{"id":2774,"date":"2016-07-01T08:44:04","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T06:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/?p=2774"},"modified":"2016-07-01T11:46:14","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T09:46:14","slug":"so-whats-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/2016\/07\/so-whats-next\/","title":{"rendered":"So, what’s next?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2016sofar\"<\/p>\n

This year, so far I finished three games, with the fourth (Queen Of Thieves) already in a good state for a beta. So, what’s next? \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

First half of 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n

First of all, we’re halfway through 2016. I’m not going to lie, things have changed A LOT for the indie business. For the first time I heard other indies quitting or taking contract work to pay the bills. It’s scary. I am fine, since I live very frugally (my biggest expense is cat food! haha) but still, I cannot deny that I’m a bit worried too!<\/p>\n

Early this year I released PSCD, which underperformed despite great writing and good gameplay design (not my biased opinion, it has 100% positive ratings on Steam!). I didn’t know why at first, but soon I understood the main reason: the art. The next games, C14 Dating and Heirs & Graces, did as expected, or even better than I thought.\u00a0 Queen Of Thieves is in beta and in preorder since a week so it’s a bit early, but so far the impression is very positive.<\/p>\n

In summary, all is good! I only hope the artist finishes the main plot CGs soon… I might need to use my motivational whip to speed things up! \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

So, what’s next?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Going back to the original question: a few weeks ago I talked about burnout, and the risk of ignoring it. So I’m well aware of it, and indeed I’m taking frequent breaks from work. In practice instead of long holidays, I work every day (even weekends!), but less hours than I used to. Thanks to that, I am not really burned out or tired right now, and I’m planning what to do in the next months.<\/p>\n

As already posted in the past, I am thinking to do some “other games<\/a>“: games in which the gameplay is more important, without a plot or with a smaller plot. This because honestly, writing a good story of 120k+ words (like all my recent games, in some cases even double that amount!) is going to take time. And I don’t want to rush writers, because if the story of a story-based game is bad… yeah, you get it! So, an alternative is to work on something else on the side, while I wait for them to finish.<\/p>\n

They could be pure-gameplay, or mixed with a story, but one thing is to write a story of 120k words, another thing is to write a story 30-40k words long (which is more than enough if a game is not strictly story-based!).<\/p>\n

I made a small poll in my forums asking what kind of gameplay people would like to see mixed with visual novel\/story: http:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=3885<\/a><\/p>\n

At the moment of writing this, “simulation” seems to be the most popular. Which is good, since it’s one of my favorite game genres and one I think I’m skilled enough (my early games were all simulations). This means that maybe I’ll try to add a more complex\/detailed simulation part in my upcoming game Amber’s Magic Shop!<\/p>\n

This is what I’m planning to do in the remaining months this year: some gameplay experiment\/prototypes. I might post them in public and ask for feedback and then decide if they’re ideas worth pursuing or not.<\/p>\n

Of course, the “regular games” will have the precedence. I’ll do those experiments while I wait for my collaborators to send me updates and make progresses \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year, so far I finished three games, with the fourth (Queen Of Thieves) already in a good state for a beta. So, what’s next? \ud83d\ude42 First half of 2016 First of all, we’re halfway through 2016. I’m not going to lie, things have changed A LOT for the indie business. For the first time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[163,44,9,140,11,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beta-demo","category-game-design","category-indie-life","category-iphone-ipad","category-other-games","category-postmortem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2774","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=2774"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2778,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2774\/revisions\/2778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}