Yes, finally the game Love & Order, written by C. Love, is available for pre-orders purchase! You can see more screenshots and information about the game and the characters at the official page. Beside producing the game, I've also tested it a lot, and I can say it's really fun and it will keep you busy for quite some time while you try to discover more about the mysterious abandoned case and at same time, pursue all of the four dateable characters :) Love & Order has also an official forum now - so if you have any feedback, comment, suggestion, bug report (let's hope not!) or anything else,  stop by my forums and write something! A little of postmortem info about this game. I contacted Christine back in summer 2010 shortly after her game Digital: A Love Story was out. After playing it, I immediately recognized the potential that she had as game developer ;) And since I've learned long time ago that my world-domination plan cannot be fulfilled alone, I asked her if was interested in writing a game for me. We exchanged a few emails and she asked what kind of game I had in mind, so I told her about several possibilities. One of them was:

"I was thinking instead of school, would be nice to have as setting work (like an office job) and have some mystery (not necessarily a murder or anything, but some mysterious event)."

And that's how it all started. A fun excerpt from one of her emails was:

I would think maybe four dateable characters (is that a good number? three men and one woman? I really wouldn't want to write a completely straight heroine), plus a couple of other people who work there.

(obviously had no problems with that!). There was a lot of initial brainstorming and then from about July or so it was all in her hands. She coded /wrote it while the various artists worked on the backgrounds and the character art (the character artist is the same of Remember Me, which should also be ready next month... or so). Obviously Love & Order is quite different from Digital:A Love Story and I hope people won't even try to compare the two games, since is like comparing apples and oranges. Our goal with Love & Order was to have a fun otome / dating sim game, with a bit of humour, mystery and lot of romance, and I think the result turned out quite good. That's all for now, ah no wait - I couldn't make a friday blog without a cat picture! Here it is: my cat Grillo seems to think "Love & Order is an awesome game, everyone should buy it!" ;)

In the picture above, Grillo & Leon when they were two small kittens in my old home. They used to sleep together to stay warmer :) As I'm writing this post, I'm doing the final touches to my Planet Stronghold RPG. I hoped to have the final build by now, since I set my own deadline to the end of January, but we're almost there. In the next few days I'll release the beta version 0.9, which will be the final build except for:

• some unproofreaded texts
• might have some plot holes or small bugs (despite the testing, there might be some small mistakes here and there)
• some missing voices

That's it, as you can see nothing really big is missing. The final release is estimated for mid-February, though you can already buy the game now for $19.99 and save $5 on the final game price (once it's officially out the price will be $24.99). As the blog post title says, I'm finishing a RPG (Planet Stronghold) and starting a new one. This new RPG will be called "DIM: The Insurrection" and you can see a preview art below, with some characters that will be present in the game: for now I don't want to say too much, also because we're just in the early stages, all I can anticipate for now is:

• the main character is the cute girl in the middle, named "Kareta"
• as you might notice the game features many hybrid human-feline races :)
• it will be completely written from scratch by native English speaker, so no more "good game, a pity about the writing" complaints ;)
• will obviously feature battles and a spell system based on four elements + life and death
• will be written in Renpy and be available for Pc, Mac & Linux
• will probably feature some map system. Not sure yet if a tilemap or something different, we're experimenting right now!
• will have cutscenes and less texts than Planet Stronghold. Will be a more mainstream game, not related to the visual novel world
• the battles will be more cinematic, featuring many custom scenes
• depending on the final texts size might even be completely voiced (though perhaps the voice pack might get released at a later date)

That's all for now! Stay tuned because next friday I might even announce the official release of Love & Order. Or at least the pre-orders :)