{"id":1102,"date":"2012-12-28T15:03:37","date_gmt":"2012-12-28T14:03:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/?p=1102"},"modified":"2012-12-28T15:03:37","modified_gmt":"2012-12-28T14:03:37","slug":"2012-the-year-of-loren","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/2012\/12\/2012-the-year-of-loren\/","title":{"rendered":"2012 the year of Loren"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='posterous_autopost'>\n<p>As usual I&#8217;m doing the end of the year blog post, in which I talk how it was the year that is about to end for me. Looking back at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/2011\/12\/2011-the-year-of-farewells\/\">the post I wrote in 2011<\/a>, lots of things went better.<\/p>\n<p>First of all, and most importantly, I didn&#8217;t had so many losses like last year. In April I lost my cat Orpheus, but luckily it was the only loss.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The year of RPGs and Loren<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Personal life apart, the main event of this year for me as you can guess was the release of the RPG Loren The Amazon Princess. I already did <a href=\"http:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/2012\/05\/loren-amazon-princess-is-out-and-postmortem\/\">a postmortem about it<\/a>, but now that more than 6 months passed after its release, the response of people that are playing\/discovering it is still amazing, and I can absolutely say that will do more RPGs in future \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>Does it means that I will do <strong>only RPGs<\/strong>? No, of course! I need some simpler games from time to time to take a break and recharge batteries. Heileen 3 was good on this regard, because while is true that making it was still working, it felt almost relaxing to have &#8220;just to design and code some simple life simulation rules&#8221; instead of balancing 60 skills and testing endless battles like I did for Loren \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll still put some RPG mechanics in the other games though, like the leveling skills of Heileen 3 (which I think was something relatively new, at least in the OELVN?) or the &#8220;crafting gameplay&#8221; that will be present in Amber&#8217;s Magic Shop.<\/p>\n<p>This year was my best since I went indie, and this means that I must thank first everyone who is supporting my games (I&#8217;m not on any big portal, so every little sale count!) and also a special thanks to all my valid collaborators\/partners who are helping me so much to make better games! In no order and using a mix of names\/nicknames: Aleema, Anima, Sarah, Megan, Michael, Franklin, George, Deji, Ayu, Matthew, Eddy, Slamet and everyone else who probably missed but that helped me making games.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Future improvements<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I think that the artwork of my games is already at good levels, even if will try to have more quantity\/variety of images or scenes. However, there are two crucial aspects that I plan to improve in the next year games:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Custom soundtracks<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s something so obvious that is quite embarrassing for me to say it. In the past games I always used royalty free audio tracks. A bit because I couldn&#8217;t afford to hire a musician, and also because I have hard time to explain exactly what music I need, because of language barrier.<\/p>\n<p>However as I&#8217;ve seen by the response to Heileen 3 custom track bonus, people really like that. So for all future games I&#8217;ll have full soundtracks made and have them available as mp3 bonus content.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Professionally made logos<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A friend of mine pointed out that while the art of my games is in general quite good, the logos sucks. Indeed, I made most of the logos myself! \ud83d\ude42 That&#8217;s why I asked M.Beatriz Garcia also known as Deji to create logos for all the next games, so for sure they will look much better!<\/p>\n<p>It might seem a minor detail, but I must say that people often judge games by first impressions. And surely a professionally done logo has much better impact than my current ones.<\/p>\n<p><strong>In conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Even for this year the show is over! I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year, and I&#8217;m looking forward to work on the next year games. Stay tuned!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As usual I&#8217;m doing the end of the year blog post, in which I talk how it was the year that is about to end for me. Looking back at the post I wrote in 2011, lots of things went better. First of all, and most importantly, I didn&#8217;t had so many losses like last [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,152],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indie-life","category-loren-the-amazon-princess"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}