In the photo above my cat Grillo sleeping deeply with a stuffed toy near him :)

Now you might wonder why I picked that title for my post? As you know I've always worked on many games at once, as a way to keep up with the occasional disappearances of artists. However, while this method is working well for my visual novel, dating sim and life simulation games, for RPGs is a different story. I've noticed that is very hard to keep focused on doing more than one RPG at once (lol, not a surprise!) so I've decided that, to avoid releasing poor/mediocre games, I won't be working on more than one RPG a year!

This doesn't include expansions or even sequels like Planet Stronghold: Warzone. When/if I can re-use most of the gameplay and rules of a previous RPG, then I believe that is possible to make even two a year, but if I have to create a new RPG from scratch... that's not possible!

I am not talking only about the coding. The coding is a tough part of RPGs, that's for sure, but what makes really hard to release a good one is the amount of content needed. I dare to say (and I'm sure most game developers will agree with me) that a RPG is the kind of game that requires more work of all the game genres. You need a story. You need several quests, which are basically subplots, and they need to fit in the main story and not be just stupid "kill 10 rats" quests (having some of them are OK, but not all quests should be like that). There's need of art, lots of art. Since I do mainly 2d games, every enemy is a sprite. How many enemies a RPG have? Planet Stronghold has 40, though some re-use the basic shape changing color/weapons. Loren RPG, my upcoming fantasy RPG will have 40-50 enemies as well, but they will be all different ones! So that's already a lot of work just for the art.

And last but not least, testing. Unless the RPG you're making is very linear and has "casual gameplay" (very simple rules), the testing will be a major pain ! :) You have to take into account every possible variable and combination, and often if you don't ,you end up with very mysterious bugs and unhappy customers (though I have to say that my RPG buyers were much more supportive than those of other games genres!).

So, what does this means in practice? that while I'll keep artists working on Undead Lily's artwork, I will release Loren RPG first, and Undead Lily next year. This way, I'll be able to release two quality products. Loren RPG is at good point - even if I keep adding "just one more enemy" since a month, the plot writing is going steadly and the battle system coding is almost finished. As I announced in my forums, once the RPG framework reaches a decent state I plan to release a small alpha to get user feedback and do some testing.

As for Planet Stronghold: Warzone, the artist said that after this last convention, she will work fulltime on it. There's need of quite some art, new enemies, a new playable character to replace the old Bellamy, and more CGs scenes for the romances. I don't have any planned release date, my idea is to keep this game going on parallel with the others and see when is finished. As I said, since I can reuse a good part of the previous Planet Stronghold code/rules/system, this game will be easier/quicker to produce than Loren RPG or Undead Lily.

So the plan is to try finishing Loren RPG by end of this year (no guarantees) and Undead Lily for summer next year, while Planet Stronghold: Warzone might really be finished anytime between the two. Obviously, I'll keep releasing visual novel and dating/life sim in the meanwhile, like I did this year.

Good RPGs are few. Probably are the kind of genre where there are less games available. Note that I'm not talking about hack'n'slash RPGs, or "simple" RPGs. But story-based RPGs with lots of gameplay rules and many dialog choices and ethical / moral decisions. It's hard to write interesting dialogues that aren't banal (and for a non-english speaker like me, is even more difficult!). In the screenshot above, Rumi Kai poses a good question to the player: she struggles between her interest in medicine and healing, and her innate destructive powers. She asks herself what is more honorable: to harm, or to heal? That is an example from the various romance subplot I'm currently writing right now for my sci-fi RPG game "Planet Stronghold" which should be out at end of this month (with another beta 0.9 release around mid-January). Dialogues and story apart, another aspect why RPGs are so hard to come by is gameplay balancing. I tested this game more than any other game I've ever made. Partly because it's fun (so that's a good sign!) and partly because every update, I regularly unbalanced the game :( How this can happen? Easily, I'll make you an example. The Psionic Power "Harm" at high level can do a lot of damage. Like even 100hp of damage. This would mean that some monsters could be killed with one attempt! That was bad for gameplay balancing of course, so I raised the Psionic Points cost (think of it like if is Mana in fantasy RPGs). Problem is that a few weeks later, I realized that even with higher mana cost, if you had two Psionics you could still do 200hp of damage even to boss enemies! A boss that can be defeated so easily with just two hits would make the game a bit ridiculous :D So, my idea was to introduce enemy evasion bonus. Some enemy have a very high evasion value, that doesn't apply only to avoiding weapon shots but also Psionic Powers. So before the Harm would always hit the target. Instead now you could miss the enemy, and since every attempt costs high amount of PP, that would balance the game well. The problem was that I forgot to lower the PP cost, making the game insanely difficult to play! This is just an example of how two small changes would affect the whole game! So, if you make a RPG, everytime you introduce a game/ruleset change, think about all possible secondary effects otherwise you'll start hear (rightful) complains from people in your forums ;)