RPG Patreon Active [AstroKaen] Melting Point

[AstroKaen]

Overview:
Among the stars of the constellation Canes Venatici there is a pair of twin planets, home to two different species. On Ustrina, you have the Furna. Creatures made of the lava that run wild in the rivers that cross their planet. Then you have Aestrum, where it's fallen stars give life to the gorgeous and courageous Metals. For a time so long neither can remember when it began, both species have been raging in an endless war. After countless centuries of combat, the Furna have finally gained the upper hand, and almost brought the Metals to extinction.
One day, when returning home from a supply trip, a Metal ship was ambushed and shot down by a Furna patrol. Crash-landing on a planet known as Earth.

This is your home. Being a simple blacksmith, enjoying the quiet life with your forge. That night, as you were preparing yourself for a good night's sleep, a huge crash from just outside your house rouses you from slumber. Upon inspecting you discover the tarnished remains of a spaceship, and a metallic girl unconscious among the wreckage. This is the moment when your simple fate leapt into the stars. To become the hero the Metals need!

Melting Point's main story is driven by a visual novel style text format, all that's needed to advanced text is left clicking your mouse. In Melting Point the player takes on the role of a blacksmith, your goal is to aid these alien beauties in their war against the oppressive Furna. When the girls are injured in combat use your skills as a blacksmith in a mini-game where you perform a number of functions with your mouse to repair the girl back to fighting condition.

Lead them in real time turn based combat, in the heat of battle everything is fast paced and never stopping. Different actions will push you back by a certain amount of time on the turn order, and some of your actions can even push the enemies turns back on the turn order! So you'll always have to be on your toes and pick the best action for the situation you find yourself in. Combat is fully controlled by the mouse as well!

But once the battle is won and you finally have some downtime, why not spend some time with the girls and get to know them. Making use of our visual novel engine to follow the story learn information about the girls and use your knowledge of them to grow closer to them.

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-Game Features-
-Demo Features-
Melting Point's Prologue.
Introduction to Tin, the game's first main heroine.
Tin's animated dialogue portrait with full story voice acting.
Tin's first 4 dates, followed by 1 H-Scene
Tin's re-forging mini-game.
2D Realtime Tactics Combat System.

-Full Game Features Currently Planned-
8+ Hours of Gameplay
An epic tale told over 3 main story acts, following the story of a blacksmith supporting a group of metallic girls.
9 Dateable Women inspired by the Metals of the Periodic Table
2D Realtime Tactics Combat System.
Completely Animated Dialogue Portraits
Animated Romance Illustrations.
Voice acting for all important story scenes, mini-games, combat, and romance scenes.
"Harem" content for multiple love interests at once.

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​

 

[DarkFire1004]

This thread has been moved to the H-Section to be locked due to a lack of gameplay information. If you wish to preserve this thread, please PM a moderator with an updated OP.

Edit - Thread unlocked

 

[dood]

If she starts looking for John Connor I'm out of here.

 

[AstroKaen]

If she starts looking for John Connor I'm out of here.

That's hilarious

 

[TheUnsaid]

I must say, I'm surprised.

The game has great voicework, a cohesive theme, and a lot of potential.
The combat system is quite simple, but I won't be too critical of it for now. It's still early in the project, and turn-based games on average don't show depth until later on in the experience.
Don't be scared to play around with passives and unique abilities though. As it is right now, it's too shallow to carry a relatively long game.

___

That being said there are a few things I'm critical of.

First is the heroine's character design.
She's dressed like a traditional anime schoolgirl. Normal shirt with a skirt. Socks and shoes coming out of your traditional japanese highschool.
She's an alien warrior who's part of an "immortal" race on the frontlines of a battle. Even if you want to take a more comedic direction when it comes to her design I think something along the lines of Asobi Ni Ikuyo would fit better.

Or the suits from MuvLuv?

Either way, I'm personally feeling a strong clash of identity with the heroine.

Second is the protagonist, and how he gets involved with the whole thing.
Mind you, this is just my personal preference and how I personally view the narrative coming through here.

MC is willing to give up his life extremely easily. Also, when they get to the ship, Tin reports to him like he's the captain making all the decisions for them as a group without it feeling like he earned the position really. I think it would be more interesting if the MC decides to follow Tin because the Furna now have earth on their radar (now that they've chased Tin there), and Tin, and the other metalloids are Earth's only chance of surviving. It makes his motivations more selfless, and would make any assertive actions he takes to be in a leadership position make more sense.

Third, it feels like Tin's going through mood swings talking to her. She gets sad, then happy go lucky throwing fake punches in the air, to depressed in seconds. Contrasted to the MC's absolute stoicism and it feels quite jarring. Most VNs are really long, that's why they have characters go through expressions so often, but you usually won't see people go to extreme expression changes like this. Take Majikoi the VN for instance, most of the times, each character will swap between smaller emotional shifts, like their normal portrait, to their goofing around portrait, to their shocked portrait or something like that as the butt of a joke. If they cry, it'll happen like... twice throughout the entire game. The appearance of that portrait is a big deal.

Though from a writing standpoint I can't be too critical. My pornhub animations aren't too popular, and the fans don't give too much detailed feedback on my work so I don't know if I'm doing anything right XD.

___________


Speaking of feedback, I'll just say this. Don't let the lack of feedback get you down. The indie eroge industry is truly exhausted with promising developers entering the field and not finishing their products *cough.* The community for "GAMES UNDER CONSTRUCTION" is MUCH smaller then the community garnered from a completed game.

======

EDIT:
Oh forgot to give gameplay specific feedback.
The save load function is broken. If you save, then load, all subsequent saves will be treated as a load, unless you click on the save button to the side of the actual save screen again. It doesn't look like a button but a decoration as well.
The game has no crawling text. This is a no-brainer when it comes to ADV presentation. The fact that it's not there is more than jarring.
The tutorial for the ship functions do not highlight the buttons when Tin is specifically talking about the functions. It's easy to guess, but not by order on screen.

The turn-based combat is not really explained well. Enemies and players acting at the same time causes strange interactions like skills just not activating.

 

[AstroKaen]

I must say, I'm surprised.

The game has great voicework, a cohesive theme, and a lot of potential.
The combat system is quite simple, but I won't be too critical of it for now. It's still early in the project, and turn-based games on average don't show depth until later on in the experience.
Don't be scared to play around with passives and unique abilities though. As it is right now, it's too shallow to carry a relatively long game.

___

That being said there are a few things I'm critical of.

First is the heroine's character design.
She's dressed like a traditional anime schoolgirl. Normal shirt with a skirt. Socks and shoes coming out of your traditional japanese highschool.
She's an alien warrior who's part of an "immortal" race on the frontlines of a battle. Even if you want to take a more comedic direction when it comes to her design I think something along the lines of Asobi Ni Ikuyo would fit better.

Or the suits from MuvLuv?

Either way, I'm personally feeling a strong clash of identity with the heroine.

Second is the protagonist, and how he gets involved with the whole thing.
Mind you, this is just my personal preference and how I personally view the narrative coming through here.

MC is willing to give up his life extremely easily. Also, when they get to the ship, Tin reports to him like he's the captain making all the decisions for them as a group without it feeling like he earned the position really. I think it would be more interesting if the MC decides to follow Tin because the Furna now have earth on their radar (now that they've chased Tin there), and Tin, and the other metalloids are Earth's only chance of surviving. It makes his motivations more selfless, and would make any assertive actions he takes to be in a leadership position make more sense.

Third, it feels like Tin's going through mood swings talking to her. She gets sad, then happy go lucky throwing fake punches in the air, to depressed in seconds. Contrasted to the MC's absolute stoicism and it feels quite jarring. Most VNs are really long, that's why they have characters go through expressions so often, but you usually won't see people go to extreme expression changes like this. Take Majikoi the VN for instance, most of the times, each character will swap between smaller emotional shifts, like their normal portrait, to their goofing around portrait, to their shocked portrait or something like that as the butt of a joke. If they cry, it'll happen like... twice throughout the entire game. The appearance of that portrait is a big deal.

Though from a writing standpoint I can't be too critical. My pornhub animations aren't too popular, and the fans don't give too much detailed feedback on my work so I don't know if I'm doing anything right XD.

___________


Speaking of feedback, I'll just say this. Don't let the lack of feedback get you down. The indie eroge industry is truly exhausted with promising developers entering the field and not finishing their products *cough.* The community for "GAMES UNDER CONSTRUCTION" is MUCH smaller then the community garnered from a completed game.

======

EDIT:
Oh forgot to give gameplay specific feedback.
The save load function is broken. If you save, then load, all subsequent saves will be treated as a load, unless you click on the save button to the side of the actual save screen again. It doesn't look like a button but a decoration as well.
The game has no crawling text. This is a no-brainer when it comes to ADV presentation. The fact that it's not there is more than jarring.
The tutorial for the ship functions do not highlight the buttons when Tin is specifically talking about the functions. It's easy to guess, but not by order on screen.

The turn-based combat is not really explained well. Enemies and players acting at the same time causes strange interactions like skills just not activating.

First of all thank you so much for playing the game and for your long and cohesive thoughts on It!

Yep! We have a lot planned for combat this is just the groundwork and there's going to be a lot more going into it in the future, such as multiple special skills for each girl different types of power ups and passives and more!

Our Art Director actually expressed the wish to change Tin's clothing because of that very reason it wasn't "Alien" enough, in the banner you actually see her with a different outfit it's not present in game yet but that's the one we're planning to change her into soon to express a more other worldly appeal!

And no worries all writing suggestions is absolutely great at this stage! We're a new studio and this is our first ever game project so we're all pretty fresh to our roles, the writer especially would love all of this feedback and I'll be sure to send all of this his way because what you said did make a lot of sense!

And I won't like it was a little disheartening I was expecting a bit more than this because of the amount of work we put into the project, but I the owner personally spent to much money to let it get me down now so everyone at the studio is going to keep pushing.

Yep the save and load is a known bug I thought I fixed it but guess I was wrong it's on our high priority list to fist because it's annoying.

The reason we got rid of the crawling text because it was doing weird things with our games engine sometimes the text would crawl but it would delete all of the text after it was done (weird I know) so for now we disabled it just until we can get the right presentation we want for it.

The ship tutorial is a last minute edition after some beta testers got stuck at the ship and didn't know how to actually do everything in the future it will be more detailed and fleshed out.

And yep it turns out a combat tutorial is needed I've heard that a couple of times now we thought we had it simple enough but this is good feedback, a tutorial explaining everything will be in the making for it in the future along with some massive overhaul to fix some of those bugs and strangeness as the studio starts to make the transition into it's next phase of life after the demo.

Thank you once again for all of your feedback and I do hope you'll keep Melting Point on your radar going into the future!