Bandits!

The first enemy group we're working on is the catgirl/catboy bandit group.

As bandits they're mainly agile, but have lower HP than the other factions.
Overall you could say that they're the weakest of all the enemies.
But don't underestimate them!

Male bandits:

Female bandits:

There are 2 types of female bandits, they either have a bow or a whip.
Most likely we're going to swap some colours for the final version, so it's easier to tell them appart.
These are just first pixel graphics, so there might be even more changes.


We've been busy with lots of stuff in the last couple days.
But hopefully we're able to concentrate on the game in the upcoming weeks.
Well, at least we're making progress again!

As always, feel free to ask questions in the comments!


P.S:
I also swapped the "slave traders" out with the "Witch-Hunters" for several reasons.
The Witch-Hunters are part of the webcomics future storyline (they're an important part of the Deathblight world) and there are also gameplay-reasons for including them.

One of the main reasons:
As Witch-Hunters, they mainly have armor and weapons that are effective against magic users.
This makes them basically the most dangerous faction in the game, as the main characters both rely on magic.
And I figured it would be more interesting to have them as enemies, instead of simple slave traders.

Well, they'll get their own blogpost anyway, so I'll stop here.

current game project info

Lets talk about what's planned for this game!

But before we get to that, I have good news for all of you guys and girls out there that can't wait to play a demo version of this game:
Well... we decided to release the game VERY early on to our patrons on Patreon.
(most likely, if everything goes according to plan, we'll be able to do that in about ~4 weeks? maybe in ~6 weeks... it won't be a polished version obviously... but it should contain basic gameplay and of course hentai stuff!)

We will also update it on a regular basis.
Most likely, there will also be a very early demo version made available to the public.
But this "public" demo version won't be updated frequently.
Also our supporters on Patreon will get the full version of the game, once it's done.
(well, they'll get the newest version all the time, but I still thought I should point this out)
And yes, please keep in mind, that those early demo versions are not representative of the final version of the game.

Why we decided to do that?
Well, the two main reasons are:
- more money/funds for the game = more/faster progress
(eventually more additions/bigger games in the future)
- more early feedback = more adjustments can be done in order to (hopefully) create a better game

Ironically, those two things are what we lack most.
So I hope our decision to stick with Patreon fixes that in the long run.

What's planned for the game:

I made some adjustments to the concept, and this is what we currently have in mind.
(yes, we already started working on the game)


Two playable characters:

We tried something different with the pixel style this time.
I hope you like it!


4 enemy factions/groups:

- Kemonomimi Bandits (Catgirl/boy bandits!)
- Orcs (and goblins)
- Witch-Hunters
- Demons

Each faction/group has it's own game over scene (game over CG scene with several pictures) with the heroines.
Not every enemy has it's own game over CG!
So the whole group shares one CG.
(we wanted to do a small game, and this is the only way how we can achieve this)


5 game over CG scenes:

4 for the factions, 1 for the final boss.
"Maybe" we're adding another faction, but for now we'll leave it as is.
These CG scenes are not animated, but they'll have several pictures per scene and they'll have text (narrative).


Hentai sprite animations:

Quite a lot of them actually.
They're faster to make than CG scenes, so we're delivering a lot of them.
However, only male enemies get H sprite animations!
For example, there are female Kemonomimi Bandits too, but they don't do hentai stuff with the heroines. (and nope, the heroines can't do hentai stuff with them either)
This way we have a clear distinction between who does, and who doesn't have hentai sprite animations.
If we include tiny enemies like cave-bats... well... they won't have any hentai sprite animations either.
(but I think this is pretty much obvious, still I thought I'd better mention this)

With these measures, we should be able to include ~12+ enemies into the game, while roughly giving ~8 of them hentai sprite animations.
Which is pretty much manageable, I think.

And yup, those are all "ingame" hentai animations, no game over needed in order to see them.


How will the gameplay be like?

I really want to do a rogue-lite game this time around.
So I actually picked parts of the concept of Feranias game (the last game we worked on), and decided to use it on this one.
However, there will be some more platforming, and some actual leveldesign.
Since this is a rogue-lite and not a metroidvania, there will be no backtracking etc.

Sion and Medusa will fight lots of enemies, while using magic spells (and occasionally close combat attacks).
And they'll also need to do some platforming in order to reach the exit of each "area".
I guess it's better to cover all of this in seperate blogposts, using graphics in order to explain stuff.

Anyway, expect more fighting, less focus on platforming.




I'll do more blogposts this month, depending on our progress.
Next blogpost will most likely be about the enemies.
Some concept art and pixel graphics.

And as always, if you've got any questions, feel free to ask in the comments!

Creating new games!

I figured it would be a good idea to tell you guys and girls what we're up to.
Yeah, we're about to do a new game, and set the game with the kemonomimis (Ferania and the others) aside for now.


The reason for this is simple:

The game with Ferania is too big, and there are too many unknown things that we would have to test and explore first. Because of Crescentias arm injury we were not able to test if animated CGs really work out for what we had in mind.
And there's still some other stuff that makes this whole project pretty much a risk, as we don't know how long it actually takes or if it works out in the end.


In other words:

After ~4 months of not working on any game, we're starting with a new, smaller game project first.
We should be able to deliver this game way faster than the game with Ferania, that's why we're doing it.

Feranias game has planned to include:
- animated game over CGs
- animated grab CGs during gameplay
- 12 different enemies
- 6 bosses
- 1 final boss

which is... a lot...

Our new game has planned:
- regular CG scenes with text
- hentai sprite animations during gameplay
~5 different enemy races (Orcs, etc.)
- 1 final boss

which is, without a doubt, a lot less work to complete.

I think nearly everyone can understand that this game should be way faster to make, by looking at those numbers alone.
(and yeah, I tend to be stubborn when it comes down to sticking to the plan, which sometimes isn't that good, but it prevents me from adding more and more content that was not planned to include from the start lol)

Once we reached our goal and the game is "done", we'll look how well it's received and stuff.
Depending on the support we get, there might be room for expansions and additional enemies and things. But don't bet on it... if there's not enough support, we will simply leave the game "as is".
(and by "as is" I mean the stuff I mentioned before)

As soon as we've got some "minor" things to show, we'll hand the game out to our patrons on Patreon in order to get some early feedback and possibly more support through new patrons that are interested in the game.
(this is kinda a "bonus" to the already existing rewards, no extra reward tier planned for this, I'll cover this topic in a seperate blogpost once the time has come)


Game heroines:

Yep, it's 2 heroines this time.
The purple haired girl is named "Sion Valor" and she already had a brief appearance in our webcomic, the black haired girl is "Medusa Serpentine".
Both are magicians, and yup...
There need to be 2 heroines because of some stuff in the game mechanics that I had in mind.
(plus, other reasons... like... if we do a game with 2 heroines, it might attract more attention than a game with only 1 heroine, like everyone else does... right?)

It's still less work than Ferania, despite having 2 heroines.
Mainly because we don't need to give them different poses for casting different spells.
I mean, they both get their own graphics/sprites!
But they only need ~1-2 poses for casting magic, they don't need a new pose for each spell they cast.
(Ferania has attack combos and stuff... that's a lot more work)

I don't want to make this blogpost much longer, so I'll stop here.
I bet some of you might have a lot of questions, feel free to ask me in the comments below!
Also feel free to ask me questions about these two ladies ^^


P.S:
Ah yes, work on the new game will start around 1st november.
And yes, we WILL get back to Feranias game later on!
I have no intention of dropping that one, as I really love to make a game with Ferania.
(it's just too big and our funds are pretty much non-existing... and we only invested 2 weeks of work into Feranias game before Cres arm injury happened, so no big loss)
I really think it's better to start off with a small project rather than... well... trying to tackle something as big as the game with Ferania.

Are GoR games broken?

While browsing certain forums or randomly looking at other hentai game dev blogs or Patreon campaigns, I've recently stumbled over a lot discussions or statements about one big topic:

The "problem" of rewarding players in a hentai game by losing!

But is this really a "problem"?

I don't think so, at least, it's not really a "problem" or that big of a problem in my opinion.

Honestly, I guess I have a pretty much unique standpoint regarding this matter.

The reason for this is because I constantly have to think of the origins of game over rape hentai games.

And I think once people understand "the origins", it's pretty much clear why game over hentai games (game over rape, or short: GoR games) exist in the first place.

So, what are those origins I'm talking about?

Well, I think nearly everyone has played a "non-hentai" game with a heroine.

Some of those games have enemies that make stupid comments or do something else that implies sexual stuff.

One example would be the game "Bullet Witch", enemies in that game do stupid comments all the time, especially when the heroine is KO-ed, but instead of seeing something, you only see the "game over" screen, and hear some stupid comment from one of the enemies.

And yeah... that's pretty much it.

Those games, that don't show anything (well they are non-hentai games) but instead "imply" that something might happen afterwards are pretty much the origin.

At least that's what I think.

The reason "we" (as team) do GoR hentai games is because we want to tell the story of what happens after the heroine "fails".

It's not about rewarding anyone for playing badly and losing all the time.

It's because we want to tell a story, because we want to show what regular (non-hentai) games can't show. And yeah, it's also because it's about hentai content, I don't like the idea of showing a characters death and stuff, but hentai is okay.

I don't think that anything on this "mechanic" is broken or flawed.

It's just a way a game, or rather a story represents itself.

And looking at other hentai games sales and statistics (yeah I do that a lot), games with GoR seem to sell better than games that reward winning, but not having any GoR related content at all.

I'm just saying, people like it... so why trying to "fix" something that is not broken?

Some people might argue, that there is no "drive" for the player to actually win and succeed... but... there is!

People want to see all the game overs, which means, they have to progress in the game, see new enemies and lose against them. In the end, if you want to see the last animation/scene, you need to face the last boss, and lose to him/her.

Which pretty much means you need to get past all obstacles before the final bossfight.

And yeah... while you're at it, why not beating the final boss once in a while?

I really think, that there's no reason to "fix" anything here.

Some people like the concept behind GoR, others don't.

But that's personal preference, and everyone has a different opinion on nearly everything.

I myself actually prefer to NOT lose on purpose in a GoR game.

I like to fight as hard as possible, failing eventually, and then seeing the game over scene.

That's what makes GoR hentai games so special for me.

(unless they're way too easy and you need to lose on purpose... that's not something that excites myself... I need a really good, really hard fight, else it's not exciting)

Looking at the whole GoR from this point of view, it's pretty much like some of the "non-hentai" games out there, I mean regular games that are fun to play.

Take that, and add game over scenes to it, so the player sees what happens to the heroine once she fails. That's GoR! That's the idea behind it! That's the reason why it exists in the first place!

No need to fix anything here, it's not broken after all.

And, since this isn't enough for some people, I figured it would be good to add ingame hentai animations during regular gameplay whenever the heroine is knocked to the ground, but is not defeated yet.

This adds to the overall GoR-feeling.

But that's just my personal opinion, some people dislike GoR hentai games or don't understand the concept behind it. It's perfectly okay to do other kinds of (hentai) games.

I just thought it would be nice to voice this kind of opinion, as everyone else is constantly talking about how "bad" this whole concept is, or how "flawed" the gameplay is.

I must admit, yeah, looking at it from a game-design standpoint, it's weird to have the player "lose" sometimes on purpose, as there's some "interesting" stuff behind losing (the scenes and animations that come with losing).

But then again, the whole idea, and the roots of GoR are way way deeper.

I mean, it's not that you can "beat" the game by losing all the time.

You actually need to win (defeat the enemy) in order to progress.

So the basic principle of needing to "win" in order to "progress" is still there, right?

Well, that's my opinion on the whole matter, and I know that a lot of people might disagree with me there. But that's life, for every opinion there is, there is at least one other opinion that's opposing.

(on a side note: yeah, I don't like "victory rape" games at all... I really don't like them)

Anyway, feel free to voice your opinion in the comments below!

P.S:

I'll do a new blogpost about our upcoming stuff in the next couple days.

As I already mentioned on twitter, we'll continue working on games starting 1st november.

Also, the stuff we're up to might have something to do with chapter 1 - page 1 of our webcomic!

https://twitter.com/Wolfenstahl

No way! O_o

The character popularity vote just started a couple days ago.
But there's been some surprises!
Aurora suddenly dashed forwards and is now second, right behind Ferania.

Also, there's some desperate words from Esmoda, our polar bear lady:
(click on the images to enlarge)

She loves challenges, and she's willing to do anything in order to win! lol


Some other important news:
The webcomic will be in colour once we start the 1st chapter with the real storyline.


P.S:
No way... this is probably my shortest post ever lol

Popularity Voting!

I just implemented a character list of our currently introduced characters,
(requested by Trolo)
so I thought it would be a good idea to finally do a popularity voting!

[Click here to view the character list]


Please keep in mind, that this popularity voting will have NO effect on who gets into the game or not!
I'll do a new popularity voting once all 20 characters are introduced.
(currently only 11 are introduced)
So relax and have fun voting for your favorite characters.

Btw. you have multiple votes!
So vote for whoever you like most.
I'll let the voting go on for at least 2 weeks.


In the upcoming days I'll do some minor changes to the blog.
Upgrading some stuff and probably upgrading the character list as well.
And yeah, I should also rework/edit all the character introductions.
(yes, ALL of them...)

The first 3 are missing some data that I introduced with the other character introductions.
And I also feel that I should keep them spoiler free as well... (because of the webcomic)
Furthermore, I did some minor changes to some things, so not all the things I mentioned in the character introductions are up-to-date. (some information is now "false"... I'll simply edit the introductions one by one in the next weeks, and I'll tell you once they're all updated!)

And yes, I figured I might write the updated stuff at the top of the introduction and leave the "old" introduction at the bottom or something...
Or should I rather simply erase the old informations?
I don't know... I'll see about that.

Anyway, have fun voting!

In case you have questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

Some random thoughts & stuff about the webcomic

I'll get to the random thoughts later in this post.

First of all I want to thank everyone who supported us so far!
Thank you very very much!
(I can't say this often enough)


1. Stuff about the webcomic
2. Some thoughts about Patreon (and our current game)
3. About the character list and (possible) gameplay changes

cowgirl (minotaur) sketch, possible character for the game

1. Stuff about the webcomic:

Currently the webcomic is very much hentai-only, but we want to change this with the next chapter.
Of course, I'm avoiding spoilers in this post.

There's one final page for the hentai scene with Claire, and then about 4 pages that "resolve" the whole situation, as we can't possibly leave her like that, right?
And yeah, after that we'll start with the official first chapter of the webcomic.

We'll jump back about 5000 years in time, into a high-fantasy setting (Orcs, Dragons, Demons, Knights, Wizards etc.), when the adventures of our main characters just started.
At first we'll focus on Ferania, Minori and Chiira, and around the end of chapter one or the beginning of chapter two we'll include Claire, Aurora and Catheline as well.
From that point on, all of our 6 main characters will be appearing in the story frequently.

Also the first chapter will pretty much contain no hentai at all.
(well, maybe a one page short scene, but that's it, and yes, I'm currently planning the details of the first chapter, the rough draft is already done)
Future chapters will contain around 2-3 pages hentai, some ecchi, some jokes and of course lots of story and some fighting scenes.
(so, from around ~12-20 pages per chapter, expect to have ~2 to 3 pages hentai, sometimes more than that)

The promotion chapter having this much hentai was pretty much an exception.
But if we manage to get more support via Patreon, it's possible that we do "side stories" like this from time to time!

I hope that this is a balanced decision, that allows us to make some progress in story telling while still showing some hentai from time to time.
In case our fans (you guys) think otherwise, please feel free to tell us!
Since we're doing this webcomic for you, we're obviously depending on your opinions.


2. Some more thoughts on Patreon:

Currently I'm thinking about possibilities to connect our game stuff more directly to our Patreon page.
(which is currently only for the webcomic)

We have not decided on anything yet.
But if we actually manage to make more money via Patreon, we could avoid using Offbeatr.
Which in turn would mean, that we'll save a lot of money.
(Offbeatr takes 30% of the raised money)
And yeah, if we get money, we would be able to add more characters to the game.

One purely theoretic thought right now is, to actually give patrons on Patreon access to alpha versions of the game. And, if we actually get enough support per month, we might be able to give out the game for free for everyone!
(yes, you heard right, free hentai games... but this only works out if we get enough money to live from it via Patreon, so it's not 100%ly free... a lot of people would get the games for free, if enough people support us)

But of course patrons would get the newest version earlier than everyone else.
(I mean, there needs to be some sort of benefit for our supporters, and this is the least we can do)


There's lots of Patreon pages for hentai games that work this way, they release free hentai games, but are being carried by Patreon. And some of them make quite a bunch of money per month.
Our main issue is lack of funds, which constantly slows down game production, as we need to look for other jobs and commissions all the time.
So if we at least manage to get a fraction of the money others get via Patreon for their hentai games, we should be able to make a lot more progress.


But well, that's purely theoretical thoughts for now.
Also it's not that simple...
I mean, just because you're able to deliver some awesome content doesn't necessarily mean that you'll get the money for it. It's all about reaching a lot of people that might find your project interesting, and getting their attention for your project.

And yeah... I guess that's something I'm not good at... I suck at marketing lol
But probably it will work out somehow, someday.

We have not decided on any of this yet, but I thought I'd share my thoughts on this matter anyway.



3. About the character list and (possible) gameplay changes:

With that many flying characters on the character list (1 dragon girl, 3 harpy girls), I thought that I should probably also change the way I think of the characters "classes" on paper.

This doesn't change anything with the characters itself, but it gives me a better overview of the whole character list. I need this because I want to have characters in the game that have different playstyles.
So I need to have a good overview in order to decide on which ones to pick.
(and yes, obviously my decisions will be influenced by popularity votes anyway)


Also I'm thinking about "maybe" doing some sort of popularity vote soon.
This will be a temporary character popularity poll with NO effect on the final list.
I'm just curious about which characters are more popular and which ones are less popular.




That's it so far.


As always, feel free to ask questions in the comments!