20200713 A Word From our Producer / 製作人的話 (Patreon)

Hi everyone! Thank you so much for your support!
Hope you all have a great (and most importantly, safe) summer, like our dear Doroelle here!
We hope you all enjoy the update we released last weekend.
Tons of comments flew in in these 2 days, and we're definitely reading them one by one! We seriously can't thank you enough! Or can we?
Anyways, you've reported a lot of bugs, and we've tried to fix them!
The hotfix build v0.12 is out now. Please redownload if you are still using the v0.11 build to avoid further bugs!
https://www.patreon.com/posts/39180856

In the past few months, we've received so much encouragement from all of you, and as I just said, we can't express our gratitude enough.
Also, on a completely unrelated note, we have a Twitter account!
https://twitter.com/Ason_oaneashi
This account has also experienced explosive growth, having nearly 1,300 followers by the time I'm typing this!
Be sure to follow us for updates, as well as some memes possibly? I don't know, I might just post some trending stuff.

But that's enough chitchat for me, because we have a special guest today!
The one and only producer from our team want to have a little talk regarding our current situation and future plans.
Oh, SPOILER ALERT by the way. If you haven't experienced the new update, now might be a good time to look away.
Without further ado, here it is!

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Dear fellow supporters, this is the producer of Ason, and I’m here to share some thoughts and development status.

After a few busy development and sleepless nights, I really think I need some good long rest.
We’ve been busy at work for this since day one of opening this Patreon page.
There were times that we said we will be taking breaks, but we were actually still working.
But this time, I think the team and I really really need a good break.
Maybe catch up on the movies I missed, a game I’ve been longing to get my hands on, or catch up with social lives.
Not for the pandemic, but I’ve been involuntarily social distancing with human contact to make The Shimmering Horizon and Cursed Blacksmith.

But we’ve been getting quite a bit of feedbacks from you guys, so here are some info and explanation.
We really listen to your feedbacks, and we would consider to update the game based on them.

Now, let’s get started!

Boss Fight

For the look of the boss, we were planning to use pixel art for the boss in the beginning, but we found that our pixel art skill is still not good enough.
So we ended up using Live2D to make the boss.
Here is a comparison for you to see how bad it was:

There were a bit of time wasted, because we are a team that strive for top notch quality.
(Ok, fine, it was me, the stubborn nitpicking producer. I couldn’t stand the quality of the pixel art version.)
So we had to spend some time for recreating the boss.

Aside from how it really turned out, how many people are satisfied with it, or some bugs and technical issues.
As a indie game producer, being able to finish my first epic boss battle, I felt like I am one step closer to my dream.

Voice Acting

Yes, we’ve been mentioning this for a while, due to being inexperienced in this area and tight development schedule, there were quite a bit of difficulties and hurtles we had to jump through.
In the beginning, we planned to dub the game bits by bits / characters by characters, like…
Whenever a character or part of the game is ready to have a voice, we would send it to the voice actress for dubbing.
However, to voice actresses, it’s quite hard to remember how she did the voice last time, because it might be a few month gap. Like how an artist would forget how to draw something if he / she has not draw certain thing for a long time.

We did consider to dub the game only after the game is done developing, but we don’t want to make you guys to wait so long, so we still ended up with trying to communicate with many new voice actresses.
Some voice actresses even stopped their voice acting career, so we had to find new ones.

One of the most affected one is Doroelle, many of you are quite used to her old voice (Mandarin and Japanese speaking fans especially), we know, yet we have no choice but to find a new voice for Doroelle.
Even I had to spend quite a while to get use to the new voice.
However, in some spiritual level, the new voice is actually a better match to Doroelle’s aurora.
We will keep doing our best for character development.

Monster Girls

We have to admit, we’ve been dealing with this problem, we’ve been spending a lot of time on designing monster girls, but the story and the game system couldn’t really keep up.
I wish I can use Shadow Clone Jutsu like Naruto, so I can work on everything at once, but I just don’t have enough time to take care of them at the same time.

Nevertheless, I’ve being tinkering with a “Endless Mode” so you can encounter the monster girls that is not supposed to appear before a certain story unlock them.

This function might drop in next month or the month after, hope you will like it. :D

Difficulty, Dungeon Generation Patterns, and Bugs

Yes, some of you reported back mentioning the dungeon generation is way too random, and lot of time you would be ganged up right from the start.
We will continue to adjust this, and there are many parts we want to fix.
Originally we were trying to tackle this problem in this update, but we really don’t have time, really sorry for that…

We will find time to deal with this, and make it the way to wanted it to be!

Discord Channel

In fact, we have been wanting to open one, and we wanted to talk to you guys more often, but there is just not enough man power to do so.
It take a lot of effort to start a public Discord channel, it might even be a full-time job of several people to manage one, because we fear that we won’t be able to reply to all of your feedback in time.
There are different languages, and there would be people all around the world trying to chat 24 hours.

We are still figuring out a way to do this, hope there would be some good news.

Moving Forward

First, here is a new friend to introduce:

Teehee, she is our next main NPC, please look forward to her appearance.
Maybe the Base Camp would get more and more noisy? :D

Actually, she was revealed first in our old blog, we had her designed long ago, but we couldn’t find the right time to introduce her in game.

The current plan is to have 6 main NPCs, and she is the third one.
We would reveal one NPC after each stage, and they would appear in the Base Camp to push the story further.
And of course, they would have some “heart pumping” event, or “accidents”. Tsk tsk tsk. ;)

We wanted to introduce some main NPCs early on, so there might not be too much story in the beginning.

Game development is way harder than what we’ve imagined, we’ve bottlenecked on some technical stuffs, but one by one we will solve them.

Sometime I even question myself: Why the F did I decide to make a complicated game like this…?
Why not just make a bad story point-and-click visual novel that just have static CG and without voice acting?
It would be done by now, and I could be counting bills already…
And yeah, I’ve tell my team that too… lol

But whenever we solve a problem, we felt like we can solve more problem.
And when we see those low quality games, we would want to be better than just that.
So please believe that we will finish this game, slowly but surely.
There may be things that we need to improve or better designed along the way, but if you are willing to support us, then we are willing to face those problem.

Ason is still just a small and amateur development team.
I was the only one there, when I was making The Succubus’ Cage.
It makes me really happy as more people joining in over the time.

I want to spend more time on making the game, I hope my team members can spend more time to make games with me.
And I hope we can be a real game development studio that we can make a living by creating games.

All this is just my thoughts and updates.

And as always, thank you all for supporting, and my outstanding team members.

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大家好！感謝大家對Ason的支持！
希望大家都像我們的小多蘿一樣過著愜意又安全的夏天！
不知道大家還喜歡上週末的大型更新嗎？
發布當天我們收到很多很珍貴的意見，真的非常謝謝大家不吝指教！
我們也盡快修正了部分比較嚴重的BUG，重新發布了v0.12版的遊戲。
請已經下載過v0.11的玩家再麻煩重新下載，以便迴避一些異常狀況喔！
https://www.patreon.com/posts/39180856

這幾個月以來，Patreon平台上的各位支援者都很有耐心地等待我們的開發，請容我們再次由衷摯上感謝。
此外，我們的推特帳號（ https://twitter.com/Ason_oaneashi）也在近期爆發性成長，目前已經有將近1300名追蹤者！
除了在平台上的固定更新以外，我們偶爾也會跟風貼點有趣的內容，有興趣的話歡迎大家告訴大家！

今天Ason的大家長要親自與大家分享目前的開發狀況與今後的規劃，希望能解決大家多數的疑問。
信中將提到本次更新的內容，如果還沒遊玩的話請斟酌觀看喔！
製作人的信如下：

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一路走來感謝舊雨新知的陪伴，我是Ason團隊的製作人，這邊來向各位分享一下我們的製作心得與目前的狀況報告。

經過接連好幾天的修羅場後，我真覺得我應該休息一下，自從發出Demo v0.01以後，就開始變得非常忙碌，遊戲本體有很多地方需要修改，進度也不能停，但無奈的是能夠花費的製作時間有限。

之前一直有說過想要好好休息個幾天，但其實我們還是在趕進度。
而這次，我與這個團隊是真的需要休息一下了，也許去看個錯過的電影，去玩個一直很想玩的遊戲，認真好好的睡到自然醒，還有重返社交圈。
並不是因為病毒，但為了製作蒼色之光魔劍鍛造師，我已經非自願停止社交好一陣子了。

不過最近釋出的Demo得到了很多反饋，還是先寫篇文章跟大家說明一下情況。
而大家的感想都將成為我們調整遊戲的建議，不管是難度，還是一些設定的修正，我們會慎重參考！

接下來，讓我們來聊聊一些心得吧！

關於Boss戰鬥

趁此機會我們將說明一下這次Boss戰的設計，事實上起初我們想用點陣圖來設計Boss，但無奈發現我們的點陣圖實力不夠，最後還是改用Live2D來製作Boss。
|可以從這邊看見兩者差異： 

其實不說這中間重製所浪費掉的時間，但由於我們堅守品質的信念（對，我是機掰製作人，我無法接受原本這樣的表現水準），還是埋頭幹了一次。

先不說結果，或是有多少人覺得滿意，甚至還存在一些技術上的問題與BUG，但我作為一名獨立遊戲製作者，能第一次完成一場看似壯闊的Boss戰，我認為我又離自己的夢想更進了一步。

關於配音重製

是的，先前一再提到的問題，由於我們經驗尚淺，再加上製作速度不夠充足，在配音上著實產生了些問題與困難。

我們起初計畫是階段性的給聲優配音，但這部份其實本身就伴隨著危險性，就像畫家久久不畫某樣東西，很可能會忘記要怎麼畫出那樣東西。
事實上我們甚至考慮過改以遊戲完成後才一次重新配音，但這樣可能會讓粉絲們乾等很久，所以我們仍然選擇嘗試與更多聲優溝通。
而部份聲優因為某些緣由，甚至已經不再進行配音活動，導致我們必須選擇更換聲優。

其中多蘿艾爾的配音應該是影響最大的，或許很多人已經習慣了以前的聲音，我們知道這是無可奈何的事。
事實上連我一開始也聽了一陣子才漸漸適應，不過在某種精神層面上這更貼近這個角色的氣息，我們會繼續努力塑造這個角色的形象。

其他尚未出場的女怪

是的，事實上我們一直有個困擾，我們前面花了很多時間在處理與設計女怪，但主線劇情與系統部份卻跟不上，產能非常不足，製作人很想要有影分身之術。
不過我抽時間做一個「無盡模式」，讓玩家可以在裡面遇到尚未在劇情中出場的女怪，也許在下個月，或者下下個月就能釋出。
希望各位之後能夠喜歡。:D

迷宮的難度與規則與一些BUG

對，或許有不少人覺得迷宮的隨機性過高，很常發生一入場就被一沱怪包圍的場面，我想還是稍微提一下這個。

其實迷宮部份還存在著許多需要去修改的部份，原本想在這次的更新實現，但實在是擠不出空，萬分抱歉…
我會再找時間慢慢改成我心目中理想的樣子！

關於Discord頻道

事實上我們一直想開Discord頻道，我們很想多跟粉絲交流，不過一直以來人手與時間吃緊，很怕會沒辦法顧及粉絲在頻道上的反饋。

但我們正在重新考慮如何處理，希望之後能有什麼新的消息。

關於日後的安排

首先先給大家看個新朋友：

哈哈，她是我們下一隻NPC角色，請各位期待她的加入，據點或許會變得越來越熱鬧？ :D
其實她在以前舊Blog上已經有亮相過，我們很早就設計好的角色，不過一直還不到讓她上場的時間，整個遊戲總是要顧及其他更多的東西。

這次的計畫之中，我們一共會有六位主要角色，而她將是其中的第三位。
每個階段過後將會使主要角色登場，並且進入據點，慢慢拼湊出故事劇情，當然，也會發生一些"臉紅心跳"的事情，與"意外場面"。
在設計上，我們期望遊戲前期可以很快的與主要角色們相會，所以前面的劇本量不會太長，往後會有更多故事劇情。

由於製作的過程比想像中還要艱辛很多，主要是碰到狀況或技術瓶頸，我們必須試圖面對，導致進度會拖延。
甚至很多時候我都會埋怨自己為何要做這種麻煩的遊戲類型。（對，我現在常常跟我的夥伴這樣講 XD）
不過當解決了問題後，我們也更有信心可以面對更多問題，無論如何請大家相信，或許中間會有設計不良與需要等待改善的空間，但我們會一步一腳印的完成這個專案。
即使我的能力與資源可能還遠遠不夠，但如果大家還願意陪伴我的話，我會繼續努力，繼續學習下去。

Ason仍還是一個不成熟且微不足道的新興團隊，在前作魅魔之籠時，甚至只有我一個人而已，但陸續有了其他夥伴，這點讓我很高興。
我真的很想花更多時間去製作遊戲，希望我的夥伴們也可以在未來花更多時間，跟我一起投入製作之中，我希望有朝一日可以靠製作遊戲來養活自己，以及我的團隊。

以上是我的報告與有感而發。
最後很感謝各位粉絲，以及我優秀的團員們！