Wednesday, January 19, 2022

Mark Your Calendars: 2/4/2022!

I've been silent for the past 2 years, but very, very busy working on three big projects for you! I'm releasing all three of them on Friday, February 4!


The Star Legation:

Immerse yourself in a choice-driven visual novel space adventure with an epic, branching story where your choices really matter! You play as the unlikely representative of the human race, Trey Donovan, and will customize his skills for a journey through space with an alien crew. Your mission: visit strange new worlds and convince powerful alien leaders to join the Interstellar Union. Can you brave the dangers of space, survive deadly battles, navigate delicate diplomatic encounters, and manage your own bizarre alien crew? Build relationships with memorable characters and develop reputations with each that will alter the course of the story, including a possible romance across the stars!

Available on Steam and itch.io for $14.99


 

Solar Echoes Player's Guide, 2nd Edition

The Solar Echoes Player's Guide is the core rulebook for Solar Echoes, a sci-fi tabletop role-playing game that uses a fast moving, no-initiative rules system set in a vast, alien universe. Choose from 7 different alien races and build a team of agents for a variety of challenges, including squad combat, starship battles, car chases, and even dialogue and hacking encounters.

This book has been updated with tons of full-color art, corrections, game improvements, and updated full color icons!

When it releases, look for it on DriveThruRPG

 


 

Whispers of the Voidsea

Meet Brad Walsh, a newly recruited human colonist that has become an agent of the Union Guard. He must learn to work with and manage a challenging team of bizarre aliens as they discover a sinister, shadowy organization aiming to shatter the very balance that holds all their worlds together in union. Can Brad's team stop events that could stir the wrath of a powerful alien race--the same beings that claim responsibility for the creation of the Voidsea itself?

This novel will be availabe on Amazon for the Kindle, and paperback soon after!

 



Monday, October 12, 2020

The Kickstarter is LIVE!

The Kickstarter for The Star Legation is live and is already nearly halfway there! Please help support this project and the goal to bring voice acting to the game.


The Star Legation Kickstarter


 

The Star Legation has gone Global!

A major news network for the Philippines, GMA News, just ran a feature article about The Star Legation visual novel and the voice actor I'm hoping to work with, Josh Portillo!

I'm trying to raise support through a Kickstarter to employ voice actors in my game. Check out the article here:

https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/scitech/technology/759349/sci-fi-visual-novel-to-feature-pinoy-voice-actor-if-it-meets-its-kickstart-strh-goal/story/

 


 

Saturday, July 11, 2020

Tower of Time Review!




I recently discovered a real gem of an RPG on Sony's PSN Store. Thankfully, I saw this game being talked about online in social media, because otherwise, I might not have found it. Sony made a mistake and listed the release date a month earlier than when it actually released, so you'll have to search “Tower of Time” to find it. But please do, this RPG is incredible and well worth your money and time! This is Event Horizon's first game, and although it seems to have somehow slipped beneath the radar of many game reviewers, I think it more than deserves a lot of attention. Please support this indie developer so they'll keep making games for us. The Tower of Time is, in my opinion, an RPG masterpiece!



SETTING

From the very opening of the game, a powerful atmosphere was set through foreboding music and the protagonist's voice-acted narrative. Mood is thick throughout the game, and it never relents—there is a pervasive, almost chilling weight to everything as you play, with a pacing that creeps forward and never feels rushed, but still carries with it an urgency and a gravity that keeps you exploring. I loved the story, but I won't spoil it so you can experience it first hand. I'll just say that the method through which the protagonist (you) is able to observe and participate in the tower exploration is novel and ingenious. The tower has an almost palpable feeling of depth and history. You will honestly feel like you're exploring something vast and ancient as you advance through every floor of the mysterious tower.





The environments were all beautifully crafted, with excellent color, detail, lighting, and shadows. Parts of the surroundings that weren't accessible but were still visible raised questions about the tower I was exploring. For example, wooden tracks for a mine cart wound around down into the darkness, making me wonder where they went, what were they used for, and who made them? I often found myself moving around the edges of a platform to see if I could get a better look down into the tower's depths and possibly answer some of those questions for myself. I was left wondering at some of the mysteries this place was hiding, though I have found that through a bit of exploring and secret door discovery, some of these questions can be answered.



I really loved the small history bits scattered throughout the environment. Ancient texts, journals, or letters mentioned a lost society (ours), and described it from an outsider's point of view. For example a description of an airplane was seen as a giant metal bird people sat inside like a ship. My fighter character concluded that “surely it must be a book of children's tales.”



CHARACTERS AND RPG ELEMENTS

The characters you begin with are set—a fighter and an archer—so you don't get to build any characters from the ground up. However, as they explore and advance in level, you can customize them by distributing 3 attribute points each level among 4 attributes. You can also customize at each level with points that you can also assign to battle-oriented skills, such as healing, dash, erect wall, teleport, fire arrows, or even summoning. The skills each have 2 options to develop, but you may only choose one for each level of the skill, which definitely allows for increased customization. For example, the fighter's Dash skill has 2 choices: the left choice reduces the skill's cooldown and mana cost (which affords you more mobility and greater threat generation), and the right choice increases the radius of impact, damage, and adds gravity pull, as well as interrupting enemy casting. At the beginning, you will only have 3 different skills available per character, but as they level up, other skills will be unlocked for point investment.





SOUND

The sound effects were really impressive, and made the experience incredibly immersive. I'd highly recommend playing the game with a stereo headset or through a surround-sound system. Rocks falling, wood creaking, water dripping, and burning torches all come together to create a very realistic feeling of isolated exploration, but the infrequent sound of magic activating through various devices you discover throughout your adventure will shock you into remembering the mystical nature of the game. The music was excellent and added to increase the mood, creating a subtle urgency to your mission that felt like a slowly building but ever-present crescendo. I truly felt like the tower was timeless—it had a personality and presence of its own that felt decidedly ancient.



BATTLE

Although it took a little acclimation, I adjusted quickly to the battle system and quickly grew to love it. It almost appears as if everything is moving in slight slow motion, but the pacing is absolutely perfect. I often paused the battle to issue new commands and change tactics, selecting new spells and abilities because of the constantly changing situation. Just when I thought that positioning my archer far away from the oncoming undead was the best tactic after sending my fighter into the front lines, I noticed that the undead were also beginning to swarm in from another location behind the archer. I quickly had to cease firing and back her up closer to the fighter with her back to the undead he was demolishing—just so she had a chance to deal with the three that were fast approaching her from the other side.





One thing I particularly liked about the battle system was that it let you know where the battles would be, and what you'd be fighting if you decided to engage. Your characters explore a beautifully detailed environment, but instead of random, unseen encounters or automatically spawned enemies, you'll see them standing there in the environment, waiting for you, blocking your way forward. If you approach them, they'll slightly approach you until contact, and then you'll see a list of each of the monsters in that group. You can look at each monster, and even read up on their abilities, before deciding whether or not you want to fight them. If you choose “withdraw,” that's simply all that happens—no battle will begin, and they will still be standing there later, blocking your way while ready to fight.



The enemies themselves all have very interesting tactical skills. For example, “Kill Command” raises your threat and other enemies focus on you. Field of armor improves armor to enemies in that aura range and overlaps with others that have the same skill, making two enemies with the skill extremely difficult to destroy. Life drain from a distance heals magi spirits, and it's honestly panic-inducing when you see these undead shining their beam onto your character, drinking his or her life away while repairing all the damage you've done to them.



The battles are challenging, and sometimes, they are too hard. This is fine, though, because if you fail, you are given the option to retry, or load from a previous save. Sometimes I'd come across a group that was just too tough to fight, so I'd leave and explore some more, hopefully leveling up my characters a little more, or maybe adjusting their abilities instead so that I could better manage the battle. Once in a while, there are isolated enemies that were definitely above my level, so I saved them for the very end before taking them on again. It's amazing the difference that it made when 1 or 2 characters leveled up once. The game feels balanced towards being consistently challenging, but never impossible.



TREASURE, CRAFTING, AND TOWN BUILDINGS

Treasure was scattered about through the tower and I was also picking up little piles of gold or opening treasure chests. Treasure included items in the basic categories: weapons, chest armor, leg armor, boots, gloves, helmets, amulets, and rings. Often, I found versions of the same that were just slightly better than what I had, or slightly worse. The amount of treasure items felt right, though—it was nothing like Diablo where you spend half of your game in inventory management. The treasure in the Tower of Time was enough to keep me going, but never too much to be distracting.





After every battle there was always a small reward of items, gold, and/or crafting materials. Crafting materials allowed me to create new items if I wanted to improve upon what I had (or try something different), and when I had the crystals I needed, I could even imbue them with small enchantments. The crafting system was not overly complex, but it was still enough that I could customize my items to fit my playstyle. Again, it didn't detract from the game and never kept me away from exploring for very long.



Eventually the option opens up to go back to town, where you'll find various buildings such as the armory, mage tower, keep, barracks, and library. You can upgrade these buildings with enough gold, which will open up more options for your party. When your characters level up, you actually need to pay some gold to train them up to the next level. As the story unfolds and you discover certain blueprints to upgrade your buildings, you can begin to recruit new characters to your party as well. The first was a druid, and he was a very needed and welcome addition to my party.



CHARACTER INTERACTION

The writing and voice-acting in Tower of Time is top-tier: I can't imagine how it could be any better. I really enjoyed the conversations between my two initial explorers, who both have very different mindsets. Character alignment is affected by the choices you make, and though I haven't played far enough, I do suspect that the negative effects in alignment may become problematic for the party as a whole. In one example, I discovered a strange statue that spoke. It asked for a sacrifice of life, and I later discovered a tree branch and a small frog. When returning to the statue, I had the option to offer one of these, but my fighter, Kane, thought of a third option—sacrifice his own blood to the statue. The archer, Maeve, is very opposed to this idea. I won't spoil anything by sharing the results of the sacrifice, but if you do it, Maeve's alignment adjusts negatively by 1, where it improves by 1 if you do one of the other two options. Each character suffers negative or positive effects, depending on where they are in the alignment chart. For instance, the druid might suffer a small penalty to mana regeneration if he is unhappy.





MECHANICS

The only flaw I might mention is that the interface in this game felt counter-intuitive at times. I still have the habit of trying to move back in a menu by clicking O, only to remember once again that it closes every menu still open and brings me back to the game. Holding down R2 while selecting an item off the radial with the stick, then releasing R2 to select it also felt a bit odd, but I did get used to it. It would have also been nice to have a less round-about way to pull up the map. This game was originally designed for PC, so it's understandable that something might have been lost in translation to consoles.



One thing I loved and should be a standard in ALL RPG's was the save-anywhere feature that saved so quickly I sometimes had to do it again because I couldn't believe it was over already. You only have 5 different save slots, but that's fine—I just moved through 1-5 and repeated that process with each progressive save.



OVERALL

I have only put about 6 hours into the game so far, but so far I am enjoying this much more than any other RPG I've played on a console (and I've played A LOT of them.) I honestly look forward to finding an hour or two during the week where I can delve into the deep atmosphere of Tower of Time and completely lose myself, never being in a hurry but always enjoying every aspect of the immersive exploration. Note that I rarely stop to read the extras in RPG's because they just feel tacked-on for the compulsive-gamer types. With Tower of Time, however, I really must know more about what happened there and why things are the way they are. Every bit of text I discover is a step closer to learning more about the story, the history, and the people involved. Everything about this game feels deep and vast. I am totally and completely hooked.



FINAL SCORE: 97/100

An excellent masterpiece and a must-buy, for only $25!




Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Declassified documents releasing tomorrow!


The dossier for Trey Donovan, the hero of the Star Legation, has been declassified by the Interstellar Union and will be releasing online, tomorrow, at DriveThruRPG.

Who is Trey Donovan? Find out here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starlegation/the-star-legation-a-scifi-visual-novel-game

Friday, April 3, 2020

Societal Shifting (part 5)


One thing is for sure—our society is going to experience some changes after this pandemic is over. We are going to learn to be more careful, and learn to be more prepared. Bottles of Purell will probably be stockpiled in homes for years to come, as well as gloves and masks. We may see temperature screenings as part of TSA protocol for passengers, and possibly see new technologies develop that enable fast testing at airports and other public places. Health care workers may influence changes in the hospital, as they lobby for better ways to ensure the protection of their families. But in a lot of ways, we may see a lot of things get “back to normal” and realize that we didn't miss those things and could do without them. Let's hope that we'll use the experience of the quarantine to change our focus instead of getting back to our old lives where we isolated ourselves from what truly matters.

Thursday, April 2, 2020

Societal Shifting (part 4)


There will be smaller changes in our society as well, and some old traditions may be completely erased. Consider the handshake, for instance. During this pandemic, handshaking is strongly discouraged, as the COVID-19 virus is easily spread through contact. We each touch our face hundreds of times a day, so passing germs through a handshake can be blamed for some percentage of COVID-19 infections. I've always been a bit of a germophobe and disliked shaking hands, but now I'm convinced that I'll never shake anyone's hand again, even in a post-COVID world. Perhaps we should all adopt the Asian custom of bowing in greeting? It's ironic that the origins of the handshake are believed to have originated with an intention to display that a person is empty-handed without weapons (and the subsequent shaking intended to shake any possible hidden blades from a person's sleeves.) The irony of passing a deadly infection through a handshake has essentially weaponized the handshake. I don't think this custom is going to last in our society's future—it may have already died completely in the last few weeks!