it (playtesting/coding/final polishing) so I can work fulltime again on SOTW to hope to finish it before end of the year.

Speaking of Seasons Of The Wolf…

Don’t be surprised, but the game is turning out bigger than expected 😀 Why I have this Deja-vù sensation? (it happens every time, I always say it will be a smaller/simpler game and then…).

The game is already over 30,000 words, is still on the second season (Spring) and that doesn’t include any camp talk conversation.

trait traitresult
An example of a decision you’ll have to do for in the traits screen

Coding / design wise I just finished the “traits selection” screen, in which you’ll be able to choose an event from the twins’ early life that will reward them with a unique trait, and I think turned out nice to play.

As for the remaining stuff, I’m a bit behind but only because I decided to rework the skills, since there are “only” 8 party-members, beside having more attributes (as seen in last week post) I want to make the skilltree more complex than Loren, with some branching decision, so that you won’t be able to unlock all the skills but you’ll have to choose.

Luckily once that thing is out of the way, I think I can go on with the battle coding much faster since I had already redone the battle screen months ago 🙂

Let’s talk about attributes

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rpgrules
From left to right, my cat Leon and Miele, having a discussion about RPG balancing

Balancing a RPG is… one of the hardest things in game design ever. Even in MMORPG made by teams of 100+ people with multi-million budgets you see patches for months after the game is out to “tweak / balance the game”.

So I am sure that even my new RPG Seasons Of The Wolf very likely won’t be “perfectly balanced”, but to me the first goal is to make it fun. But I know that there are some very hardcore people who will dissect the game in details and find all possible weaknesses.

Let’s have a NIGHTMARE

Let’s start with saying that this time I’ve listened to the pleas about the difficulty:

difficulty

Note the new difficulty level with that friendly name “NIGHTMARE”. Already the hard level will be… hard, but I expect the nightmare to be a real pain in the ass, requiring people to grind, fine-tune their equipment, and maybe even reload old savegames to try a different tactic/leveling up path.

You know, all those things that for normal human beings are annoying, but for those guys are the most fun thing ever! 😉

I’m joking in case it wasn’t clear. No offense to anyone! Those hardcore RPG players are indeed the most useful testers since they usually find more bugs than anyone else, so an applause to them!

Attributes, attributes…

Loren’s attribute system was pretty simple: 3 attributes, Strength, Skill, Will. One of them particularly good for each of the 3 classes: Warrior, Thief and Mage. But even the other two would provide benefits.

This time in SOTW I wanted to have more attributes: six in total.

attributes

Let’s see each one in detail:

  • Constitution – increases character’s durability in battles. Each point spent in this attribute will increase the HP amount by 10.
  • Will – increases character’s ability to use special attacks or spells in battle. Each points spent in this attribute will increase the SP amount by 10.
  • Strength – increases character’s physical damage in battle. Each point spent in this attribute will increase the Attack value.
  • Skill – increases character’s ability to avoid or block physical attacks in battle. Each point spent in this attribute will increase the Defense value.
  • Agility – increases character’s Speed value. Fast characters will move sooner and perform the same actions quicker than slower ones.
  • Arcane – increases character’s Magical ability. A high value helps caster to cast more powerful spells, and also grants protection to magic attacks.

One of the rules for game design, is that each attributes should be at least useful to each Class. If there’s an attribute that gives absolutely NO advantage to any of the game Classes, you have “a problem”.

Currently, my only attribute with this problem is Strength. It works fine for Warrior and Thief since influences the Attack, but as you can imagine, Mages won’t have much use for it. Unless maybe I allow them to use Missile weapons too, or have strength influence some of the resistances.

Yes, because while the resistances will be the same as Loren, they’ll use a much better/more practical percentage based scale, so it’s not enough to have two armor items giving each Fire resistance to become immune. More like, each piece will give some percentage points.

So I have still to think better about it, I have some ideas already… (the attributes will surely change in the final version, but not by much).

Of course, there are plenty of RPG with unbalanced attributes that are still fun to play. Baldur’s Gate and Fallout comes to mind, just to name two very popular and fun RPGs 😉

More news coming next week, about this game and the other one currently in progress!