Saturday, December 31, 2016

Deathblight RPG update + summary of 2016

It's been a while since the last blogpost, yes.
We're doing (mostly) fine and we're working on the game as usual.
We also released the first version of Deathblight RPG on Patreon, but we didn't publicly announce it because of tax-reasons.
With that out of the way, we can finally announce it here on the blog.

Usually we're posting regular updates on Patreon and sometimes on Twitter too.

Patreon:

Twitter:

Crescentia Pixiv:



So todays blogpost will contain the following:

1. About Deathblight RPG's first release
2. Short summary of the year 2016


But before we get to that, a quick shoutout to some awesome and very nice hentai game developers.
If you haven't heard of Ahrimans work "The Moral Sword of Asagi" yet, you should totally check it out!

Here you can find Ahrimans game:


It's a great game with great combat hentai mechanics.
There's also an english fan translation by TNT90 from ULMF forums.


Also check out Sierra Lee's stuff:

Her blog about her game TLS: http://the-last-sovereign.blogspot.com



So, lets get to Deathblight RPG then!

1. About Deathblight RPG's first release

As I said earlier, we released the first version on Patreon.
It will be made publicly available for everyone once we released the second version on Patreon.

Screen of Deathblight RPG - Operation Thunderfang


As planned the content of the first release is:

- Ferania and Minori are playable.
- They have their basic graphics done.
- Minor demons are included as "grunts".
- The game is playable up to the first mid-boss. (and slightly further)
- Capture mechanic is in place.
- There is one game over CG scene when both heroines get captured.

Basically this is half of the first level.


We'll continue working on the game as soon as possible, namely, early January 2017.
(Currently we're mostly trying to enjoy a few days off)

Also, thank you very much to Ahriman for granting us permission to use scripts from his Asagi game!
And thanks to TNT90 for giving us permission to use some of the translation files and translation graphics.



2. Short summary of the year 2016

2016 was a much better year to us.
The only sad moment was when towards the end of 2016 someone dear to Crescentia passed away.
But other than that we had no troubles and no issues for once.
(so... even if 2016 was a "shitty year" to the world, it was good to us)

We started live streaming in June 2016 on Picarto.TV.
(follow us on twitter to know when we're streaming)


And we managed to strengthen bonds with Picarto.TV and even go on a convention together with them in december in germany.
They are really cool and nice guys, so I'd like to use this opportunity to say:
"Thank you very much Picarto.TV! We hope you're continuing to become even more awesome in 2017!"


Anyways, lets get back to talking about what good things happened to us during 2016.
We managed to work on Deathblight RPG and push out a first release this december.
While the webcomic progressed smoothly and we didn't missed a single page release.
Our Patreon has grown quite a bit, and the hard work definitelly pays off.
Also, 2016 had a flood of commissions and new regular customers (for commissions) coming in, so we've got waaaay more commission requests than we can possibly handle.
(for every commission done, 2-3 new commissions roll in)
So we would like to express our gratitude, while at the same time apologizing that we can't possibly handle that much, which results in commission requests getting turned down or delayed by weeks or even months.
(we don't charge money before we start work, still it feels bad to have people wait too long, sorry about that!)


At any rate, we would like to use this opportunity to thank all our patrons, supporters, commissioners and fans!
Thank you very very much, each and everyone of you had been a great support and great help to us during 2016 and previous years as well.
We wouldn't be standing here and doing what we're doing without every single one of you.
So we can't express our gratitude well enough!
Thank you very much!

As some of you may remember, previous years (especially 2015) were really hard on us.
But thanks to everyone, we were able to push through 2015, and had a VERY GREAT year 2016.
So, once again: Thank you everyone!

With that being said, we're wishing everyone a good and prosperous, happy new year.
Hope you get a good start into 2017, and we hope that the rest of 2017 stays great for all of you too!

See ya next time, and take care!


P.S:
I almost forgot, if you didn't heard of Lewdgamer yet, you should probably check them out.
They're regularly writing articles about all sorts of hentai games and stuff.
https://www.lewdgamer.com/

Thank you very much for doing such an awesome job, guys and girls at Lewdgamer!
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Thursday, August 18, 2016

Roadmap for Deathblight RPG

On the last live stream some of you were talking to me about the direction we want to go with Deathblight RPG (working title), and I figured it would be a good idea to share some kind of "roadmap" with everyone, so you know what to expect.

First of all, the poll results of which enemies get first into the game said that the Shapeshifting Creature (or more accurately "Failed Clones") as well as Giant Wasps will get into the game first, followed by Minor Demons and Female Plant Monsters.

After thinking about this for a while, I realized that I made this poll a bit too early, as it would be better to add "basic" enemies first, and then add these enemies to the game next.
Don't worry, we'll still include these enemies as fast as possible (not as first enemies, but directly after that!), and eventually (almost?) all enemies from that list make it into the game, sooner or later.
(and yes, the list might also expand, depending on suggestions from our supporters on Patreon)
Adding the Shapeshifters/Failed Clones not right away also makes sense, as we would like to include the bossmonster named "Failure" alongside them, and she would make a fine enemy once Catheline is being added to the game (which will happen at the same time when we implement the Failed Clones and Failure, so it's perfect).

That being said, lets get to the actual roadmap!


The first release of Deathblight RPG will be as soon as possible.
August is pretty much impossible at this point, as we've lost too many working hours to the summer heat (can't work efficiently with too much heat, and we don't have an AC unit).
The upcoming days will also be very hot, and this will limit our productivity.
But depending on the rest of august, we should be able to get at least some work done, and hopefully release it sometime in september.
We're not slacking off, but with some days only having about 50% productivity due to the summer heat, it's really tough to meet our own deadlines.
(of course we're still trying as hard as possible)

Now, what is planned for the individual releases?

preview of some graphics that are being used in the combat system



First release content:

- Ferania and Minori will be playable.
- They will have their basic graphics done.
- Minor demons will be included as "grunts".
- The game will be playable up to the first mid-boss.
- Capture mechanic will be in place.
- There will be one game over CG scene when both heroines get captured.

Basically this is half of the first level.


Second release content:

- The first level will be finished.
- Ferania and Minori will get a couple more graphics.
- There will be a bossfight and another game over CG scene.
(no escape mechanics implemented yet, but the capture and rescue mechanic is already in place since the first release)

The second release will happen shortly after the first release.


Third release content:

- Catheline will be added to the game.
- The second level will be about the Shapeshifters/Failed Clones, the Giant Wasps will also make an apperance here.
- Failed Clones and Giant Wasps will both get a CG scene of their own.
- Basically the second level will be the first "real" level, where you need to look for ways to advance in the level, and with Failure being a proper boss that will be (a bit) challenging to beat.
- "Failure" (the boss) will get a CG scene as well.
(which means, a total of 3 CG scenes for the second level)

The third release will take longer to make, as we'll release the whole second level at once.
Also implementing Catheline will be a lot of work.


Fourth release content:

- Corruption system will be added.
- Hentai adds corruption points, but they can be cured with potions.
(there will also be potions to raise corruption levels)
- We'll add jobs for the characters, so they can earn money and do lewd things outside of combat.
- There will be some new outfits for certain jobs, as well as CG scenes for jobs.
(or rather, CG scenes for the lewd stuff and hentai that comes along with the jobs)


Fifth release content:

- The third level will be added.
- Possibly a new playable character will be added as well.

I'm being vague here, as we're most likely going to let the Patrons vote on what's up next.
So I don't want to set things in stone, but the rough idea is there, and of course I'll be working it out as we move along.


These plans work out quite well, as we're episodically adding content to the game.


You can view it like this:

As we add another level/stage to the game, a new character might make her appearance and she becomes playable.
(she won't be playable in earlier levels, as she joins the party at "that" point in the story, and she's available from that point onwards)
Also, as the story progresses, new areas are being unlocked.
With new areas, there will be new jobs, new enemies, new characters, you name it.

This methode of adding content to the game makes it very easy to add stuff without having to worry about the previous levels.

And I guess that's the most important news for now.
If there are any questions regarding Deathblight RPG, please feel free to ask in the comments!

See ya next time!


Posted by at 41 comments:

Sunday, July 24, 2016

Addressing concerns about Patreon + Progress Report

Hello everyone,

A big thing happened more than a week ago. We're not involved in it at all, but we received many questions about it and people asked me about my opinion on it, and I realized, that even if I don't have any stake in that thing itself, it's becoming apparent that it probably will have an impact on all of us hentai game devs that use patreon.



So, let's talk about said "big thing":

As you may or may not know, the game Breeding Season, which used to be one of the most funded hentai games on Patreon, was shut down.
The reasons for this was apparently a mix of bad management as well as differing opinions of the team members which initially led to them breaking up.



First regarding my opinion:

I think it's regrettable, that a hentai game had to be closed down, especially in this manner. In my opinion there can never be enough hentai games, as there's too many fetishes, too many groups of people with different tastes among the hentai community.
This leads to the conclusion, that every game that gets shut down or never reaches it's final stages is really a loss to the community as a whole.

Although, yes, I have to agree that lots of hentai game dev teams are inexperienced.
And most projects are way too ambitious. So it's likely this isn't the last game that goes down...
I wish that each and every dev team out there manages to finish their game and satisfy their fans. But sadly this is just a dream... (though I honestly wish everyone to succeed)



Now, more importantly, though, lets get to our own case:

I want to assure everyone, that we're not going to go down, and there's several reasons for that.

First of all, we are able to get shit done.
We finished Paperheads back in the day, and most of our games had been self-funded.
The money that went into Paperheads and Geisterhand were from previous jobs I worked in, and LDH's initial funding (before the first release on Patreon) was via money Crescentia saved up from doing commissions, and later on a friend of ours also supported some of our projects.
LDH's add-ons as well as Deathblight RPG are the first of our games that have been funded via Patreon. We've been hesitant to do this at first, but we realised that we need to take this step if we want to continue doing hentai games in a timely manner.

Sure, our projects don't sound super epic in scale, as we don't promise high-resolution super detailed graphics with dozens of animations and hundreds of enemies to interact with in hentai animations. But there's a very good reason for that!
It's because we have experience and know what we as a team are capable of both in terms of skill and time, and because we know what's just flat out unrealistic to promise. Simple as that.
We don't promise big things, if those things are unrealistic. You can do those things if you have proper funding and a well coordinated team of experienced artists.

It's sad to see that developers actually have to promise people the moon in order to get their games funded. But it's always been like that, even long before Kickstarter and Patreon. Back in the day it was the publishers who promised people the greatest of games all the time and often enough disappointed fans afterwards with mediocrity. And the games that actually turned out to be great, often had little to no support and fans. Somewhere, sometime, someone had to make unrealistic promises in order to get a contract or funding.
That's basically how life works all the time.
(but yes, I refuse to do so, as I believe that this only leads to long-term frustration and problems)



The only concern remaining would be, if there's a chance we'll break up or something similar happens to us as it happened with Breeding Season, right?

Well, no need to worry there, because our team coordination is great.
I've been doing team-leading jobs for more than 10 years now, and even though I hate talking about myself in such an arrogant and seemingly haughty manner, I really know what I'm doing and it should be difficult to find someone with team-leading abilities that match mine.
(it's surely not impossible to find someone with similar skills in this regard, but it's damn difficult)

Team-leading is not about being the big boss, it's more about communication, respecting every team member equally, respecting the fans and customers, and most importantly... taking responsibility for all the bad stuff that happens and adjusting the course so stuff won't go wrong next time.
(I'm not talking about making useless excuses, but about taking responsibility, adjusting the course, and seeing things through to the end, aiming for the best possible outcome in any bad situation, instead of bailing out)

As a team-leader you don't actually "lead" with an iron fist or something, it's more about walking down the path together with your team as a whole, communicating with everyone, being the center of the group, encouraging everybody and being more of an equal part of the group.
(of course there's certain occassions where you have to call the shots all on your own, but that's usually happening rarely)
A good leader isn't called a leader because of his/her position (or title), but because people respect him/her as a person, and they have faith in his/her judgement and general abilities.



About the "rights" on Deathblight content:

There's nothing to worry about with the ownership of Deathblight.
If it ever happens that we're breaking up, Cres keeps ALL the rights to Deathblight, the games, the characters, everything. So worst case scenario, nothing would be lost and she can simply continue doing things or, depending on the situation, build it back up.

But honestly spoken, I doubt we'd ever break up.
We've been working and living together for more than 4 years now.
And... how do you call it?
"It's a match made in heaven" or so they say.
Yeah.
(well this is very personal stuff, so I won't go into the details, but it really is working out greatly)

At any rate we're both sane, responsible, and are highly dependant on building up and sustaining a good reputation. Creating Deathblight is important to us, and we can't afford to lose any credibility or screw up big.

In the future we hope to expand our Patreon even more in order to deliver you more awesome stuff. If possible we can even go full-time with the help of Patreon, but for the time being we're still dependant on doing commissions and hired work.



So, let me sum this up:

We can get shit done!
We have experience, so we don't promise more than we can deliver!
Our team is well coordinated and we've been working together for more than 3 years now! (I've been working together with Cres for more than 4 years btw.)
We're great at producing lots of content with minimal funding, however, having more funding would help us to produce even more content.
(or possibly hire a skilled pixel artist to tackle bigger projects in the future)
You can ask our long term Patrons:
We do deliver and usually we deliver more than what we promised.



Regarding our progress on our current game project:

The summer heat is slowing us down, but we're getting closer to our first release.
We're aiming for the highest quality this time, so you can really look forward to it!
Before we can release the first version of Deathblight RPG (working title), we need to finish a bunch of graphics. Currently we're about 50% towards the first release in terms of finished graphics. The remaining 50% should be getting done a lot faster, as the graphics are mostly naked.
(the first 50% was naked + clothing + destroyed clothing, which is of course a lot more work than (mostly) naked characters only)

small selection of a few sample graphics


We're aiming for a first release towards the end of august.
But please keep in mind that if the summer heat gets worse, we might not be able to meet that estimation.

The first release will just include Ferania and Minori, the full combat system with hentai during combat, and a room full of enemies up to the first mid-boss.
There will be one game over hentai scene in the game.

From there on we'll be working to add more and more content to the game.
(more events and more game mechanics, more enemies, more hentai scenes, more areas, more story and of course more characters too)
We're currently posting most of our progress reports, previews and artworks of the game on Patreon.
But we'll keep you updated about releases and (once we get there) content updates on this blog.


I hope this answers all of your concerns and questions regarding our stuff.
If you still worry or have unanswered questions, please feel free to ask in the comments.

Posted by at 13 comments:

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Small Update + Live Streams!

So, time for a short update:

We're still working on the RPG Maker Game and of course this will still need some time before the first release, but we're regularly doing progress updates and showing graphics on Patreon.


Crescentia is also doing live streams now.
Not regularly yet, but from time to time, if we can.
Today (25th june) we'll be doing a live stream at 22:00 GMT +2.
That's in about 2,5 hours from now.
This time the stream will be NSFW.

If you missed the stream, you can watch a recording of it by clicking on "video" in the description of Crescentia's channel on Picarto.TV.

Here's the channel:

We also announce every stream on Twitter, so check them out and follow us if you're interested in those dates:




In other news, there's now a Deathblight Wiki, but it's heavily work in progress.
If you're interested in helping out, feel free to do so!
I'll gladly answer important questions, but I'm not working on the wiki myself since I've got enough work with the game project and webcomic.
(I hope this is understandable)

Here is the link to the wiki:

That's all for now, see ya!


P.S:
The character section here on the blog is almost completely outdated.
Please don't use it as a reference, I just kept it so people can see how things evolved over time.
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Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Possible demons + Patreon and blog update

Hello everyone!

I figured I should share a couple news here on the blog.
First of all, here you can see some sketches of enemies that might make it into our new game project (the RPG Maker one).




possible enemies that might get into the game


Next, as you may have noticed, the blog got a little "facelift". We finally updated the header and the background! That was long overdue, as the previous one was almost 4 years old, haha. I hope you like the new look!
This goes hand in hand together with an update to our Patreon. It's got a new description, new tiers, new milestones and a new header as well!

Head over there and see for yourself:
https://www.patreon.com/deathblight

We'll also share more details about the current game development progress, sketches, concept art (as well as finished artworks) and other stuff over there.
You're still going to get news and happenings on this blog, of course. However it's only going to be major updates, like when a new version is being released and what it's contents will be about, the games changelogs etc.

Also you might want to follow me on twitter, right now there's mostly tweets about webcomic releases, but as we move forward with game development, I'll tweet about those things as well.

https://twitter.com/Wolfenstahl

That's all for now, see ya.
Posted by at 4 comments:

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Next game project

Let me start this off with saying:
No, this is NOT an april fools post.
I never did those before, and I certainly won't start doing that now.
(seriously, I figured I'd say this before someone thinks this is an april fools joke again <-- it happened several times already that someone thought this)
It's not even 1st april yet.
(at least not over here)

Anyway, let's get started:
First of all, please let me explain a couple things, so you all understand why we decided on doing this.

As I mentioned a couple times in the past, we're financing game development via Patreon.
The first 600 $ go into the webcomic, while everything on top of that is being invested into developing hentai games. The past months this amount was around 100-200 $, recently it climbed up to 200-300 $ per month. This allows us to work on games about 2-3 days per month.
(btw. this only covers Cres' artworks, everyone else is not getting paid (which means yes, I'm also working for free))

At any rate, with just 2-3 days per month there is not much progress to make on games like DA (Deathblight Apocalypse) or games like Paperheads 2. If we would go and try making those games right here, right now, we might very well need 2-5 years to finish one of them.


This leads us to the following conclusion:

We need to do a game which is less work (graphic wise) than any of those previously named games, so we can make noteable progress with our current funding level.
And this is where RPG Maker comes to mind.
RPG Maker has lots of "premade" assets, while Cres can play out her strengths and do character graphics as well as CG's. She doesn't need to spend time on the tileset, sprite animations or other things, which saves us a looooooot of time. Also we can tell another story about our Deathblight characters, which is also one of our strengths.
(furthermore, it's quite easy to add a lot of characters in this kind of game)

More precisely:
We want to do an RPG Maker game with a similar battle mechanic like Ahriman's "The moral sword of Asagi".

In case you haven't heard of it yet, you can find the english link (the game's still japanese though) here:

Or the japanese version here:

We asked Ahriman for permission to use his code and scripts, and he kindly granted us permission to do so.
Thank you very much Ahriman!

This makes it easier for us to work with RPG Maker, as this is our first RPG Maker project.
So we can focus on the graphics, characters and story.




Compared to DA and Paperheads, this project would be more fit to being a Patreon game anyway.


This is because of several reasons:

- Faster progress is possible even with low funding
(this allows us to do more updates in a shorter time, compared with DA or Paperheads)

- We could do votes on Patreon, and ask people what we should include next
(a platformer might run into gameplay issues if people vote on flying enemies only, for example, but in an RPG Maker game it really doesn't matter that much how the enemy looks or what type of enemy it is, it shouldn't break the gameplay, so we can give more control over choosing the enemies to our Patrons)

- If people wish for it, we can include more and more characters, and expand the game a lot.
(this might even go as far as nearly infinite expansions, or multiple sequels, if that's what everyone desires)

Also, if Patreon funding reaches a certain amount, we could hire a dedicated pixel artist.
This would allow us to finally work on games like DA or Paperheads 2, while being able to finish those games in a timely manner. This also means, that we would be able to still work on the RPG Maker game (if enough Patrons wish for this) while simultaneously working on DA or Paperheads 2, as we would have more working-power in the case we are able to hire a dedicated pixel artist.

We talked to our Patrons about this, and held a survey regarding this matter, you can see the survey results here:

With 59.8% voting for doing the RPG Maker game, we're obviously taking this path.
Thank you very much to anyone who participated in the vote!


So, what will the RPG Maker game be about?

The game will take place in modern times (cell phones, cars etc.) and will focus on our characters from Deathblight taking on missions to clear out several demon-dens in a city. At first there will be only Ferania and Minori in the game, but we'll expand the cast as we move on.
(first we'll add Catheline and probably even Aurora, since we believe those two add a lot to the dialogues and plot, but afterwards we let the Patrons decide via polls/votes on who to include into the game next)

The combat mechanic will be very similar to Asagi's.
Which means, the battle system will contain hentai and the characters can be captured and need to be rescued.

We also think about including a corruption mechanic.
And various "jobs" the characters can take on to earn some money.
(this means stuff like prostitution or working in a maid café or a bar etc.)
Some jobs require a bit of corruption, or the character will refuse to do it.
There will also be hidden events, when you take a character on a mission which has a higher or lower corruption value, something good or bad might happen to that character.

And yes, there will be potions to raise or even cure corruption.
(even completely remove corruption!)
Which gives more freedom to the players actions.

I'll post more details along the way.

Here you can see some concept art for Ferania and Minori:
(they're still the same characters, just with different clothing)

Ferania clothing concept art

Minori clothing concept art



Also another change we decided to do is, that we're going to create free hentai games from now on.
(this doesn't affect Visual Novels or if we decide on doing "non hentai" games one day)
By "free" we mean, that we're using Patreon as financing method to make those games possible.

Ultimately, anyone (even non Patrons) will get access to the games sooner or later.
But Patrons will get access to the newest version of those games.
(also Patrons get to vote on the contents of the game, and thus influence development)
Everyone else needs to wait until the next Patreon version goes online, before they get the last version.

Which means, Patreon Supporters will always get the newest version, everyone else 1 version older than the newest version.

For example, if the version 0.2.1 goes online on Patreon, the 0.2.0 version will be online on the blog for everyone. If version 0.2.2 goes online on Patreon, version 0.2.1 will go online on the blog for the general public.

With this change, we'll also be making a couple changes to our Patreon campaign in the near future.
Basically adding more tiers, as well as reworking the 1$ tier.
We'll share the details about this on Patreon soon.
Posted by at 23 comments:

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Final Version of LDH released

With this final version of LDH, we'll finally move on to a new project.


Just for clarification purposes:

LDH (Last Demon Hunter) was always planned to be a "test game" only.
Which means, there was never the intention to fully flesh out the CGs and other parts of the game.
Originally our initial plan was to release the game with 3 enemies, which we did with the first release. But then we figured we could add a couple more enemies to the game.

So, even if some people are disappointed that we're not fleshing this one out, we went past our initial plans and added a lot more content to the test game than we originally planned to do.
Since the majority of people (on Patreon, as well as here on the blog) voted for not continuing LDH and moving on, we're obviously taking that direction, and... well... move on.
Still we hope you all enjoyed LDH at least to some extent.

Have fun playing the game!

Download:
[LDH ver 0.48C]

Changelog:
- new Werewolf enemy added
- music added
- a couple minor bugfixes (mainly edits of the levels)
Posted by at 12 comments:

Saturday, January 23, 2016

Final Version of LDH on Patreon

I totally forgot to mention that we've released the final version of LDH on Patreon a couple days ago.
As always I'll upload it here in about 4 weeks.

The final version includes:
- the new Werewolf enemy
- music
- a couple minor bugfixes (mainly edits of the levels)

LDH won't get any additional content beyond this.
But in case there are bugs, please tell us about it and we'll see what we can do.
We'll move on to working on DA (Deathblight Apocalypse) instead.

Or rather, we'll be asking our Patreons in a couple polls what they want us to do, since they're supporting us and we think they deserve to vote on what's about to come.
This means it's possible that we're reworking the existing graphics of DA.
We're also including a couple other voting options, since we're really curious as to what our Patreons want us to do, and we want to take as much options as possible into consideration.

That being said, I need to think about all the questions the poll should include.
So it will still need a couple days before the vote starts.
Posted by at 11 comments:
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