"World at War" is the subtitle of Loren The Amazon Princess second chapter. The war is between the human and the elves: can Loren and her party stop the madness?

In the picture above, while Myrth and Apolimesho shake hands, Rei asks a vital question: "Can the elves really work together with the humans?" that's what you'll have to find for yourself playing the new game update, which can be downloaded from here:

http://www.winterwolves.com/download.php?game=LorenRPG-0.85.zip

As always, if you find any bugs, please report them in the game official forums.

Of course, there's much more beside the new chapter. The game has been improved under various aspects, many bugs fixed and things tweaked. For example, during the final scenes of second chapter, there's a sequence of battles that you have to fight without the automatic healing option. And I found that the party setup was missing a clear indication of each party member HP and SP.

So in the picture above you can see the new improved party setup screen, that shows the HP/SP for the members you have currently selected to fight.

Another complaint/suggestion I got from the player/testers was about the level up screen. It wasn't really clear which skills you could learn since all the skills were displayed in full color.

So as you can see in the screen above, the greyed-out skills are the ones that you cannot learn yet. I think it's much clear now. Also you might have noticed that I put a reset button, so if the attributes picked by the auto-assign doesn't satisfy you, you can retry as much as you want or allocate them manually.

Another big change is that I found a bug in the vendor screen, so that the vendors inventories weren't updating. Now, if you visit the same shop from time to time (you need to advance the plot a bit every time) you'll see new interesting items available.

There are LOTS more changes in the new version of course, but I cannot list them all! :)

I am not satisfied yet by the skills power level setup in the battle, since is easy to forget that you have 3 levels, and using the numbered buttons is not very intuitive, so I still need to tweak it, but except that I believe the battles, the skills and the classes now are really well balanced.

The mages now deal lots of damage, and since the vendors are fixed, you can buy some SP regenerating items and they can become really powerful. Warriors still have the highest HP and can absorb lot of damage, while Thieves are very versatile and now can use their skills more often.

As for the plot, it's already 140,000 words, so already more than double Planet Stronghold's plot! There's still the end of chapter4 and some romances left, so I think will reach 150,000 words for sure, becoming my biggest game ever! And it's not even a pure VN, but a RPG... definitely people won't be able to complain about the game length ;)

Other games update!

And now for the visual novel / dating sim fans, here's an unusual outfit for Ebele that you'll be able to admire in the upcoming Heileen3:

The game is already over 120,000 words, and almost all the 100 scenes have been written. Lora's path is complete, and only Marie's one is left. If everything goes well, expect it sometimes this summer :)

Also, the artist working on mystery/otome game Nicole had some computer problems, so the art production was delayed by a few weeks, but now she resumed working regularly. Even for this other game, expect a release sometimes this summer!

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!