Thursday, December 31, 2015

Summary of 2015 & happy new year to all of you

Looking back at what happened this year, it truly was the worst year of our lives.
It's not like one or two catastrophes, all of this year was pretty dark and depressing.
But we're not depressed, we managed to overcome all obstacles, and we're alive and well, yet all these things caused us to go through a lot of sad moments, and also some events cost us a lot of money.

This year, nearly all our equipment and property broke.
At the beginning of january my notebook broke down, as well as my car.
Fixing all of it (well, fixing the car and buying a new notebook) was very expensive, but we managed to pay bills.

During the course of the year, nearly all our team members had to buy new computers, since for whatever strange reason this bad-luck-streak decided that all our computers had to break this year...
Cres didn't buy a new computer yet, but the past 3 months her machine is acting up and it's very likely that she needs to buy a new computer at the beginning of 2016.


But what was really depressing this year, was losing valuable family members, and attending their funerals...
My mum died in january 2015, my grandma in july 2015.
Attenting those funerals also cost us a lot of money (since we had to travel quite some distance), and of course it caused us to lay down our work for a couple of days...

At the end of the year, Cres got into a fight with her family.
It really went out of hand, the summary of what happened is:
Her family wanted to force her to stop being an artist.
They also tried to force a lot of other things upon her, and tried to destroy what she build up in the last couple years.
And no, it was not the usual "we only want the best for you" situation.
In fact they wanted to force her to stop working on stuff, and rather take care of household work and foster her grandparents and mother.
It was a very selfish act of her family, and they refused to listen to her, they ignored her opinion, her thoughts and her plans for the future, and simply wanted to force their own values on Cres.
Furthermore Cres discovered, that her family had been manipulating and sabotaging friendships and other relationships of her all these years, simply to force her to stay at home.
And that's when Cres decided it's best to leave it all behind and break contact with them forever.

Discovering this was really shocking and depressing but as always it's better to know the truth.
Furthermore, moving places required Cres to give up on her dog as well.
2015 certainly wasn't easy on us...
But as I said before, we're doing fine, we've overcome things, and we managed to hold our ground.



There were also a couple good things in 2015, but they were small in number, but still there was something good.
After my mum passed away, I was able to get on good terms with my dad.
He completely changed during the past year, and I'm happy this happened, though I wish my mum would have lived to see this as well.

Also our webcomic became quite successful, and the story went along nicely.
Furthermore we gained a lot more fans and supporters.

Thank you very much to everyone who's supporting us!
Thanks to your help and support, we're able to continue doing what we're doing.
Thank you!

Let's hope that 2016 will be a lot better!
We all wish you a happy new year, and we wish you all the best for the new year.
See ya in 2016!

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Merry christmas 2015

Edit:
All the stressful events made me totally forget to mention that we've been interviewed:
[click here to read the interview]


Merry christmas everyone!
We hope you're enjoying the holidays and have a good time.

Faye baked some christmas cookies!


This year had been quite eventful, and a LOT of bad stuff happened, but also a couple good things.
Probably I'll do a blogpost about this at the end of the year, to sum everything up.
However, for the time being, lets focus on the last couple weeks.

First of all, shortly after the last blogpost our composer disappeared.
We tried contacting him several times, but we haven't heard back from him yet.

And after that, things got even worse.
Cres had some trouble with her family, and got kicked out in the process.
She also decided it's best to break contact with her family, since things really went out of hand.
But don't worry, everything is fine, we managed to sort things out, and have a place to stay at.
Hopefully in a couple days when the dust settles, we're able to get back to being productive again.

Ah yes, and of course we've been able to continue with the webcomic and other stuff.
I mean, despite all of this chaos, we've managed to get the important (or rather "paid") things done.
But I hope I've been able to explain why progress on our games had been so slow lately.

On a side note:
We currently get an "excess" of around 100 $ to 150 $ via Patreon per month.
100 $ equals about 1 work day (Artworks only, and yes, we're quite... I'd say "efficient" with money) and a new enemy for LDH requires around 3 work days (Artworks only).
So... all I wanted to say is... even if we're slower than we've been before, I hope it's understandable.

Also DA had been released on Patreon, but it's Pre-Alpha, kinda like a prototype with barely any content. And we're thinking about remaking it from scratch as the graphics are more than a year old.
I would NOT suggest you support us on Patreon because of DA at this point, unless you really want to. Currently there isn't enough content yet.
And it will most likely take a lot more time to get there.

This explains the silence on the blog the last couple weeks.
At any rate, I'll write more about the events of 2015 in an upcoming blogpost.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Results of 2nd character popularity poll

First of all, the results of the 2nd character popularity vote:
Ferania won with an overwhelming 618 votes, followed up by Faye with 219 and Catheline with 208 votes!

Thanks to everyone who participated in the vote, and congratulations to the winners!

Catheline, Faye and Ferania


Status report on LDH:

After more than 4 weeks of dealing with carpel tunnel, several issues with implementing music and sound, and various other things that troubled our progress (Illustrious pc broke down, etc.), I can finally say that we're able to make some progress on LDH again.

We still need to get the werewolf done and implement some sounds and voice (yes voice!) for Ferania. The music is already ingame, and the sound menu works as intended.
I can't give a definite release date yet, as there's just too many unknowns.
By that I mean, there's still a lot of sound effects to add into the game, and I have no idea how long it will take to implement, tweak and test all of it.
At any rate, we're working on it to get it done as soon as possible!

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Character popularity poll #2 and status update

I'll first do the status update since it's shorter.
We're working on implementing music and sfx into LDH right now, but it will still take a couple days until it's fully implemented and we still need to do testing.
So, I can't give any definite release date yet, as there's still the possibility of running into unforseen trouble. At any rate, we're working as fast as possible, so it shouldn't take too long.

Also, since our writer is currently having a lot of RL issues, the upcoming version of LDH will not include the Werewolf enemy, since it won't be ready in time.
However, we'll make sure to deliver it in another patch.
After that we can wrap up LDH, and we can finally move on to DA.



Now to the character popularity poll:

Since we're always curious about which one of our characters is received best, we're doing another popularity poll! Especially because the last one had been a long time ago.
Last time Ferania was the most popular character, followed up by Aurora on second place and Catheline on third place.


This time around, we're only including characters that made an appearance in the webcomic.
Even if they just made a brief appearance, you can still vote for them here.
Also, same as last time, you'll get multiple votes.


The candidates are:

Ferania

Deathblight's lightning shooting tsundere protagonist.


Minori

Also called "Mimi": Now with gravitation manipulation abilities and karate techniques.


Chiira

Cute and calm, but coupled with Ferania she might be a troublemaker.


Claire

Super lazy... because of mind reading and telekinesis abilities.


Aurora

Drinks alcohol to get rid of her shyness, also likes to piss off people.


Catheline

The very very curious Cath.


Faye

Big sis foxgirl shrine maiden.


Mia

Super old big sis with jiggly boobs.


Bahia

Also super old big sis but without jiggly boobs.


Esmoda

Ms polar bear who tries to manipulate polls by telling people she will show her boobs if she wins.


Grizelda

Don't fuck with the grizzly bear lady... seriously, don't fuck with her.


Banshee

She's not sad, she always looks like this.


Shiwa

Green haired yandere-chan, still looking for a senpai.



And that's it.
Have fun voting!



Monday, July 27, 2015

Public release of LDH v0.46 and future plans

First of all, here is the newest public release version of LDH:

You can find the changelog here:




What is planned for the future?

We thought it would be best to finish what we've been working on LDH since the last patch.
So the stuff we started working on isn't wasted.
What the next and most likely last version of LDH will include is mainly music and SFX, and probably some other things. Since some voice acting recordings are still missing, it's very unlikely that this patch will be released this month. Hopefully we're able to wrap things up next month though.

Other than that, we'll be working on Deathblight Apocalypse as soon as possible!
Most of our supporters on Patreon voted for DA, and here on the blog it seems to be received very well too. (though here on the blog it is as popular as Paperheads 2, while on Patreon DA won with 56% voting)


About Deathblight Apocalypse:

In case you wonder why we hadn't worked on this earlier, this is because DA is a lot more work than LDH. As all the ingame graphics are animated, and the CG scenes are fully lined and coloured.
With only 1-2 days per month (1-2 days were we don't need to work on commissions or the webcomic), we wouldn't have been able to produce results in satisfying intervals.

By that I mean, it was easy to make a bunch of sketches for LDH in only 1-2 days per month, thus being able to release a new version each month so far.
But it's an entirely different story with high quality (full coloured) artworks and ingame animated graphics. (LDH had no real ingame animations of any sort, it was just static graphics "moving" by mirroring the image etc.)

I'll be honest with you, this means DA will only get a new patch every 2-4 months.
Of course if support via Patreon continues to rise, we will be able to put more time into DA and thus release patches more often. Currently we're also thinking about other ways to "solve" this situation, as we don't think that an increase in Patreon support is a given.

And yes, we're aware that there is no way to quickly "solve" this.
But we're thinking in long-term solutions here.
We already have some ideas, but nothing is really decided yet.




I won't lie, basically all of this means:
Progress will be very slow on DA, unless we rack up a lot of financial support.
But we'll put as much time and effort into it as we can afford to.
And of course, we're doing our best to fulfill what we promise our supporters.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Rethinking stuff

Hey guys and girls!
Lately I got the impression that LDH is not being received that well and... yeah.
Obviously I couldn't get all those things off my mind, so I thought about doing a vote in order to gather some information and then think about that. LDH was intended to be just a testgame, and if people are not that interested in it, I think we should move on.


In the vote I'll give you the options to:
  1. Vote for Last Demon Hunter
  2. Vote for Deathblight Apocalypse
  3. Vote for Paperheads 2
  4. Vote for a not existing RPG Maker game that we could start if demand is high.
  5. Vote for us doing an entirely new game, and tell us what you like in the comments.

The RPG Maker game idea came to mind when we thought about Crescentias artistic abilities and the fact that CGs are super important in RPG Maker games.
And Paperheads 2 was an idea that I had on my mind since Paperheads 1...
As the name suggests, it's basically Paperheads just VASTLY improved on all fronts.
(better graphics, better CGs, better gameplay etc.)
But we're obviously not limited to that.

I'll be blunt here:
No matter what game you guys and girls (the community and fanbase) want us to work on, we're okay with working on nearly everything!
So we'll gladly work on the game that YOU want to see.
But we can't do that without money to buy food and pay bills.
This is actually the only thing that keeps us from going "all out" on game developement.
Despite the fact that with only about 1500 $ per month we could already go "all out".
Yeah, 1500 $ won't make us rich, we won't be able to buy everything we want to, but that's fine.
It's enough to cover the basic needs, and we lived from that amount the past months, so we're used to it.


So yeah, why should you support us on Patreon?


Let me give you a couple good reasons:


We've got a reputation and skills:

We've been working on hentai games for more than 3 years now.
Yeah, there had been a break, but the point is we're no strangers, you know who we are, what we did in the past and if you look at our old games and compare them to our new games you can see a lot of progress. During those 3 years we improved CONSIDERABLY on all fronts!
Programming, Artworks, efficiency overall.

Since art is an easy language everyone understands, let me show you a comparison of Crescentias progress over all these years:


old version of Verdani 2012/2013
new version of Verdani 2015


Fun fact:
The new artwork took the same time to be created as the old one.
(no kidding!)



We've build up quite the team of skilled people:

A professional game designer, a very skilled music composer, and several writers, just to name a few.
Since we've been working on a lot of projects together over all these years, we managed to get the team work very efficiently. We know each other, we get along really well, we trust each other and we love creating hentai games!



We're quite the fast workers:

Over time we improved on our quality, as well as our working speed.
I'm confident that we're able to produce a lot of content in a short time spawn.
Of course, given that we are able to focus on our work, and are not distracted with doing commissions and hired work in order to earn money for our daily needs.



We can produce good results with low funding:

This is actually somewhat tied to the "we're quite fast workers" point.
Since we're fast, we can be cheap.
Currently we're living of around 1500 $ per month, it's not much (since we're more than 1 person!), but it's enough for our basic needs (food, paying bills etc.).
Reaching that amount would allow us to drop commissions and hired work on a large scale.
It would enable us to add another ~10 work days to working on hentai games per month, that's quite a lot! At the moment we're ONLY working on 1-2 days per month on hentai games, no kidding.
Imagine that big difference in work time, we could do so much more!
(the other days of the month we're working on our webcomic, which is already fully funded)

Of course it would be nice to have even more funds.
It would boost our productivity in several ways:
An appartment and working place of our own would be neat. (no distractions by parents/housemates)
We could hire additional artists and programmers, or have existing teammembers join us full time.
Possibly an office for our team to work in, it would boost working speed even more!



We're honest and talking openly about our stuff:

In the past years, we've been always talking openly about what's going on.
Be it progress reports of our games, or issues we've ran into.
Game developement is a very complex process with lots of troubles, but also lots of joy!
We want to stay true to our honest ways and we're also continuing to do our best when creating hentai games, even if the trouble we run into is of major magnitude.
In the end, we always get stuff done!


In the past the only thing that kept us from going all out were little to no funds.
But this can change today!

With only as little as 1500 $ per month, we can already get VERY far!
So if you want to support us, spread the word!
The more people hear about us, the better!

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Last Demon Hunter v0.46

I just wanted to inform you of the new version of Last Demon Hunter on our Patreon (v0.46) which has the new ghost-demon as well as custom controls.
(it will be released to the public on this blog in about 4 weeks)

The newest public version of LDH can be found here:
[Click Here]

It contains the ape-demon as well as several fixes.


The changelog for the v0.46 version is pretty simple:

- added ghost-demon to the game
- added custom controls
- added fonts for translation purposes (french, italian, russian etc.)




Known issues:

Custom controls menu:
Custom controls might show some "weird" key inputs, but this is only for special characters.
Letters, numbers etc. work fine.
I have no idea why that is, I also have no idea if I can fix this.
Good thing is, everything else related to custom controls works as intended.
The buttons you assign are working as they should, even if you assign special character keys!
This means, it's actually just a visual bug, but it doesn't affect changing controls or gameplay.
(it's a pure "visual" thing only)

There are some keys like ESC and ENTER that can't be assigned.
This is intentional!
(ENTER is for pause)


Japanese characters:
There are issues with GMS when it comes to loading unicode characters out of TXT-files.
As far as my research into this matter goes, I can't fix it as it's tied to the GMS engine.
I'm very sorry about this, but there really isn't anything I can do at this point.
The only thing that I could do is "hardcode" the CG text in japanese into the game, making it not-edit-able in the process.
This sadly means, fan translations into japanese are not possible.
I apologize for the inconvenience, and I hope I can find a solution for this sometime in the future.

Other languages:
If you want to translate the CG scenes into your language, please make sure to save the file as UTF-8 format TXT-file.
Otherwise there might be errors in the loading of the CG scenes.


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


P.S:
We're going to add music and sound in one of the upcoming updates.
Probably not next month, but sometime in the future.
We're currently working on it!

Also several other additions are planned, by that I mean new game mechanics and stuff.
But I'll cover all that in the next blogpost I guess.

Monday, June 15, 2015

New public patch of Last Demon Hunter

Here is the next public version of LDH:
[Last Demon Hunter ver0.40D]

You can find the changelog here:
[Changelog ver0.40D]


We're currently working on finishing the new patch, which should be done "soon".
The new patch will include customisable controls, some fixes, as well as a new enemy (the Ghost-Demon).
I'll write about the details in the changelog of the next release.

Other than that:
Have fun playing the game and in case you haven't done yet, check the readme for the current controls!
Ferania can teleport (like in the webcomic) and she can charge her attacks up as well.
Making a lot of the confrontations easier.


P.S:
Since some people have trouble downloading from Mega, the usual thing I say applies:
Feel free to upload the game anywhere else, in order to help distribute it!
But please link to this blog so people can keep track of the games developement.
Thank you very much for your support! ^^

Also the link was not working before, but it should work now, please try again!

Sunday, May 31, 2015

Information about the upcoming patches

I'm currently working on implementing customizable controls.
And if everything works out, I guess it should be done and released earlier next month.
This should help several people with adjusting the controls to how they like best.

Furthermore we're working on a new enemy.
But I can't say for sure when it will be done.
(However, I'm certain it will be sometime next month!)


Ghost Demon:



Ghost Demon with burning eyes


It's half ghost, half flesh.
This enemy will be more scary than most other enemies, as it will be able to disappear and reappear somewhere else.
Confusing our heroine and cutting off her escape route quite easily.
It's also stronger than mutants, and running away will be quite the challenge. Having sound in the game might help with being more scary, so we're taking this into consideration to add sound sometime in the future.

I guess this will contribute to having more different enemy types in the game.
And of course we're still working on adding more different types with different behaviours!

Tell us what you think about this new enemy in the comments!



Sunday, May 17, 2015

Last Demon Hunter patch finally done

So, our first "addon" or upgrade for LDH is finally done.
The Ape Demon is fully implemented into the game.
We've also done a couple of bug fixes and other additions to the game.
The update will be uploaded to Patreon in a couple hours, we'll do this when we upload todays webcomic page.
The public version will be uploaded in roughly 3-4 weeks here on the blog.


Large Ape Demon grabbing Ferania



Here's a complete list of changes:

- Ape Demon has been fully implemented
- 5 more maps the random generation can choose from have been added to the game
- Spawn chance of the girls that need to be rescued has been increased from 20% to 30%.
- Mutant "twitching" bug has been fixed.
- Bug where enemies didn't get close enough to grab Ferania has been fixed.
- Mutants stick to walls a lot less now. (it can still happen I guess, but it's less likely)
- A memory leak tied to the dynamic lighting system had been fixed.
- Skip button for CG scenes had been fixed (press CTRL to skip).


And as always, feel free to ask questions in the comments!

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Upcoming new enemy for LDH

As I expected in my last blogpost, we were not able to make much progress this month.
But at least we got some of the work done!
Hopefully we're able to release the new patch mid may on Patreon, and ~2-4 weeks later on the blog as well.

Let me tell you a bit about the upcoming new enemy for LDH.
Beware, there are spoilers ahead, so if you want to be surprised by this new enemy, better not read any further!

Currently the ingame graphics are all done.
(Enemy graphic and grab pictures)
But the CG scene is still missing and is being worked on as soon as possible.

Ape Demon:



The Ape-Demon is a fairly tough enemy.
It has lots of HP, and it's very fast when using it's charge attack.
Overall it's also very strong.
So this is one of the most dangerous enemies in close combat.

There won't be too many of them around.
But don't underestimate them!

Saturday, April 18, 2015

April progress

Phew, this month is kinda like a mess.
I'll simply do a general report about what's currently going on.

So, the webcomic is going smoothly with 2 pages per week.
We hit the 600 $ goal on Patreon buuuut...
The thing is, we realized a couple days ago, that 50 $ of pledges of a total of 615 $ didn't go through!
Technically this would mean that we didn't hit the 600 $ goal, but never mind.
We decided to do 2 pages per week anyway!
(please remember that the first 600 $ go into the webcomic, every extra $ above this amount goes into developing hentai games)

However, this faces us with a... liiiittle problem here.
Actually we're doing more work now, for less money than expected.
Which in turn requires us to do more commissions and hired work to balance things out.
This in turn means, slower/less progress on our hentai games.

Ugh... yeah.


But we still intend to deliver a patch with new content this month, if possible!
If we find some time to do this, between all the commissions/hired work that is...
So we're trying our best (if possible!) to release a patch for LDH.


We intend to include:

- various bug fixes that had been requested
- more areas the random generation system can choose from
- 1 new enemy, with CG scene and everything else

Also, this situation pushes back the release of a public demo for "Deathblight Apocalypse".


If you want to help us to make faster progress on our games, feel free to support us on Patreon.
But more importantly, spread the word about us!
Thank you very much for your support!

[Patreon link]

And yes, as patron you'll get earlier access to stuff as well as some other extras.





Saturday, March 28, 2015

So what's next?

(If you're new to this page and looking for the download for "Last Demon Hunter", you can find it here: [click here] )

First of all, thank you to everyone who's supporting us on Patreon!

[Patreon]

It not only helps us to do the webcomic, but from now on it also helps us to fund developement of our hentai games. The more support we get, the faster progress will be since we don't need to do commissions in order to pay our bills.

Also we've gotten our first review for LDH by lewdgamer.com!
They also have a ton of other reviews to other awesome games.

Check it out here:
https://www.lewdgamer.com/2015/03/28/last-demon-hunter-test-game-now-available-from-projekt-wolfenstahl/



What do we have planned for the future?

Actually, from this point onwards we'll be working on 2 game projects at once.
One being Deathblight Apocalypse (aka "full game" or DA) the other being Last Demon Hunter (aka "test game" or LDH).

Adding more content to LDH is cheaper and faster, as it's just sketches and less animations.
On the other hand, DA looks way better, but it needs a considerable amount of polish, and the graphics and CG scenes are fully fleshed out.
So this needs more developement time (more funds required).


Deathblight Apocalypse:

Deathblight Apocalypse


















The most important thing right now is, getting Deathblight Apocalypse out to the public.
In order to do this, we want to implement at the very least 1 hentai sprite animation as well as 1 CG scene. But... I guess it's a way better experience if we add at least 2 more enemies with hentai animations etc. to the game.
(so yeah, I'm a bit indecisive about "when" to make this game public, more content is always better, but the question is how much progress we're able to make during april, and I really want to show this game to everyone as soon as possible)

Let's just say, I would like to release some sneak peak before the end of april.
But I'm not sure if we're able to get it done between taking care of commissions.
So no promisses here!
(we'll try our best anyway)



Last Demon Hunter:


Last Demon Hunter














Since this game is considerably cheaper (production wise), it's only natural to expand this game.
Depending on how much support we get, this might even mean turning this game into a full fledged game! But of course this is only possible if we get a lot of support.

For the time being we're thinking about leaving this game as a (not fully fleshed out) test game, while still expanding it a little bit.


What expansions can be expected in the upcoming weeks/months?

1. Adding more enemies:

Ghost-Demons, Ape-Demons and other stuff.
Each of them with different behaviour patterns.
(of course each one gets their own CG scene)

2. Adding more areas:

Currently the areas are randomly selected out of a pool of premade areas.
(afterwards the enemies are being placed randomly on the map)
We'll add more areas to the game, in order to make each playthrough even more unique.

3. Adding an escape mechanic:

This is an even bigger task than all the other things planned.
Adding this mechanic requires more CGs for every enemy type, as well as unique areas that Ferania is being held in after she was captured, which she needs to escape from to prevent a "game over".
It's more work than all the other additions, but it's possible to do this with a reasonable amount of effort invested into it!
(also I think it adds a lot to the whole atmosphere of the game, so I think it's worth it)


Of course there is more planned for both games.
But I think these informations are the most important for the time being.
Well, that's all for now.

Tell us what you think in the comments below!
Also, feel free to ask anything about these games.



P.S:
Totally forgot to point out that LDH stays a free (for everyone) game.
But Patrons get earlier access to new versions.
While DA is being handed to Patrons only, but there will be the option to buy it via DLSite once it's done.
(of course there will be a public demo version of DA as soon as possible, but only Patrons will get early access to new builds, as well as the full version of the game, until it's later being released on DLSite)




Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Last Demon Hunter out now!

Here you can download our test-game "Last Demon Hunter", but don't expect too much, it's being called a test-game for a reason!

Quick Hotfix Version 0.31C:
- 2nd key-layout (Arrow Buttons for movement, CRTL for teleport, SHIFT for "Use"/"Open Doors")
- typo corrected in one of the scenes

[Last Demon Hunter download]



Screenshot of Last Demon Hunter (top-down shooter)

If people can't download from mega again, feel free to upload this to other locations as well.
But please keep in mind to link back to the blog.
(well, it doesn't matter that much since I've included links in the game itself... but uh... yeah)

The controls are in the readme.txt
Basically it's WSAD control + mouse.



And yes, expect some patches with fixes as well as some additions to the game in the upcoming weeks/months.
(I didn't find any gamebreaking bugs, but 1-2 small graphical glitches with the dynamic lighting system, I'll look for more bugs and fix them with the next big patch)

If people are interested in this game, and if we get some more support on Patreon, we'll most likely add a couple more enemies to this test-game.
(well, you can still give us your oppinion in the comments below, as well as on Patreon)

Supporting us on Patreon will also gain you the benefit of getting patches earlier than other people, as well as enabling us to work on these games in the first place.
Of course we're working on them anyway... but the more money we get via Patreon, the faster we'll be able to make progress.


With this game we'll officially use Patreon as game-funding platform as well.
And I'll also like to announce, that we're going to continue working on "Deathblight Apocalypse" (the game), too!
 
I'm talking about this game here:
(this is NOT the test game)

Screenshot of Deathblight Apocalypse

Deathblight Apocalypse will contain hentai pixel sprite animations, as well as the usual high quality CG scenes.
I'm really excited to pick up work on this game once again!
And yes, the more support we get via Patreon, the more we'll be able to work on this.
(because we don't need to spend too much time on commissions and stuff)

There's also already a playable version (not yet released).
And we think about releasing it once we added some hentai to the game.
(which will happen soon, but don't expect this before the end of april!)

Anyway, time to go to bed.
Good night everyone!

Monday, March 23, 2015

Almost done!

So yeah, I just figured I'd fill you in on the details before the release.

First of all, the "test game" (named: Last Demon Hunter further being called LDH) is a test game, no full fledged game here. Please keep that in mind when giving feedback or criticism.
The purpose of this game is pretty much practice and experimentation and stuff like that, since we've been out of game-dev for quite some time. And yeah, I figured I'd simply share this game with everyone else, since it exists in the first place.
So in the past weeks we've been adding some more graphics and content to the game, in order for it to be a decent test game.
(I believe noone would like boxes shooting at each other, right?)

LDH will be released on the blog (here) and on Patreon as well.
With Patreon getting earlier access to new patches, and the blog getting the patches at a later time.
(this is in order to give our Patrons another "bonus")


Speaking of patches:

If we get some more support on Patreon, we'll add some more content to the test game.
Can't say much about that yet, it really depends on the amount of support we get.

Other than that, we'll continue working on "full games" afterwards.
So every dollar, every single supporter, is very appreciated!
And even small amounts help us a lot in the long run.
But more important than giving us money, is spreading the word!

Once the game is out (in the upcoming days), spreading the word about our stuff is the most important thing there is.
I hereby want to thank everyone who supported us thus far, and also thank you very much to everyone who supports us in the future!
We wouldn't be able to do all this without you.


Current status of the test game:

- CGs all done (3 CG scenes, sketches, so they're black and white only)
- worldmap tileset needs to be done (half days work)
- adding more areas to the game (75% done)

Almost there!
It's just a matter of days now.



What the game is about:

It's a top-down shooter with random generation.
The player plays as Ferania, there is of course GoR hentai in the form of a status-picture at the side of the screen.
(Cloth destruction, changing images, black and white sketches only)
If her HP drop to zero it will be "game over", and as usual there will be a hentai CG scene (black and white sketches as well).

The goal of the game will be to rescue captured girls.
And uh... yeah, no animations here, sorry!
But our next game, Deathblight Apocalypse, will have hentai sprite animations!
So look forward to that one.
(also, Deathblight Apocalypse will be a full fledged game)


P.S:
I dislike april fools jokes.
I didn't do any of those in the past, and I certainly won't start any in the future.
Just thought I'd point this out, since april fools is around the corner and people usually suspect an april fools joke everywhere...
The last thing I want is people thinking I'm not releasing a game since it's april fools day...
(still I probably avoid posting anything around april fools day... as usual)


Saturday, March 14, 2015

Another progress report

The random generation is finally done!
Took longer than expected, but it's done.
I still need to do some testing, but so far everything is working as intended.

Here, take this random sketch! lol

What's left to do:
  • Building more premade levels (the levels are the only premade thing in this game)
  • Adding another CG scene
  • Making graphics for the world map

Building those levels will take a lot of time.
So it will most likely need another couple days until it is finished.
I do hope we get all of these things done within the next couple days.

And yes, this whole test-game was a lot of work programming wise.
But that's okay, I can use the random generation, the CG script and other things for "Deathblight Apocalypse", so it was no waste of time at all!
Of course I need to do a few adjustments here and there.
But honestly, most of the work is already done.

I'm not saying that implementing it will be working in 5 minutes or something.
(most likely it will take a couple days)
But at least it won't take me another 2 weeks planning and programming all of it.

That's all for now.
See ya!

Friday, February 27, 2015

End of february progress

Originally we wanted to "finish" the test game by now.
But Cres arm started acting up about a week ago, so the only thing we've got done since then is that one webcomic page...


And no, it's nothing serious!
Technically we could have ignored it and still worked on, but we decided it's better to be cautious and take a week off, instead of risking making it worse and not being able to work for several months again.

So... more swimming in the upcoming weeks...
(I really dislike swimming...)

This also means we're a bit behind schedule with ordered commissions as well.
Sorry for the delay!


First we need to finish the commissions, and do a webcomic page each week as well.
We'll invest all our spare time into finishing this test game as soon as possible.
So hopefully releasing the test game works out in march.

Actually, I do have something that I could release right now...
But I really want to implement the few last things that are missing.
(by that I mean, the stuff I wanted to have in the test game once it's being released)


Saturday, February 7, 2015

Debating about Patreon "prices"

First of all, two status announcements to two of our games! (yup, two of them)
The Patreon "debate" is down below in this post.

The test game: "Last Demon Hunter" goes along smoothly.
I'm talking about this game:

Last Demon Hunter (aka Test Game)

As you can see, it's a topdown shooter with minimal graphics.
The CGs are also sketch only, well, it's a test-game after all.


Current status:

I'll need some more time before the random generation is implemented, but I'm making progress.
Please keep in mind: this game will never be "finished" (by that I mean, polished etc.) it's just a testgame. Also this won't be sold at all.

The plan is still to give this game to our Patreons as "bonus", and then release it some time after that for free on the blog. Possibly the first free version will also be released to the public very soon.
But possible additions to the test game will be first handed to the Patreons, then later on, to the public.
(something along those lines, we haven't settled on the exact details yet, but probably we'll get to that later this day, or in the upcoming days)



Lets move on to our real game: "Deathblight Apocalypse"
It's this game here:


Deathblight Apocalypse

Anyone still remembers this one?
We worked on it around the time Cres got her arm injured etc.
Then we couldn't continue working on it for a long time.
Several months ago, we figured we should do the "Sion and Medusa" game.

Well, there's some important stuff I need to share with you guys and girls.

A couple days ago, I was thinking about the whole Patreon stuff, games etc...
Originally we wanted to do the "Sion and Medusa" game, because we could deliver this (probably!) faster than "Deathblight Apocalypse"...
But, why's that?

DA (Deathblight Apocalypse) already has graphics, it's already running, the combat is working, the only thing missing is more enemies, hentai content and possibly a world map (for the random generation).
So... why would SaM (Sion and Medusa game) be "faster" than this?

Well... animated CGs...
Anyone remember that one?

We originally wanted to include animated CGs, which is a lot of work.
On top of that, we have NO prior experience in this field.
We did several animations attempts, but we never made the "real thing".

And there's one more problem:
Even IF we prove to be capable of producing animated CGs, there's a high probability that those will eat up a shitload of resources, so the game could probably become unplayable...
(at least unplayable on older machines)
Which is not good...

Back then I also mentioned, "if" those concerns prove to be true, we would rather do animated hentai pixel sprite animations + CG scenes (consisting out of several pictures/variations per scene).



So, the conclusion is?

We were not able to "test" animated CGs and it's pro's and con's, because of Cres arm injury back then. (everything healed, no worries!)

And we figured, our "next game" (whatever this is) should be a game we're confident that we can 100% deliver what we promise.



In the end we decided to continue with DA, but use hentai pixel sprite animations + CG scenes.No animated CG's anymore... sorry for the disappointment everyone...
But this is probably our best bet right now.
And we should be able to deliver this game way sooner than any possible release of "SaM" would have been.

On top of that, most of you want to see Ferania in a game, right?
(at least that's what I get out of the popularity polls)


Finally... lets get to the:

Patreon debate!


The last couple days, I was looking again at other Patreon pages (well I do that all the time, actually), and I wondered if we would sell ourselves too short, if we do what we originally planned?

So, this is what we planned at first: (the following is "obsolete" I just figured I'd mention it anyway)
I figured, I'd give anyone who gave us 1$ via Patreon full access to every "early access" version there is. Including the full game on release day.

Why I thought like this?
Well, I figured, such a project would most likely need 6-12 months until it's finished.
Probably around 10 months, so that would be 10$, right?
(1$ each month)

But then again, wouldn't it be "too cheap" if I sell "early access" this cheap?
I'm NOT trying to be greedy here!
I'm just thinking about the fact, that everyone else is selling "early access" at a higher price.
(this includes other Patreon campaigns, Kickstarter etc... but it excludes Steam, Steam early access is usually cheaper than buying the full game <-- so that's the only reversal thing, but we're not on Steam, we're debating about Patreon here)

So, doing a cheap "early access" model is an interesting idea.
But at the same time we would miss out on a lot of funding, probably?
The funding is extremely important, as it would help us to scale down commissions and other stuff.
Plus, we could afford our own appartment at some time, which should also boost productivity.
(Living with other people... there's always stuff that gets in the way, especially when working on hentai games...)

Also, if we reach a high enough amount of money, we could hire a good pixel sprite artist, so we could boost developement speed.
We obviously can't afford someone like that right now.

This all mostly means:
More funds = faster progress
Of course there's some "limit" to as fast as things can possibly progress.
I hope this makes sense?
(we certainly won't hire ~20+ people, even if we have the funds to do so... it would just get out of hand at some point... I'm just feeling confident in successfully leading a team out of ~5-10 people for now <-- I have years of experience with this kind of thing)


So, with all these things in mind, we figured (for now) that the following "model" would be the best?


This is what we "now" have in mind:


1$ Tier:

Everyone who pledges 1$ gets access to the Patreon only informations, plus the FULL game if they pledge on the same month that the game gets released on.
Yes, this means the people on this tier get to "read" about the stuff we're currently working on, plus they'll get to know WHEN release day is, some time before release day.
Plus they'll get the game once it's out, even if they only paid 1-3$ for it, if they are subscribed on the month the game gets released!

And yes, there will be "public" demo versions, but they'll be cut down in scale compared to the "early access" versions that always include the newest stuff.
(the public demo is just to show what the game is about)

However, people on this tier will not get the "full" game if they're NOT subscribed on the month the game gets released. They have to be subscribed at least in the month the game is being released, in order to get the full version!
Also they don't get games that had been created in the past, they'll just get the currently released game.


5$ Tier and upwards:

This includes the stuff on the 1$ tier (obviously) plus:
The 5$ tier and all tiers above would get full access to early access builds.

This means, that people who are on the 5$ tier will most likely pay WAY more for the game, than I originally planned, provided they're subscribed for the whole developement cycle...
But then again, it's "voluntary" pledges, no one needs to do that.
If you just want the game once its released without paying more for early access, there is still the 1$ tier. Plus we'll sell DA and probably all our other future games on DLSite too, so you still have other options.
Also, I'd figured there could be another thing.
Once we released several games, we could offer a "bundle" on Patreon, where you pledge ~30$ or something for 1 month only.
And then you'd get all the "finished" games that we created up until that point or something like it?
It's just an idea, and it's not going to be included unless we have 2 or more games "done".
So there's quite a lot of time going to pass until we get to that.


Anyway, most likely we'll be joining the "Patreon hentai game developers" this month.
First with "Last Demon Hunter", and shortly after that (probably next month though?) with "Deathblight Apocalypse".
Even if it just increases our current Patreon campaign by a small amount, we should still be able to work MUCH more on our games.
And that's what everyone wants too, right?

Currently, thanks to our Patreons, we're able to pay ~50% of our monthly bills through the webcomic.
The other 50% are being paid via commissions.
If we raise that amount a bit more, we'll need to do 2 webcomic pages a week, but after that goal, we would be able to concentrate much more on the game stuff.
(currently we're only working on the game stuff "in between" so progress is slow, as you noticed, but we're making progress! don't worry)

I hope I didn't forget anything important.
If there are any questions, feel free to ask!

And... I just realized I wrote WAY too much again... ugh...
Well, at least you all know what's going through my head now.

Please feel free to share your opinions in the comments!

Monday, January 26, 2015

January progress

Phew, the new year started very troublesome.
But I'm happy to tell all of you, that we've managed to overcome everything!
Thank you very much for your kind words and support!

In the last couple days, I've been able to get back into programming.
I just need to fix one AI code, and then I need to include another enemy type.
After that I'll really get into some random-generation stuff.
And then we'll be able to show what we've been working on.
Even if it just is a "test game" (so don't expect too much!).

Crescentia just needs to make 2 sketched CG scenes and 1 tileset.
So that probably takes her around 3 days work.
Well, Cres also has her hands full with commissions and the webcomic right now.
So this will happen somewhere "inbetween" of all of that stuff.
But I'm confident that we should be able to get this done within the next 2 weeks.
Of course stuff can always be delayed... but I do hope this will not be the case...

Btw. lets name this test game "Last Demon Hunter".
Maybe I'll post some screenshots once the tileset is done.
(otherwise it would just be characters and... grey boxes...)
That's all for now, see ya next time!

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Current status report

RL issues have been sorted out so far.
This month will be very commission heavy, but we'll also work on games as much as possible.

That being said, I decided on releasing the "test game" I've been working on to the public sooner or later. This is because it will need some time until we get the Sion and Medusa game working.
By "some time" I mean, it will certainly take longer than january, probably longer than february...
(can't say how much longer, but we certainly won't make any progress on it this month)


Why the "test game" then?
Well, the test game consist out of a lot of placeholder graphics and stuff.
But it has a decent amount of hentai sketches.
It's clearly nothing polished, but it should be fun to some people.
Also, I experimented a lot with the combat system, some other form of dealing with being "grabbed" etc. etc.
It's highly experimental, and sketchy... but it's still a game.
It was never meant to become a full game though, so keep that in mind.
If I release this, it's like... some sort of "present", you could say.
(obviously, this "test game" won't be sold, as it's far away from being a fleshed out game)

Time consumption wise, this game was a lot of programming work so far.
But it helped me to learn a couple new things.
Graphically it consumed nearly no time at all.
(maybe a weeks worth of work? probably a bit more than that, but nothing major)


I decided on doing things this way, since I get the feeling that we need to deliver some new game (whatever game) in order to make this whole blog more interesting again.
Also, you could say it's a way to give something back to all the people that supported us thus far.
Thank you very much!

And yes, that being said, I think we'll give the test game to our Patrons on Patreon first.
It's a natural thing to do since they support us quite a lot.
After a while, we'll release the test game on the blog as well.
At least that's the idea so far, and probably this is the best possible solution, giving the fact that we won't be able to make much progress on the Sion and Medusa game this month.

I'll write about this a bit more detailed in the upcoming days.
Or probably next week or something.
Just thought I'd make a small update and tell you about the stuff I decided on.