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:

http://www.dlsite.com/ecchi-eng/work/=/product_id/RE149951.html

Or the japanese version here:

http://www.dlsite.com/maniax/work/=/product_id/RJ149951.html

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:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1OxcLEx0qUgVHYN1C5QHyCEkHOtoYwHAh2COpIza4ll0/viewanalytics

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.