A tough week

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Zeal

Zeal, one of the many new characters you’ll encounter in the expansion

This week was really a tough week!

First of all because I was literally burning in my office. 29°C for most of the day, even turning the A/C on the whole afternoon. Of course, it happened right when I decided to announce on Twitter/Facebook that the beta testing stage of Loren’s expansion, The Castle Of N’Mar, was starting!

A tough week for those who played the beta and had to fight against lots of bugs. It was entirely my fault, since I decided to use the latest Ren’Py version to do the expansion beta, while I should have waited a bit more.

Now anyone familiar with coding knows well that using the latest version of any development tool is NOT a good idea, since it might still contain bugs… but I ignored that simple rule and the result was people having all sort of weird stuff happening (random crashes, variables not stored, load/save problems, etc).

So today in the latest beta version (1.1k) I decided to revert back to the previous Ren’Py version which hopefully should solve some of the bugs left. You can get the download links and latest info in my forums:

http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=2622

Again this has nothing to do with Ren’Py which is still an awesome tool (my favorite) but to my silly idea of trying it so early.

My goal is to try finishing the beta testing by the end of the month. If you preordered the expansion but were waiting to see until was more stable, I think now should be a good moment to play since the amount of bugs left is really not big… you know every time I write such sentences  I’m a bit scared, but oh well 😀

Other short news: Spirited Heart 2 writing is going at very good pace, I got a new writer that’s going to review/fix/edit Nicole’s script, Roommates is going to be the biggest game I’ve ever made (80k words and it’s not even at 1/3 of the plot), Heileen 3 will be done first in Ren’Py and maybe later in Monkeycoder (this will require a new blog post to explain, maybe next week) so it should be out this October.

Soon the gates of N’Mar Castle will open to the public

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Today’s blog post will be shorter, since as you might know I’m busy doing the final touches to Loren’s expansion “The Castle Of N’Mar”. I hoped to have it ready for the 15th August, but I didn’t make in time. In reality it’s not missing much, but we want to polish it and test well to make sure that there aren’t stopping bugs early in the expansion.

I believe it’s the last time will do such a non-linear RPG. For visual novels is much easier, but for a RPG is really a painful experience! Or do like Walking Dead game from Telltale (my favorite game this year) that is achieve non linearity through linearity. How is that possible?

Make a linear game that looks non-linear

In practice, doing a true non-linear plot in a RPG, with multiple solution quests is insane. The best example of this is Fallout. Typical scenario is: character A gives quest to kill character B. You stumble intoto character C and he says that he wants B dead too. Then (and here comes the fun) when you meet characte B, he makes a counter-offer: kill characters A,B and he’ll give you a <insert precious rewards here>.

And the example above is just one of the simplest scenarios possible, when you don’t have quests with multiple steps! Now, Fallout is one of the best RPGs series ever made, but honestly I don’t think will do such a thing again in future.

For two simple reasons:

  1. I’m not a multi-millionaire company with a team of 50 people 😀 and only testing all those multiple solution quests takes LOOOOOONG time!
  2. I am not sure, in my specific case, that it can be better for players, since if I have the mutliple solution quests, the plot length will be necessarily shorter. And I think there’s a solution to make a linear plot look less linear.

Point 1 is obvious, but what about point 2? I want to reconnect to Walking Dead game mechanics: you can have a story that while in practice in its structure IS linear, it appears not (or at least, appears that player’s choices have a big impact on the game world).

For example in Walking Dead, during several key points you have to take “tough decisions”. In one you have to decide if to attempt to save a person attacked by a zombie, or a kid nearby. No matter what you choose, the person dies – so you might think “bah not only the plot is linear, but the choice is even pointless”. I know it might seem so, but in reality not! Because even if the outcome is the same, the characters related to that person and the kid will remember who you tried to save, and all the future dialogues will change to reflect that, resulting in a more immersive experience, so that the story won’t feel linear at all.

I think that’s the road I’ll try to follow to make longer RPGs but still with several possible outcomes. And now, I’m going back working on Loren 🙂

Doing a sequel is not easy as it seems

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…at least for indies who doesn’t make games with the only goal of money! 😉

It’s quite common in the mainstream gaming to see titles like Quake 4, Might & Magic 8, and so on. But in most cases  (not the one I mentioned though) the software house make sequels just to capitalize on the game name, maybe releasing a product that is even worse than the original.

Now, so far I only made one sequel which is Heileen 2. Guess what? sold worse than Heileen 1, even if in this specific case I know why (the story was too serious for the target market, indeed with Heileen 3 it will be much more light comedy).

With a visual novel or dating sim though is easier to make sequels, with a RPG like Loren or Planet Stronghold is much harder. I am making Spirited Heart sequel right now, and it’s relatively “easy” – I’m going to keep all the old dateable boys and add more (maybe as expansion, not sure yet).

But what I mean is – adding extra characters in such games is just a matter of adding some dialogues, because there wasn’t a “main plot”. Each characters was a separate story, and since you can replay it several times to get all the endings, it was something very different from Planet Stronghold or Loren, where the characters were inserted in a main plot with an ending.

So I’m pretty sure that no matter what I’ll do, some people will complain because character XYZ who they loved in the first game, isn’t present in the second. Others will complain and demand that the sequel’s story starts where the first game ended, remembering all the big choices they made and the characters they romanced. And so on. As you can see, making a sequel for a RPG is definitely not an easy task, unless you set it several years away in future (so you assume all the original characters are dead!).

I believed that yesterday I finally found the right romance setup for Loren sequel, which will happily feature almost all the romances of the first game, excluding only Karen. It was harder than it sounds, really!

Mortesarcasm

As you can see in the image above, Mother Morte has a nice sense of humour

Regarding the expansion, just today I finished testing the Dwarven Mines, one of the new locations, and it seems well balanced. There is still some stuff to write and script (adding images to the story) but it seems that the expansion MIGHT be really out the 15th of August! I hope to talk about it in next Friday blog post 🙂

Castle Of N’Mar expansion is available on preorder!

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The expansion

In case you missed the announcement in my newsletter last week, the Castle Of N’Mar, the expansion to my RPG Loren The Amazon Princess, is available to preorder here. For a limited time, until the expansion is officially released, the price will be of only $7.99.

I know what the next question is: when it will get released? Well, at the time I sent out the newsletter last weekend, I didn’t really know so I said sometimes in August. Now, I got the last missing art piece and the texts/scripting is at a very good point, so I could even dare to say that an indicative date might be mid-August (for the beta version of course).

The expansion turned out to be much longer than expected, with 60,000 words of story and several new zones, enemies, quests, and so on. However we tried to experiment with some non-linear gameplay: some of the quests can be solved in several different ways, so you might not see all the possible outcomes on the first attempt (unless you save before each choice, of course!). So the game length might appear shorter than what I said, but is because there are multiple choices!

The sequel sneak peek

I know sounds odd to be talking about the sequel which will be out next year, but I just got some images of the characters that will be present and I absolutely wanted to show them:

Breza Rei

One is Rei in a more sexy pose, the other is Breza who was a secondary character in the first game, but will have a much bigger role in the sequel 😉 For those interested, Rei is GxB only while Breza is GxG only (being a true Amazon…). There are of course more characters for all possible love combos.

I won’t talk more about the sequel since there will be time for that! I just wanted to show you the new coloring style that will be used in the sequel, comparing the “old image” with the new one.

Codesign crazyness

As of July 25, the new Mac OS “Mountain Lion” is out. If you have installed it, none of my mac games will run by default (and I suspect those of thousands other indies).

While I believe I found a solution to codesign the apps, for now know that you can just turn off the infamous “Gatekeeper” in the System Preferences and play my games just fine, knowing you’re safe like you were before, since my games are indeed clean of trojans/virus/spywares 🙂

To turn it off, open System Preferences, then click on Security & Privacy, and in General tab click Allow applications downloaded from: Anywhere.

I’m honestly not sure how many people have upgraded to the new MacOS yet, but in the next months I’m going to reupload all my games signed and updated with the new Ren’Py version that will include a much practical autoupdater!

Meanwhile if you also want to test if my codesigning works, I uploaded a signed app here: http://www.winterwolves.net/SpiritedHeartTrial.zip

Gabe doesn’t like Windows 8 and so do I

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Those interested only in news about my games, can skip the paragraphs below 😉

Windows 8 and the Mayan prophecy!

In a recent talk at Casual Connect, Gabe Newell (the man behind Steam) said that the upcoming Windows8 will be a catastrophe. Literally. In particular he said:

“I think that Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space. I think that we’re going to lose some of the top-tier PC [original equipment manufacturers]. They’ll exit the market. I think margins are going to be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that’s true, it’s going to be a good idea to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality. But when you start thinking about a platform, you have to address it. “

Valve wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the PC. Id Software, Epic, Zynga, Facebook, and Google wouldn’t have existed without the openness of the platform. I think there’s a strong temptation to close the platform… That’s not how we got here, and I don’t think that’s a very attractive future. So we’re looking at the platform, and up until now we’ve been a free rider. We’ve been able to benefit from everything that’s gone into the PC and the Internet. Now we have to start finding ways that we can continue to make sure there are open platforms.”

Obviously, he is also worried since Steam currently “owns” the PC gaming space, and having an appstore built-in on Windows, is a very serious threats to his business 😉

However, that point aside, I completely agree with him. There are several wrong things done in Windows8:

  1. the default touch interface. What? It makes sense if I use a tablet, but on a DESKTOP COMPUTER!? I want my old Windows back! Of course from what I know is possible to switch back to the classic desktop view, but still by default, you see the new touch interface every time the computer starts…!
  2. The walled-garden appstore. I’ve said before, I’m NOT a fan of appstores, especially if the trend is to make it (in a not far future) the EXCLUSIVE way to distribute apps for a particular platform. The new Mountain Lion MacOS is just out, and if you try any of my mac games by default they won’t run. For now you can still allow any app to be excecuted in the preferences screen, but is a first step towards censorship.
  3. Censorship. Yes, because when developers aren’t free anymore to make any game they want (of course within the limit of decency!) it starts to be a problem. The Apple appstore is famous for pulling apps from sale for various reasons, often really bizarre reasons. I can say that a game like Loren Amazon Princess, as it is, on iOS would never appear. I would need to make a “heavily censored version”, but from what I see, many people liked the game especially for its “sex appeal”. Not all of course, but why exclude a good part of the market? Even if I don’t play hentai games, why someone shouldn’t be allowed to? Who decides what people can do with THEIR PC, since they paid for it?
  4. The new locked bootloader features. It means that on several PCs, tablets, phones models you won’t be able to install Linux or any other operating system. This point is still a bit obscure since reading online I found sources saying that you can install linux as long as it’s “certified”. So it’s not terrible as it might seem, but again is a first step in the wrong direction. What will be next ?
  5. Certification. This seems a sort of “developer tax”. It’s not about the amount, which is small (around $100/year) but about the illusion that people running “certified app” will make them immune from virus/trojans..
  6. The $0.99 appstore flood. Big news! On the Windows8 the minimum price will be $1.49 ! Still, I don’t think this will be a real issue, even if there will be surely a flood of crappy $1.49 app but most games can still sell for higher amounts, it will just be tougher (but is always tougher, isn’t it?).

So I definitely don’t like all those signals (not just from Windows 8 but also from Apple). I want to say again that platform openess is essential for game developers and indies in particular, to be able to experiment with new gameplay ideas. Unless MS and Apple want us to make only HTML5/MMO games in future? (locking down “internet” will be a bit harder).

Status update about my games

July was a tough month to work for me, and for my write Aleema, since there was a heat wave that made almost impossible to stay in front of the computer. I have A/C in my computer room but I really hate using it because I get sore throat.

So let’s say I took some time to relax. But now things are back in motion! Also I’m really happy that a new build of Ren’Py has been released including an autoupdater, something that will really be useful during the beta testing phase.

Here’s what’s happening right now on each project:

Loren Amazon Princess expansion

This is probably the most awaited title right now 🙂 It’s not missing that much, some writing and scripting. Coding-wise I believe I have made 99% of the work already, maybe some more balancing but for that there’s the beta testing stage, which I’ll do making good use of the new built-in autoupdater.

I also finally got an answer from the colorist, so the last missing new sprite will be ready before end of month. So while I don’t want to say any date, seems the release is approaching fast…!

Heileen 3

I’ve been thinking recently if to just use Ren’Py even for this game, and do a later “port” to the new visual novel engine. This because I would be able to release it sooner, since I have everything needed to do the base game (not including the yuri version).

I haven’t decided yet, I think will wait until Loren’s expansion is out to make the final decision.

Nicole

I’m missing only 2 CG images, all the backgrounds and Chandra latest scenes. However I’ve also asked one of the writer who applied for Amber Magic Shop to edit/check the text, since they could be improved in some areas. I am also going to add new scenes including more red herrings 🙂

Roommates

Despite being one of the biggest games, is progressing really well. Writing is almost at Winter Break, which means 1/3 of the game! I got also a new bunch of art for it, and started the same artist that made the sprites on the backgrounds. Something unusual that only happened with Summer Session and Heileen2 before: a single artist doing all the work for the game!

The backgrounds list is quite impressive, with 27 different locations!

Planet Stronghold: Warzone

New enemies have been done. I also asked the artist to draw some character dialog poses, so that feels more natural. Like characters interacting with the environment: sitting on a chair, leaning on a wall, and so on. Still long way to go before the art is finished though, maybe this Fall.

Queen Of Thieves

Artist made some more sketches for new “pages”, cutscenes made like a comic page. Some are really funny, other romantic, and so on. I also should get the remaining texts soon.