Important survey and other infos! (Patreon)

so here we have the survey that I mentioned a while ago.

Please read this post carefully before answering the survey.

Also this post was written by Wolfenstahl, which is why I'm named in 3rd person.

Just for you to know, so you won't get confused^^

So here we go:

With the final version of LDH released, we can finally move on to new projects.

This in mind, we figured it would be best to inform you about a couple things and have a more detailed survey/vote on what's next.

Please read this post so you get a better understanding of why we're doing another vote.

You can find the link to the survey/vote at the end of this post.

First of all, why did we do LDH anyway?

Our initial plan was to start a small test-game in order to get back into game development.

At the same time we intended to boost Patreon a bit more, so we get more support and with more support more funding, this would allow us to take on bigger projects.

(LDH was a low budget game, so we were able to release content updates more frequently)

This plan partly worked out, but we didn't get as much support as we hoped to get.

So we need to make an important decision:

How are things going to continue from now on?

Well, let me explain a few things about our situation.

(everything is fine, don't worry!)

Currently the webcomic is covering about 50% of our monthly expenses.

(Food, insurances, etc.)

However, the other 50% is covered via commissions and hired work.

Of course we make some extra-money via commissions and hired work as well, which we save up, but those are the rough numbers.

The "extra" money we made via Patreon in the last months (and by extra money I mean the "leftover" money after the webcomic has been paid) is roughly around 120-150 $ per month, which is around 1-2 working days of Crescentia.

The more money we make via Patreon, the less money we need to make via commissions and hired work to pay our bills.

Basically this means, the "extra money" is enough to focus on doing hentai games for 1-2 working days.

Of course, since we save up money from doing commissions and hired work as well, we could in theory invest some more time into doing hentai games besides 1-2 days a month.

And that's actually what we did on LDH from time to time.

But why would we not continue doing that, some of you might ask?

Well, seeing that hentai games don't get us anywhere right now, we figured we should invest our time (and money) into something else.

Don't worry! Patreon money goes into the webcomic and hentai game dev only!

It's our own, saved up money, we earned through commissions and hired work that we're spending here.

(I really just want to emphasize this in order to prevent misunderstandings)

That being said, we're about to prepare a Kickstarter campaign for a Visual Novel (short: VN) with some of our characters from Deathblight.

(though those characters are from a different country in Deathblight, and they're not our protagonists from the webcomic)

The idea is to make money via Kickstarter, and then invest the money (and time!) into making this VN.

As I said before, we're currently investing about 50% of our time into commissions and hired work.

With a successful Kickstarter, we could turn those working hours into working on the VN instead of commissions.

Which would be a benefit to all our fans I suppose.

Furthermore we believe that doing a VN and putting it on Kickstarter, as well as getting it on Steam once it's done, might help us to make some real money and build up a larger fanbase as well.

Afterwards we would still be doing hentai games, it's just that with actual money we could hire a pixel artist and invest a lot more of our time into hentai game development.

We also thought about the possibility of giving Patreon backers this VN as reward as well.

Though this might be tied to certain conditions, like a minimum number of months of support as well as a minimum amount of money that needs to be pledged at the time the VN gets fully released.

I want to emphasize that we didn't decide anything about this yet, but we're putting our thoughts into it, finding out a good way to do this.

(there's lots of difficulties, like people who stop pledging disappearing from the Patreon list etc. so we really need to take all those things into consideration and find a hopefully satisfying solution to it)

We'll give you more details about the VN, Kickstarter, and Patreon rewards as we slowly move towards the Kickstarter start.

For now, lets focus on hentai games that are being made via Patreon support.

We've put a lot of thought into what would be easily possible with low funding, and we also thought about what's more difficult to do as well.

So here is a summary of possible projects:

RPG Maker project:

With only 1-2 workdays per month, we would be able to make the most progress with an RPG Maker hentai game.

Maybe you have played Ahrimans game "The Moral Sword of Asagi"?

In case you have not, here is a link to the DLSite page where you can download the trial version or buy the full game:

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

If we would make an RPG Maker game, we would create a similar battle system with Deathblights characters.

The battle system has various hentai poses, characters getting grabbed as well as captured.

There's also a mechanic where you need to rescue captured characters.

Advantages of an RPG Maker project:

1. it's cheaper to make as lots of assets (tilesets, enemies etc.) are already done, of course we can add our own enemies to the game as well.

2. new characters don't need tons of graphics, only one pixel art character and graphics for the battle system.

3. since new characters are very easy to implement, we can implement a lot of Deathblights characters into this game, we're talking about adding a fully implemented, new character every 2-3 months.

4. it's easy to tell another story with Deathblights characters, possibly in a future scenario (modern times), thousands of years ahead of the webcomic.

5. CG scenes would be more story related, which would allow more narrative as well as game over scenes and good or neutral hentai scenes as well.

(which means, more diversity in the hentai CG scenes)

Deathblight Apocalypse:

We could simply carry on with DA.

However, it has less advantages and more disadvantages.

Well it's a platformer, so there's lots of graphics to make and lots of animations to do.

Adding new characters will take ages (at current Patreon funding level) and the graphics are still quite small.

Basically, since there's a lot of graphical work and since Cres isn't very good with pixel art, it will take longer.

Which means, less updates and longer development time.

(we're talking about roughly 1 new enemy about every 4 months)

Deathblight Apocalypse remake:

Since the graphics of DA are more than 1,5 years old, we could remake it all, so they're a bit higher in quality.

This basically means starting from scratch.

We could even increase the graphic size (resolution) but this would mean that progress on a remake would advance even slower.

With higher funding we could either invest more time into it ourselves, or we could hire a dedicated pixel artist.

However, hireing someone is out of the question for now.

(Maybe a future possibility)

Depending on what the remake should be like, it could very well take even more development time.

So probably this isn't a good idea, but still we figured to give you the option to vote for this.

Brawler Game with Ferania (similar to Paperheads, just with Ferania):

Since lots of people like Paperheads, we figured we could do a similar game with Ferania instead.

Of course we wouldn't repeat the mistakes from Paperheads, so the game should be better overall.

Graphic wise it will be a lot of work though...

The graphics are quite large, they're actually being "drawn" instead of pixeled.

(we can't use that method on Deathblight Apocalypse, as such large graphics won't work with a platformer, you won't be able to see where you're jumping etc. but it works with a brawler like Paperheads when there are no platforms and combat is mostly close combat focused)

Still, large graphics mean a lot of work.

So this project will take about as much time as DA.

Which means, slow progress at current Patreon funding level.

Regarding the funding level:

You could say, roughly, that about each 100 $ would help us to work 1 more day on hentai games.

(this actually just covers Cres work time (the art and graphics), not my programming or any other work besides that, but we're somehow managing to do it anyway, basically we're cutting corners and trying to be as cheap as possible with our daily expenses)

At any rate, we believe with current funding that an RPG Maker game would give the best results.

We would be able to deliver quality content on a regular basis, while making enough progress to hopefully keep you satisfied.

I'm also positive that the narrative and combat system will be satisfying as well.

Of course it's different from a platformer, so we can understand if you don't like the idea of us doing an RPG Maker game.

Once the Visual Novel we mentioned earlier is done and sold on Steam, we'll most likely have more money to tackle bigger projects like DA and hire a dedicated pixel artist to speed things up considerably.

That's why we personally believe it's best to do the RPG Maker game now, and get back to DA later when we actually can afford to focus most of our time on it.

As it's really a project that needs more of our attention than we currently can afford to spend on it.

We decided to stick to what you guys and girls vote on, even if you vote for continuing to work on DA or remaking DA.

(primarily we wanted to inform you and ask for everyones opinion on this)

The choice is up to you, here you can vote on what you like us to do next:

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

The survey/vote will be up for 4 weeks til the 29.02.2016.

Thank you very much!