news tidbits

I'm sponsoring a small visual novel writing contest this month. It's silly. You will need to be creative. There are prizes. Go for it.

Development on The Royal Trap continues. Three of the four planned initial routes are written, and we have an awesome new CG artist helping get things moving along.

Cool new bonus stuff will be coming to LLTQ in the next couple of months. There will be art. I can't show you anything yet! But there will be entertaining new reasons to murder Elodie that is, to seek out rare events.

Greenlight news - we have two pages up at the moment.


Science Girls - If this gets voted up high enough to pass, it will get a graphical overhaul with cool new visual effects for battle, better maps on the alien world, etc, while at the same time being sold way cheaper because that's sort of what Steam expects from a silly little RPG like this. Should it then actually sell some copies, it might have a sequel someday. Otherwise, probably never. So if you actually liked this poor little game, cheerlead for it!

Date Warp - If this one passes, the price will drop by half and existing customers will get free Steam keys, but this game is done so no huge changes would pop up. Vote for it to boost VNs on Steam and to get yourself a discount. :)

mumble mumble DOOM

... e is the Undivider, the Flower of Infinity, naHam Ch'oom...

i can't not post that

I must post a link to this UNUSUAL vn screenshot seen on tumblr.

Not exactly porn, but NOT SAFE FOR WORK

(or for having a mouthful of drink)

buried under backlog

I am so far behind in my gaming that when I went to GOG to redeem the gift someone sent me (the Back To THe FUture adventure games I'd been kinda interested in) I discovered a bunch of other games I'd purchased and totally forgotten about...

the future of ownership

So, apparently City of Heroes is shutting down. I have the sads.

It's pretty much the only MMORPG I ever really played. Sure, I've been bullied into free trials of things here and there, and I spent a brief period of time in World of Warcraft before having my account hacked and deciding it wasn't worth the hassle. In ALL of these cases someone pretty much had to buy the game for me and tell me to play it because there's no way I'll waste money on these things.

And this is why. Now the game will be gone. The game that we spent quite a lot of money on over the years... a handful of monthly fees for me, a lot more plus the box copies and then all the weird DLC crap my husband bought after it went f2p. The game that was pretty entertaining to load up just to play witht he character creator even if you didn't feel like playing. Gone.

Of course, it should also be obvious that I haven't touched the thing in who knows how long. I'm far too busy and MMORPGs don't play well with my distracted gaming style and occasional net interruptions. But as usual it is still highly irritating that the game I played (primarily as a single-player experience because I'm not social, but occasionally with my husband) will be taken away and there's not much I can do about it (other than hunt for legally dubious fan servers which probably exist somewhere, I don't know).

Insert my usual rant about DRM and MMORPGs and all that nonsense, I'm honestly getting tired of saying it. I'm tired of being asked to pay for things that will be taken away from me. I'm tired of knowing that this is apparently a better business model than actually selling stuff like I do. Sigh.

Fly'n

Another interesting item spotted through someone's greenlight thread:



This isn't quite a complete game yet though, it's due out this fall. I think. But it looks adorable and the sort of thing I'm into.

Scheherazade is hard to spell!

Here's an interesting project from the makers of Academagia:



(Click through to see video properly)

And like Academagia or Long Live The Queen, it looks like there are a lot of skills and you'll be able to make use of them to shape the way your character handles her adventures. I don't know yet if it will be as VICIOUS as LLTQ though :)

The main game's webpage is here. It's not done yet.

Project can also be found on Greenlight... as, for that matter, can several other games, such as Science Girls and Date Warp. So if you want to see this sort of thing on Steam, get in there. Otherwise, stay tuned for more info when this title is complete.