What's new

RPG Patreon Ci-En Fantia RPG Maker [Ason] 蒼キ光と魔剣の鍛冶師 / The Shimmering Horizon and Cursed Blacksmith


Serifyn

Tentacle God
Joined
Nov 10, 2010
Messages
1,390
Reputation score
340
Yeah I agree completely.

Reverse Rape games are erotic because it feels like the girls in the game are lusting after you. That makes the girls themselves very erotic.

I don't think there's much to be concerned about on that front though when it comes to Ason. In Ason's Succubus Basket, the other Succubi inside the mansion would sometimes want to have sex and you needed to fight them off, so I think Ason does a good job of making the heroines show their eroticism through the gameplay.
I get this sense as well, the gameplay and the Hentai content are completely separate, my guess is because the dev wants a non adult steam release.
 

TheUnsaid

Well-known member
Joined
Dec 28, 2019
Messages
1,481
Reputation score
574
Screenshot 2020-02-23 16.39.31.png
I'm still getting the error with the scrolling bar appearing. It goes away on fullscreen though.

I will edit this post once I have more feedback on the game :)

EDIT:
Ok!
So I've played through the whole game.
I must say... The game's really shaping up to be really good. The addition of the arena is nice. It's the closest we have to a recollection room and it's really fun.

I've noticed you made this version easier than all the previous versions. In fact, during my 1h 50 minute play session the only enemy scene I saw was the one from the tutorial. That was quite disappointing to me personally. I do think the difficulty being around this level makes it more accessible to new players however. It might be good to keep it at this level for now.

Did you guys change the sprite animations? Amazon felt a lot bouncier than before. In fact, if my eyes aren't playing tricks on me, the game just feels more HD than before. Also the Red Swordswoman's spin slash has an animation when she charges. Maybe it always had that and I didn't notice however XD.

I also noticed that Vampire rarely resurrects, has much less health and appears much less often. Outside of the health reduction I think this was a good change.

I never met the succubus though T_T
Is she in the game? Does she have a very low chance of appearing? I looped through the dungeon twice and couldn't find her.

Good job on your project, it's really shaping up! Like seriously good work!
 
Last edited:

Someone92

Demon Girl
Joined
Mar 27, 2010
Messages
712
Reputation score
176
Version 0.7 has been released for $5+ Patreon:
 
OP
Ason_oaneashi

Ason_oaneashi

Member
Joined
Aug 10, 2019
Messages
28
Reputation score
49
This is great news. My only problem with this game is how low on erotic content it "feels" it has. I know that objectively speaking it has a lot.

I hope you can make special scenes, like waking up to Doroelle happen randomly as well. Maybe Doroelle has a lust meter where if it goes too high she has sex with you when you wake up? If this happens you get to keep more soul power on revive or something?

In games like Teaching Feeling, it really feels like the heroine loves you when she acts on her own to approach you with sex, so I hope the mentality regarding the sex scenes with the main heroines isn't like a traditional visual novel where it happens once, and that's it.
Yeah I agree completely.

Reverse Rape games are erotic because it feels like the girls in the game are lusting after you. That makes the girls themselves very erotic.

I don't think there's much to be concerned about on that front though when it comes to Ason. In Ason's Succubus Basket, the other Succubi inside the mansion would sometimes want to have sex and you needed to fight them off, so I think Ason does a good job of making the heroines show their eroticism through the gameplay.
Good to hear.
We know that we will be changing the adult content a bit in future, but please don’t get overhyped. We definitely don’t want to give false hope! For this game, considering our available resources. Our original plan was to invest most of our funding into gameplay and game depth. In turn, we did sacrifice the erotic content a bit. However, to increase the quality of the sex content, we tried something big with using Live2D and scouting for Japanese voice actresses. We spent quite a bit of effort on communication, and a lot of time on many different things.

We do know that, for erotic games, maybe nothing is that important other than sex content. Nevertheless, we still wanted to make a game that has more than just sex content. Some games out there are filled with cheap sex, boring stories, and close to 0 gameplay, we just can't stand if we also create something like that. There is still a lot for us to learn, and a lot to resource to acquire.
It’s quite tough to create a unique game with good adult content and good gameplay at the same time, but we still want to keep going on this path. We will see this to the very end, and we will do our best to enhance the sex content. And when this game is finally complete, we will look back and evaluate if all this hardworking is worth it. Every feedback, donation, and sales number will heavily influence Ason’s future.

We could even say that if The Shimmering Horizon and the Cursed Black Smith is successful, then it will be able to really fund Ason as game developer. Our producer and other staffs could finally stop having day jobs, and work on some bigger and better stuff full-time in Ason.

Thanks for all the feedbacks! :D

I get this sense as well, the gameplay and the Hentai content are completely separate, my guess is because the dev wants a non adult steam release.
That is correct. We have been keeping our eyes on Steam, and the reality is, Steam is currently the biggest gaming platform. It could have the most exposure for developers, and every development team wants to be successful on there. That’s why we planned from the start to have a non-adult version. However, that’s not the reason we are lacking a bit on the sex-content. The truth is the cost to making quality adult content is quite high if we want to continue our way.

But Asthetic had given us some good feedbacks before, and there were some good ideas to try, which might not take up too much resources. We will start to try them when all the functions are done, and we are caught up with our schedule.

full save pls
Oh, it’s just the demo right now, game saves are not that usually at the moment. But you can see if there are people who want to share it with you.

View attachment 29717
I'm still getting the error with the scrolling bar appearing. It goes away on fullscreen though.

I will edit this post once I have more feedback on the game :)

EDIT:
Ok!
So I've played through the whole game.
I must say... The game's really shaping up to be really good. The addition of the arena is nice. It's the closest we have to a recollection room and it's really fun.

I've noticed you made this version easier than all the previous versions. In fact, during my 1h 50 minute play session the only enemy scene I saw was the one from the tutorial. That was quite disappointing to me personally. I do think the difficulty being around this level makes it more accessible to new players however. It might be good to keep it at this level for now.

Did you guys change the sprite animations? Amazon felt a lot bouncier than before. In fact, if my eyes aren't playing tricks on me, the game just feels more HD than before. Also the Red Swordswoman's spin slash has an animation when she charges. Maybe it always had that and I didn't notice however XD.

I also noticed that Vampire rarely resurrects, has much less health and appears much less often. Outside of the health reduction I think this was a good change.

I never met the succubus though T_T
Is she in the game? Does she have a very low chance of appearing? I looped through the dungeon twice and couldn't find her.

Good job on your project, it's really shaping up! Like seriously good work!
Oh god, ok, we will see what we can do to fix that scroll bar error.

About the difficulty, we did thought about the new comers, especially the ones who is not familiar with this type of games, are prone to give up if they kept dying or wasn’t able to progress. So yeah, we have been adjusting the difficulty and friendliness.

Demos are mostly for testing though, things are still changing. And we will be adjusting again when the first boss is finished. But we do plan to have easier levels in the early stage so players can get used to the controls and mechanics, and we will be ramping up the difficulty in mid and late game.

We did try to improve on animations when we can, you might just caught the details we improved on. :D

The chances of Vampiress reviving is set to one time right now, but if you attack with light type, you would be able to kill her right away. The chances of she appearing did not change though, because we didn’t have time to work on the dungeon this month… _( :3 」∠ )_

Succubus is not yet deployed, other than we are still waiting for the voice actress to send us the files, we are also planning to put spawn her after the first boss. There are way too many things we are working on at the same time right now.

Thanks for your compliment, we will keep up the hard work!

Version 0.7 has been released for $5+ Patreon:
Thanks for posting our new demo. ;)

-----------------------------

This month’s demo v0.07 is up on Patreon, other than some new UI functions, we also implemented the Arena. For this version, Arena is built for players to fight monster girls more conveniently, and we will build the main function for it later. Arena is not really the kind of H-scene gallery we have in mind, but you guys can use it to quench the thirst for now. We will be working on the H-scene gallery after all the voice acting are done. (Maybe some of our current Patrons have already found that we had prepared two sets of subtitles in our new H-scene video post?)

One more thing. if our donation amount can still keep up at our first donation goal at the beginning of March, then we will be hosting our first “Adding a new monster girl” poll. We will list different kinds of monster girls, and add the one with the most vote into the game.

Thank you everyone for your support so far, and we will keep up our hard work!
 

TheUnsaid

Well-known member
Joined
Dec 28, 2019
Messages
1,481
Reputation score
574
@Ason_oaneashi
Isn't Melty's Quest on steam?
Quite a lot of games on steam are adult only, and that doesn't hurt them.
We do know that, for erotic games, maybe nothing is that important other than sex content. Nevertheless, we still wanted to make a game that has more than just sex content. Some games out there are filled with cheap sex, boring stories, and close to 0 gameplay, we just can't stand if we also create something like that. There is still a lot for us to learn, and a lot to resource to acquire.
It’s quite tough to create a unique game with good adult content and good gameplay at the same time, but we still want to keep going on this path. We will see this to the very end, and we will do our best to enhance the sex content.
I think you guys are undervaluing yourselves.
The gameplay is fantastic. It's absolutely fantastic!

The only complaints we have is just that the sexual content feels too low even though there's a lot. In the latest demo, The only sex I experienced was the tutorial and Doroelle's scene. In fact, I was never defeated in the dungeon. Personally, I don't think this is a problem that "difficulty" can solve, but it's just a general design problem. I don't know what your limitations are so I can't give direct advice or anything, so I'm excited to see your solutions.

If you released the game as it is right now however, I would still purchase the game and be excited for your next work.

We could even say that if The Shimmering Horizon and the Cursed Black Smith is successful, then it will be able to really fund Ason as game developer. Our producer and other staffs could finally stop having day jobs, and work on some bigger and better stuff full-time in Ason.


I can't wait to see what Ason turns into :D
 

Aesthetic

Well-known member
Joined
Jul 21, 2018
Messages
733
Reputation score
341
Succubus is not yet deployed, other than we are still waiting for the voice actress to send us the files, we are also planning to put spawn her after the first boss. There are way too many things we are working on at the same time right now.
I'm really curious about the boss now... Like REALLY CURIOUS!

We've already seen some hints of the succubus so if she appears AFTER the boss, it means you guys have already done some work on the boss. I can't wait.

I also noticed in the arena room you have quite a few slots for future enemies. I don't recommend having so many empty slots since people will have expectations of the final game. It's better to only have slots for the characters that can be unlocked in the current demo.
 
OP
Ason_oaneashi

Ason_oaneashi

Member
Joined
Aug 10, 2019
Messages
28
Reputation score
49
@Ason_oaneashi
Isn't Melty's Quest on steam?
Quite a lot of games on steam are adult only, and that doesn't hurt them.

I think you guys are undervaluing yourselves.
The gameplay is fantastic. It's absolutely fantastic!

The only complaints we have is just that the sexual content feels too low even though there's a lot. In the latest demo, The only sex I experienced was the tutorial and Doroelle's scene. In fact, I was never defeated in the dungeon. Personally, I don't think this is a problem that "difficulty" can solve, but it's just a general design problem. I don't know what your limitations are so I can't give direct advice or anything, so I'm excited to see your solutions.

If you released the game as it is right now however, I would still purchase the game and be excited for your next work.




I can't wait to see what Ason turns into :D
Yeah, Melty’s Quest is a nice game, quite practical.
In fact, Stream’s policy is getting stricter. If the game’s art is in Japanese style, and you know how some Japanese H game content might turn out to be illegal in western country laws, so it might be banned.
Nonetheless, we are striving for really good gameplay, so if we don’t release as adult game on steam, it can still be quite enjoyable as a normal game. Imagine beating a normal non adult game you really like, and later found out there is adult content patch later. That would bring new meaning to the game isn’t it?

Anyway, thank you for your compliment! And about the difficulty, we will keep balancing it in the future. There is quite a bit of stuff we are juggling around right now, so balancing isn’t on the top of our list.
We don’t know how Ason will turn into in the future, but we hope we can keep making more interesting games. :D

By the way, we have updated our engine for the demo v0.08, please see if the scroll bar error still exist, we will see what else we can do if it’s still there…

I'm really curious about the boss now... Like REALLY CURIOUS!

We've already seen some hints of the succubus so if she appears AFTER the boss, it means you guys have already done some work on the boss. I can't wait.

I also noticed in the arena room you have quite a few slots for future enemies. I don't recommend having so many empty slots since people will have expectations of the final game. It's better to only have slots for the characters that can be unlocked in the current demo.
Oh no, we didn’t plan to have H-content for the boss itself, but we actually plan to have an exhilarating fight, and it’s related to the story.
Every boos fight would be a test to the players, and passing the test would reveal a new character.
Beating the bosses would push the story to the next chapter, and also have new monster girls appear in the later dungeons, so we want players to focus on fighting the boss instead of wondering what H-scene the boss would have.

However, you can look forward to the final boss of the game, there might be what you are looking for. ;)

24 slots are actually the number of monster girls we plan to have right now, there is more information on our voting posts on Patreon. And the slot number is only going to increase, unless there are some unforeseeable challenge in the future.

-----------------------------------------------------------

P.S. Demo v0.08 is live. Go check it out if you are interested! :D
 

TheUnsaid

Well-known member
Joined
Dec 28, 2019
Messages
1,481
Reputation score
574
I'll be delayed in giving feedback this time around...
I've cut back on Patreon expenditures, but I plan on re-subbing eventually. I'll probably come back when the changes to the adult content are made since that's what I'm most concerned about. You guys have a lot of skill. I have the utmost confidence you will have created a fantastic boss battle :D
 

TheImmortalKite

New member
Joined
Nov 8, 2018
Messages
11
Reputation score
2
I'm gonna keep an eye on this one. What I've seen of the gameplay and mations I like. Can't patreon right now so I can't try it firsthand. I'll have to look at my budgets once I figure out how much moving the Japan trip to July 2021 will cost... Anyway, keep it up and I'll see you in September (When I can purchase the actual air tickets and see exactly how much I should have on deck.)

Edit: Just read through the whole thread and noticed you Patreon incentive. I'll give you a hand in advance, then.
 
Last edited:

Strange

Demon Girl Pro
Joined
Jul 24, 2014
Messages
1,256
Reputation score
486
I'll have to look at my budgets once I figure out how much moving the Japan trip to July 2021 will cost...
Have some extra coin on hand, in case you're not a very good swimmer ;)

It sounds like they finally put the voice acting on hold ('cuz karaoke-deprived Asia for obvious reasons) and they'll be releasing a new demo in June.
Still no news about a public demo, as far as I know.
May I ask, how many girls are implemented so far in the current demo, out of the ( 20? 30?) planned for the full game?
Doroelle (poster girl)
Amazon
Demoness
Sword Maiden
Oni
Maid
Fencer
Skocjan (just a goddess/statue?)
Lamia
Vampiress
Succubus
Priestess
Rezia (heroine?)
Angel
Elven Archer
Elven Fighter
Succubus Queen
 

anon52

New member
Joined
May 11, 2018
Messages
22
Reputation score
5
well if i am not completly mistaken i think many of the revealed ones are actually stil in progress - due to the addition of voice acting i think.
The ones in the game that i know of would be:
Amazon, Demoness, Sword Maiden, Oni, Maid, Lamia and one Scene with Doroelle.
The goddess is a statue and currently serves as a "credit to all Patreons" who spended atleast 20$.
 

TheUnsaid

Well-known member
Joined
Dec 28, 2019
Messages
1,481
Reputation score
574
well if i am not completly mistaken i think many of the revealed ones are actually stil in progress - due to the addition of voice acting i think.
The ones in the game that i know of would be:
Amazon, Demoness, Sword Maiden, Oni, Maid, Lamia and one Scene with Doroelle.
The goddess is a statue and currently serves as a "credit to all Patreons" who spended atleast 20$.
The vampire is also in the game.
The goddess statue serves as a credit to ALL patreons. I know, because I'm on there and I haven't donated $20.
 

anon52

New member
Joined
May 11, 2018
Messages
22
Reputation score
5
my bad - mixed it up with the statement about recieving a copy of the game if you donated atleast 30$ in total. (as steam key when it launches)
 

Strange

Demon Girl Pro
Joined
Jul 24, 2014
Messages
1,256
Reputation score
486
Thanks, that matches the 7 girls I saw there
 

TheUnsaid

Well-known member
Joined
Dec 28, 2019
Messages
1,481
Reputation score
574
Thanks, that matches the 7 girls I saw there
Yeah, that's exactly how it looks in the most recent demo.

They've finished more girls when it comes to animation and programming though. They've finished an archer elf, a fist fighter and at least one more... ah that's right the succubus They're just waiting on the voicework for those girls. though. I've also talked to them and it seems like those girls will be introduced after the first boss. I really can't wait until their next update. I'm definitely gonna be playing that.
 

TheImmortalKite

New member
Joined
Nov 8, 2018
Messages
11
Reputation score
2
Initial thoughts: Just as I had hoped on almost all the gameplay and mation areas. Pretty easy game to pickup, and there's enough variety in the weapons that I love to just meander through the maze making things.

Thanks to the arena, I found (to me at least) a disappointing tendency. If you get knocked down and there are more than 2 enemies close by, two of them will very quickly monopolize the grapples. when they are initially setting up, you might get a third who gets one grab, but after that those two are off to the races. Tested this in the tutorial area, and the two oni just took turns, even with the rest of the group there.

Update: It appears to be caused by having minor enemies attacking, and the positions of enemies in the turn order. I think I had an issue like this during my RPG maker vx days, and I KNOW that Queen amongst Vixens had an issue like this, capping the enemies you could fight at once at two.
 
Last edited:

anon52

New member
Joined
May 11, 2018
Messages
22
Reputation score
5
well that might be a minor issue given the current design decision to limit the numbers of enemies per dungeon - currently the first area has 3 Girls - lamia (though kinda rare), amazon and oni. I think tutorial and the "gallery/arena" are the only areas you can effectively encounter more enemies at once.

will be kinda interesting to see though if we get a system that allows us to skip certain areas once we progressed passed them. Might be my nature that i am most of time not that into rougue concepts but i think having to beat 4-5 dungeons per "area" we could end up having around 30+ dungeons to get through. not saying i dont like a hgame that delivers on the game part, i just think that it would be rather beneficial to cut unnecessary loops. IMO the Starting bonus unlocks you get through dorelle are certanly a step towards this but i dont think that statt improvements alone would be enough - maybe adding another shortcut type in the dungeon once you beat the boss would help.

but like i said - not much of a rougue type gamer, take everything here with a pinch of salt.
(And maybe the devs already thought of something but had others priorities sofar - would make sense since we are not having all the content, thus seeing all the implemented areas is easier to achieve)
 

TheUnsaid

Well-known member
Joined
Dec 28, 2019
Messages
1,481
Reputation score
574
well that might be a minor issue given the current design decision to limit the numbers of enemies per dungeon - currently the first area has 3 Girls - lamia (though kinda rare), amazon and oni. I think tutorial and the "gallery/arena" are the only areas you can effectively encounter more enemies at once.

will be kinda interesting to see though if we get a system that allows us to skip certain areas once we progressed passed them. Might be my nature that i am most of time not that into rougue concepts but i think having to beat 4-5 dungeons per "area" we could end up having around 30+ dungeons to get through. not saying i dont like a hgame that delivers on the game part, i just think that it would be rather beneficial to cut unnecessary loops. IMO the Starting bonus unlocks you get through dorelle are certanly a step towards this but i dont think that statt improvements alone would be enough - maybe adding another shortcut type in the dungeon once you beat the boss would help.

but like i said - not much of a rougue type gamer, take everything here with a pinch of salt.
(And maybe the devs already thought of something but had others priorities sofar - would make sense since we are not having all the content, thus seeing all the implemented areas is easier to achieve)
You don't have to fully explore every map to make it to the next floor though. There's also those midpoint areas that let you return to homebase. Those could become teleportation starting points.
 
Top