First of all, let me say farewell to my cat Orfeo, 7 years old. Found him dead on the road nearby our house 2 days ago :( Man, how I wish I could get a house far away from all the roads and crazy drivers...

Word of mouth ?

Getting back to the post topic: word of mouth is really one of the most powerful marketing tools available for indies. Very few indies can afford to spend lot of money on advertising, and many don't get covered by the biggest review sites. Of  course, some do, but mostly indies doing games in popular genres, not "niches".

As a visual novel/dating sim author, is quite hard to get covered. Even Planet Stronghold which is mainly a RPG, probably didn't get much coverage because of the "excessive texts" problem. I remember a reviewer politely emailing me, saying that they would rather not cover PS because they would have to give it a bad rating because it has "too much texts".

I believe it wasn't just the text amount though, but also the quality, since Loren The Amazon Princess RPG has over 175,000 words of texts but so far nobody said "it has too much texts"... ;) Did I mention I'm not going to write directly any of my games anymore? ok good!

Anyway, what happened this month? In some very popular RPG forums, people discovered my game Planet Stronghold. Here are the forums threads:

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/mass-effect-gaiden-planet-stronghold.70928/page-8
http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16777

Let's say that in the beginning the tone was definitely NOT positive towards my game :D But on the other hands I could understand since they were comparing it to Mass Effect 3! But then... something incredible happened! Some people realized that behind the manga artwork (which somehow is associated with younger audience, like if is a negative thing!) and the slow beginning, there was a full featured RPG with armor, resistances, different attack types, skills, moral/ethic decisions and so on, and some of them started to be literally enthusiast about it!

Of course, despite what they say, I know that my game is NOT better than Mass Effect 3 :) But I think that it offers something that most games nowadays don't include: gameplay. The few AAA games that have been successful in recent years, beside top production values, also include lot of gameplay/innovations.

Anyway, this month's sales for Planet Stronghold have been much higher than normal, thanks to the "word of mouth" started by those threads but also by other people talking about it as a consequence. I got many new members in my own forums, and got suggestions for the sequel. I even got a journalist from RockPaperShotgun online magazine to play it, and while I don't know if it will be actually reviewed (so many good indie games out recently), before it was always ignored!

Sometimes, to have some "success" (modest in my case, of course) you just have to be patient and wait. Make the best game you can, and then be patient, because remember, not all the indies have quick success stories like Mojang.

One last thing before I forget: Loren version 0.94 is now ready! Get the update here, and the full changelog in my forums.

In the picture above, Othello looking at the new arrival, our dog Skipper.

I'm starting to see the light at the end of the Loren Amazon Princess tunnel :) If you follow me you know that last week I made public a sort of sneak peek, to see what people think. So far the response was very positive. People like the art, the story/writing, and beside a few bugs (all my fault though!) even the gameplay.

After the public preview, I made a big spreadsheet document with all the bugs and suggestions. I spent the following 2 days fixing them and evaluating the suggestions, and today finally I started to get back into the "content creation" phase.

Yes, because even if the plot is done until chapter4, as I play the game I'm adding the fights, creating new enemies, and also adding some extra movement steps on the map to make the game seem less linear (even if in reality it is, but nobody complained so far!).

The goal is to have the plot fully scripted by mid-March, and Aleema (my writer) said it would be possible, and I self-imposed myself the deadline of end of March for the almost-final release. It won't be easy, but I'll try to make it!

The next appointment with Loren is 1st March when I'll start pre-orders and release a new improved demo.

And the other games...?

I know that not everyone who follows me is a RPG fan, and they might be wondering what happened to the various games I have announced!

Well, to be honest I underestimated the amount of work that was needed to make a huge game like Loren. So while I am still waiting for the artwork and the writing for most other games, I was so busy that wasn't able to use my traditional "motivational techniques" to encourage my collaborators. In other words, the famous "spanking lazy collaborators"! :D

So the progress speed for my other games has been slower than usual, but until I finish Loren I don't think will have time to follow/encourage them.

Also, this week I decided to move the main Winterwolves site into a cloud server, so this added some extra delays (those kind of things are always problematic!). But better do that before Loren is released, just in case somehow it becomes a popular game!

Anyway, just to reassure that the other projects are still going forward, here's a sneak peek of Heileen 3 male romances:

From top-left to bottom-right: Heileen with Sebastian on the shore at night, Heileen with Jonathan in an artist atelier, Heileen with Morgan on the ship bridge, and Heileen and John... in bed! :)

Heileen 3 is still missing some art, and the whole Marie subplot, but I'd say that is 80% complete (of course, I still need to put everything together and test it).

And below is Jeff, one of the four pursuable characters of the mystery/otome game "Nicole":

I am at good point in this game too, story and art is about halfway finished, even if being a sort of mystery/detective game I'll have to review everything to make sure that there aren't spoilers early in the game or plot holes.

That's it for this week, see you next Friday!