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Planet Stronghold Public Alpha 1

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I’m proud to finally announce the first public Alpha of my next game Planet Stronghold. For those who don’t know what it is, I’m currently also building the official website which will also contain more info about the story and each character, but for now I can tell you what you’ll find in the game:

  • a manga sci-fi roleplaying game – with beautiful art and really varied characters (not all the same good-looking boys/girls you find in manga games)
  • two different heroes to choose (male / female) – The choice will only impact the romance and few situations in the game, but the statistics / skills / gameplay will have no differences
  • battle system – similar to those you find in JRPG titles and a gameplay similar to adventure games
  • romace option – romance was always present in all my recent story-based game and this won’t be an exception, including new homosexual romance option for both the male / female characters! The romance is entirely optional so if you’re not interested in it, you won’t see it at all (you won’t have the chance to stumble in it by accident)
  • relationship system – with any of the 8 charaters beside the main hero. Keep them happy to increase their skills, piss them off and if you push it too much they could even leave your party!
  • autoupdating – I’m experimenting with an autoupdate system that should allow me to release updates on server-side, and players to download only the changed part. No more “redownload the whole game to get latest update” like before! 🙂

Instead what you won’t find on the game:

  • tilemaps – if you’re a RPGMaker fan, sorry to disappoint, but I really preferred to concentrate my time on writing the story and characters interactions than mapmaking. There will be  a generic map to move from a location to the other though
  • puzzles – since I’m building this game system from scratch, for this first game I want to concentrate more on the battles, the skills, the statistics and variety of enemies, than puzzles. However I’ll have an interesting character training system. More on this later.
  • offline play – to play most of the game past the alpha version you’ll need to be online. Partly to protect me from piracy, but also to offer new features like achievements, autoupdates, new missions / maps / weapons / items and so on.

Are you still here? Good because now comes the good part, the download links:

http://www.didone.com/games/PSDemo.exe (Pc Version)
http://www.didone.com/games/PSDemo.zip (Mac Version)
http://www.didone.com/games/PSDemo.tar.bz2 (Linux Version)

I absolutely love to get feedback on gameplay and/or any bugs you encounter. Especially for the mac and linux platform, since I have already many testers on Pc! The build uses a very new version of Ren’Py game engine so you should be able to play with openGL acceleration enabled (press key F to go fullscreen).

Thanks and I hope you’ll enjoy the first alpha, even if is quite short for now 😀

Bionic Heart and more

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I have yet to receive all the voices for Bionic Heart. The total voiceovers size is now around 120mb…! 8)

In retrospect, probably wasn’t a good idea to wait and have the game fully voiced on release. I mean, the voices really change the game completely: on the other hand, they also delayed the game release (was ready in the beginning of June). And even after I receive them all, will need to retest the game again because could have miss some lines and so on. I really hope in the end all this effort will be worth it in term of sales.

The actors did an oustanding job so far, so certainly isn’t their fault for anything. Simply if I make voiced games in future I’ll need to start the voiceovers as soon as the scripting is done (before getting the final art). Or maybe I should avoid adding voiceovers to such HUGE games! 😀

Another good news is that I am having a friend of mine doing a “dungeon game engine”. So yes, FINALLY Tower of Destiny will see the light! I have only a very early alpha version of the engine but it already rules. Full 3d means that I can move and even if the movement is “in blocks” (with turning of 90° degrees), being in full3d means that is very fluid, can have dynamic lightning, animated textures, and many other features.

I can’t wait to finish some projects I still am working on right now to concentrate 100% on that game. Finally, doing a dungeon crawler RPG is a reality! Hurrah 🙂