Tag Archives: renpy

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 😀

What are “light-RPG” games?

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I remember when I was young, the game genres where very well defined: there were action games, adventure games, role playing games and so on.

As the game industry grew up, some interesting genre-mix started to pop up. For example now we all refer to Diablo as a RPG, but would be more accurate to call it Action-RPG. Actually, right now, we can find many “RPG elements” in lots of games. Very few “pure action” games remains.

One of my upcoming games, Planet Stronghold, is a “light-RPG” game. I consider it a visual novel with RPG elements, but stronger than those you can usually find in dating sims. What I exactly mean? I’m talking about quests, relationships, interactiveness? No, because many of those features were already present in my other “normal VNs”. In Heileen 1-2 there are quests, in Bionic Heart relationship and some interactive scenes, in Summer Session there are the stats/skills to improve and so on.

So to call the game “light-RPG” I knew I had to go forward and push renpy to its limits (well no, not really, is quite easy to achieve good results with it!). Indeed in Planet Stronghold there will be combat, an inventory, quests, character relationships and so on. There will be several kind of weapons based on the damage type: energy, piercing, explosive, etc. There will be 4 classes: psionic, soldier, guardian and scout, each one with special advantages.

BUT, the game won’t be FILLED by stats. You’ll clearly know from beginning what kind of gameplay you can expect from a certain class. Scouts will need lot of time to recharge but will be able to kill opponents with a single shot, especially human ones. Guardians will be tough and have lots of hitpoints, psionics duty instead will be to heal / protect others. That’s why I use the word “light”, because while is clearly a RPG game, it’s not hard to understand.

Clearly is not easy to create a game like that. Is actually harder than creating an uber-complex game like some I did in the past (Magic Stones or Supernova 2 for example). Because with this game, even a casual player should be able to pick up the game and after learning a few basics, being able to enjoy the game without getting lost not knowing what to do.

I hear voices!

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Yes, the voiceovers actors are doing a great job. And I can officially announce that I’m going to release Bionic Heart fully voiced, unless some really unfortunate events occurs (which at this point I really hope doesn’t!).

In the short clip above you see part of the introduction and the first choice you have to make in the game. You can notice a system similar to those used in Summer Session, each character has a relationship value towards you that can change during the game based on your actions. Don’t be surprised if later in the game there will be unpleasant consequences to your early choices… characters remembers how you have treated them in the past! 🙂