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Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2011 10:28 am
by jack_norton
Official webpage: http://www.planetstronghold.com
Game Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDtnXLSqglo

Direct download links:
http://www.winterwolves.com/download.ph ... PSDemo.exe (Pc)
http://www.winterwolves.com/download.ph ... PSDemo.zip (Mac)
http://www.winterwolves.com/download.ph ... mo.tar.bz2 (Linux)

Game features:

- Play as male or female
- Four different character classes
- Eight NPC will join you in the battle
- Detailed battles with many tactical choices
- Over 40 unique enemies to fight including some "boss fights"
- Three optional romance ending for each gender for a total of 6 different romance endings
- Lots of quest and side-quests to solve
- Dynamic story that changes based on your choices
- Use non-combat skills like Explosives, Science, Sneak to solve some situations without resorting to combat
- You can also get the official strategy guide and receive 4 extra bonus weapons in the game (internet connection required to activate it once)

Screenshots:
Image Image Image Image

Please note also that the 1st March 2011 will raise the price of this game permanently to $24.99 - so you have two days left to buy it at $19.99!

Some final comments:
Finally, the game is out! This is the biggest game I ever made in Ren'Py (and perhaps the biggest game in general). It's also the longest game I made for players, I estimate that completing the game with one character gender will require at least 9-10h (playing at maximum speed and easy mode, skipping the optional side-quests).
When I showed it to some developer friends, they couldn't believe this was done in Renpy. Hopefully this way I also brought some interest of other pro-developers to Ren'Py :)
It was a very long run, from the early prototypes in 2009 when the screen language didn't even exist, to the latest versions that runs fine even on netbooks (it's a miracle for such a game I think! great work by Tom on this).

Special thanks: Littleramyun, sake-bento & Riviera for the proofread. sake-bento also provided the character battle voices that made them even more fun. And obviously thanks to pytom for Ren'Py !

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2011 10:55 am
by Aleema
Congrats on release!! I know this is a biggie. I'll have to wait until March to buy any games, though. ;_; Saving for DA2 was hard enough.

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2011 11:13 am
by jack_norton
Yes I bet, I guess it wasn't really a good moment to come out with this game, but well... it was kinda already on sale since 1 month and was tired of waiting :D

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2011 5:28 pm
by Muse
Sadly I'm another person who will be waiting after March to get this, but I love what I've played of the demo. I'm a bit surprised at the difficulty though (although not in a bad way); I'm used to being able to take things really easily on Normal but it's giving me trouble in this. :D

Anyway, I know you'd rather hear from someone who had played the whole thing, but I can say safely the demo has me hooked. :) Great artwork and music, as well. I can say this also is running very smoothly on my old MacBook Pro so far, which is great, since many combat based games tend to run painfully slow on this thing. Excellent job!

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2011 5:35 pm
by jack_norton
Thanks. About difficulty, it's probably the hardest thing to balance when doing RPGs: because as I made the game, I know all the tricks, so combats are easy for me :) I think though that it's well balanced, and anyway since you can change difficulty anytime, if a battle is too hard you can try at easy level.

About the game smoothness on your macbook you need to thank pytom for that - I remember before GL implementation the game was running slow even on my powerful desktop PC, since during battles lots of stuff happens (big PNG sprites, stats calculations, effects, music, etc). Thank God now it has HW acceleration :D

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2011 8:10 am
by aya001
Awesome... too bad that I also have to wait to get the full game... With Dragon age II, Yakuza 4, Dissidia 012.... XDDDD I'm poor this month T_T. But I'm sure to buy the full game, soon ^^ Can't wait.... :)

Also played Love&Order, another one to the list "games to buy..." :)

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2011 2:21 am
by sporkysan
I played the demo and I'm very tempted to get the game. But I think I'll have to restrain myself until later because I have other things to take care of. And I know that if I buy the game I will be playing it instead of doing my work.

I found some minor issues in the demo. The first one is really small. When you meet the queen she says "who where those people". It should say "who were those people."

The other issue is an odd one. When you split up into teams to fight the rebelling robots, I choose to take Rumi Kai and Michelle LaFleur with me. But for some reason Tom Shatz was in my party instead of Rumi. Not that I'm complaining, because I would have liked Tom in my party, but it didn't make sense. So when I returned to the Royal Hall it said Tom had been waiting there with Rebecca Fox. Except he had been in my party the whole time.

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2011 3:51 am
by jack_norton
Ah thanks for finding out those problems, will fix them now :)

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2011 4:49 am
by LVUER
Congratulation ^_^ Finally... I still remembered the first time you posted about this game. I never thought it will be this long... (and never thought you have the patience to finish this also). Good job!

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2011 5:14 am
by jack_norton
Lol to be honest I didn't thought would have been so long either. After this long game I'm definitely taking a break and making some "smaller" ones (or less complex if you prefer).

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2011 2:39 am
by LondonIvy
This game looks wonderful. Any chance you'll be making versions of it for portable devices (like the Iphone) like you did with Vera Blanc or is it just not possible or feasible? I'm going to get it either way. XD

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2011 2:59 am
by jack_norton
Haha no sorry, forget about having this on anything else than desktop! It's really too complex, beside it wouldn't even fit the display - perhaps the iPad, but then I have no reason to port it there considering wouldn't sell enough to justify the huge porting costs.

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2011 12:06 am
by PyTom
Don't forget the xoom and the other android tablets coming relatively soon. It might be fairly easy to port to them.

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2011 3:36 am
by jack_norton
Yes, even if I am really not sure the amount of effort required since this game was coded in middle of a big renpy transition and there are part of old and new code :) with the final release of Monkey I might also rebuild my RPG framework for that system so when I finish a new game it would be instantly available on all platforms... even if means I would have to give up renpy and python :(

Re: Planet Stronghold (RPG/VN, sci-fi, commercial)

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2011 1:35 am
by sporkysan
Yes! I still have more work to do, but I have a small break so I bought the game. I've been itching to play it. Only problem is that I'm having trouble getting it to acknowledge that I bought the game. But as soon as that gets fixed, hopefully I'll be able to play. Maybe even leave a review.