At Nekomura Games we like to play lots of different games, regardless of the genre, shinsaku (new releases) or current top sellers – if it’s a good game and there’s some time to play it, chances are it’ll be played eventually, even if it’s a game from 10 or 15 years ago. Of course there is some personal taste involved so some genres are completely absent in our games library, but still – the list of games that we played the most in 2009 is pretty diverse. Read the rest of this entry »
Nekoworld
Games and cuteness!
Trying to capture the spirit of being young and happy in Japan in a raising simulation game.
It’s time for the next update of Happy Memories: Azalea Town, devlog! I wanted to show some reference material we’re using to establish the atmosphere of this game. What would you expect to see in a raising simulation game set in modern Japan?
I would definitely expect a convenience store, game center, part time jobs where they tell you that egao (smiling face) is worker’s most important attribute, cute characters / mascots everywhere (hmmm… a relaxed bear would get us in legal trouble – perhaps a relaxed frog would do?) Read the rest of this entry »
For the last few days, I was battling one of the central issues in any raising simulation game: The Calendar. The flow of in-game time has always been one of the most fascinating topics in game design for me. Unlike many other types of simulation games, raising sims tend to have a rather realistic flow of time with a fixed end. There are exceptions to this rule, such as Wonder Project J, but most raising sims present the player with a protege to raise from childhood to adulthood or at least from some less sophisticated state to a more mature one and end at an arbitrary point in time – when the protagonist reaches “maturity”. Consequently, the flow of time tends to be presented rather realisticly – no imaginary seasons with 30 days each like in Harvest Moon or years and decades flying by with nothing much changing in the outside world like in some early business sims.
An interesting problem presents itself if the player is alowed to select their character’s birthday – in a raising sim that ends after a certain number of (character) years, Like Princess Maker 2, the selection of birthday affects the amount of “preparation time” the player has before the first calendar event / festival so some dates are more desirable than others. In a raising sim set in a modern environment, like Happy Memories: Azalea Town, the game’s beginning and end are tied to school year, not calendar year or “character year” (from one birthday to another) so the player’s choice of birthday only affects the character’s age for each school year and what birthday celebrations will actually be seen ingame.
There are basically three layers of “time” in a modern-school-setting raising simulation game:
- school year
- calendar year
- story timeline (some events are independant of both school and calendar years and occure when certain conditions are met)
For the last few days, I have been battling one of the central issues in any raising simulation game: The Calendar. The flow of in-game time has always been one of the most fascinating topics in game design for me. Unlike many other types of simulation games, raising sims tend to have a rather realistic flow of time with a fixed end. There are exceptions to this rule, such as Wonder Project J, but most raising sims present the player with a protege to raise from childhood to adulthood or at least from some less sophisticated state to a more mature one and end at an arbitrary point in time – when the protagonist reaches “maturity”. Read the rest of this entry »
We'll be seeing more of Miles Edgeworth.
Capcom has made an Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth demo available to play online in English! In this demo, you get to examine Edgeworth’s office with the new point-and-click interface, and test the new “Logic” system, one of the series’ biggest new features. Obviously, the demo contains spoilers, but I played it anyway since the first case in each Ace Attorney game is usually more of a tutorial than a real full-blown “case”. It certainly looks promising!
You can play it online here:
It’s always interesting to see what can be done by different people using the same tools – holds true especially in the case of IG Maker because the software is still relatively new. Unfortunately, at the time of writing no finished games done in IG Maker were published outside of Japan yet.
Enterbrain, the company behind IG Maker, have been producing game engines – such hits as RPG Maker 2000 and RPG Maker XP (which were used in production of many commercially successful “indie” RPGs) – for a long time. And it shows – IG Maker is well organized and fascinatingly flexible!
To complement the tutorials for IG Maker that might be found elsewhere on Nekoworld (at the moment of writing: “How to put player character on screen” part 1 and part 2), we are making an experimental game that will follow soon after the series (or what could become the first part of a series) of tutorials is finished!
At the moment it looks like this (please ignore the main character, it’s just a placeholder):
Robot Farewell, an original IG Maker game by Nekomura Games
Part One: Importing Assets and Creating a Simple Map
In this tutorial, we cover the first steps in IG Maker: how to create a simple map and place a player gadget on it.
Defining the player character was really simple in RPG Maker, but don’t let the apparent complexity of Enterbrain’s new engine discourage you – once you get over this first stumbling block in using IG Maker, the engine will hopefully start to make sense.
IG Maker - different types of game genres
IG Maker currently has 3 genre plugins: platform, shooting and RPG (the demo plugin has a different function and we won’t cover it in this tutorial). In all 3 of them, it is assumed that one of the “gadgets” will be a player character. The player gadget is treated as a special gadget that can’t be deleted and has its own dedicated events that trigger switching actions. In this tutorial, we will show how to put the player on screen in RPG mode, but the same basic rules apply to other plugins, too. Read the rest of this entry »
ButaVX explores the village.
Our second Cute RPG is out! Featuring a “brave warrior” on “an important quest”… It’s not really saving the world but pretty close. And all with mom’s approval! Read the rest of this entry »
Our mystery visual novel, The Stolen Diamond Ring, was reviewed on White Butterfly, one of the rare blogs specializing in otome game reviews! You can read the review here.
Yesterday the first video for Nekomura’s upcoming Mystery Visual Novel was uploaded: The Stolen Diamond Ring is a video game with a slightly detectiveish atmosphere, revolving around a missing engagement ring worth $30000!
(This review of Princess Maker 5 was originally published on March 22, 2008. The game is currently available from Playasia for PlayStation2 and PSP)
Raise a little girl from the age of 10 to 18! Again. (For those unfamiliar with the “Princess Maker” kind of raising simulation games, Wikipedia offers some basic info.)
I loved Princess Maker 2, but after being severely disappointed by installments 3 and 4, found myself increasingly skeptical of whether its charm can ever be replicated again – even by its original creators. But this time, they got it right! It is as close to gaming perfection (at least for me), as the legendary Princess Maker 2 was. The spirit is the same, but Princess Maker 5 is a much, much bigger game, and set in modern Japan. Read the rest of this entry »
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