Jump to content

Hellscape ~ Scelus Empire, the realm of Acedia (NSFW)


Eternals-Eiliya

Recommended Posts

On2X7Jd.png

I'm Eiliya, the founding member of Eternals Developing, a small studio of indie developers that mainly focuses on erotic games (we do have other projects in the air as well, but I will refrain from mentioning them here). Since one of our games is fairly close to reaching the point where we can release a demo, our programmer suggested that we start trying to spread the word of our game. Fuwanovel was among the sites that he suggested, so here I am. Let me introduce the game.

TUFbFqi.png

Hellscape - The Scelus Empire is what I like to call a patchwork game. It's intended to feature aspects from various types of games, such as the narration system of visual novels, the turn-based combat of old-school rpgs and the city building/governing of many simulation games, mixed in what I hope will be a fun and engaging experience for any player. The main focus of the game is obviously going to be the story told and when the game starts, only the visual novel narration and the rpg system will be available to the player but as the story moves on and future episodes are released, new features will be added to the previous version.

Warning: From here on is the details of the game. While there will be no actual such images on display, the game is erotic in nature. If this bothers you, this read is not for you. Also, if you do not really care for what the game is about and only wishes to know what you can do to help, there are links at the bottom of the post.

Story: You play as Taranoir, a demigod that once ruled over Hellscape, the mightiest empire in the Abyss. Due to the goddess that created you having been captured by enemy dieties, you have now lost your divine powers and the mighty empire is crumbling into chaos. In order to survive, you escape to the mundane world with the intention of gathering enough followers and worshippers to elevate yourself into goodhood, thus regaining the power you need to rescue your divine parent and retake your lost homeland. And what is the best way to go about doing this? Conquring the world, of course!
 

Spoiler

 

Systems: Earlier, I mentioned that the game is a patchwork of various systems. Let me go into those a bit deeper. The narration (basically all of the story-related text in the game) will be shown by the means of a typical visual novel system. An image will be shown in the background to represent the current location, sprites of characters will be placed over the background to represent people talking and on top of all of that will be the textbox which shows the text to the player. I'm quite confident everyone here knows what I 'm talking about.

kPciTNh.png

Next is the dungeon exploration system, which is still very much a work in progress. As things stand right now, it will be an isometric map system in which the player can explore the dungeon by moving the player icon in a way that is somewhat simillar to turn-based strategy games. The places you can move to are determined by your current location and each time you move there is a chance for a random encounter to take place. Some of the dungeons will also contain puzzles of varying difficulty (anything from flipping a lever to unlock a door to sliding mirrors in order to reflect light through a maze).

UN8IbUW.png

Closely related to the dungeons is the combat system. Our combat system is a turn-based combat system with an active time gauge that gives the player a fairly accurate idea of the order in which the combatants will be acting. The maximum number of active fighters on either side is 3, but both sides can have backup combatants. For the enemies, these simply replace defeated foes until the stockpile is empty, but for the player, things are different. The player can only bring a total of six characters into a dungeon, and they need to be separated into the front row and the back row. Characters can then be swapped between these rows during combat, but in order for this to be doable, the swapping character must be alive. While a character is in the front row, the player is able to control them and decide what they do during their turn in the combat and while they are in the back row, they instead provide some kind of passive boost to the player party.

YZ9geFr.png

As with all RPGs, this one will also contain an experience based growth system where your strength is represented by your character level. A character can have three types of levels, Adventurer, Prostitute and Chancellor, all of which serve different roles when playing the game. Note that not all characters have access to all three roles. There will be both upgradable weaponry and replacable equipment, as well as an inventory system containing a total of 30 different items (key items not included), some of which can be used both in and out of combat. There is both a limit to how many of each item you can carry in your stockpile (9) as well as how many you can bring with you into actual combat (determined by the character's carrying capacity). Finally, once you unlock a specific function in the game, you will also be able to upgrade the rank and power of certain items.

rf3iXna.png

Finally, while it is still a project for the future, let me talk about the city management system. At a certain point in the game, you will be given the reigns of your own empire and this brings with it the need to govern it properly. Through governing, you can explore new lands (thus unlocking hidden dungeons and locations), state decrees (lots of uses, but mainly upgrading your captial and managing your army units), attack neighbors (mainly used to progress the story) and simillar things such as these. In order to properly govern your empire, you need to appoint members to a Ruling Council. This is where the aforementioned Chancellors come into play. Only characters with levels in Chancellor can be appointed to the council and only by serving as a Chancellor can you increase your level as one. Assigning a character to the Council prevents them from performing as any of the other roles (Adventurer or Prostitute), but instead grants important functions when governing the empire. An appointed role is never permanent, you can always swap between them provided the character can access more than one.

The Erotica: The Brothel is where you engage in sexual activities with the female cast. It serves both to convert girls (most of whom start out as your enemies) to join your cause, as well as a means to upgrade your female characters and it can also be used to generate the important resources that are neccessary to upgrade the structures in your capital. The system will work a little bit like the talent system that can be found in most MMORPGs, where you get special talent points from leveling up and can them use these points up upgrade your character. In this game, instead of making them stronger, it will affect their personality and behavior, as well as influence their role in combat.

W4z8mdO.png

While leveling up the character is required to get the points for making progress on the Sexual Branches, that is not all that is required. You also need to have certain non-combat stats be at specific values to unlock some of the events. Juliyala is the first female character that appears in the game, for instance, and one of her branches is Innocence. In order to unlock that, you need to guide her onto a more kind and goodhearted path so that her Good and Harmony stats will get high enough. Another example is Rosanna, whose second branch is Submission. In order to unlock that, you will need to oppress her and show her who's the boss. After a while, she awakens to that kind of pleasure which will give you access to her second branch.

PE8tlHa.png

So, I've mentioned a few of the branches. At this point in the game, we have six different ones; Acrobatic, Innocence, Monster, Servitude, Submission and Wild. Each female main character has one path that is true to their personality, another that is the closest thing to an opposite we could think up, and a third one that was added simply to add more variation. As the game gets updated through new episodes, additional ones may be added, but for now, these are all that are planned. When leveling the character, even if you reach the max level, you will still only have enough points to fill one-and-a-half of the branches. This is because when you reach the end of one of the branches, the character gets a whole new look and their personality changes in accordance with what path you completed.

And I think that's it, for now. There are a few other systems as well, but since they will not be used until quite a bit into the story and thus require further episodes to be released, I will omit them for now. Thank you for reading, I hope I peaked your interest at least a little bit.

 

Seeing as how walls of text are usually frowned upon by the community, I put the biggest chunk of text into a spoiler. It contains details about the various systems we plan on using, so if you are interested, please do read it. For those of you who want something that is a bit less heavy to handle, here's a video demo of the first few minutes of the game (note that only the visual novel aspect of the game is being shown):

 

Since I do not know if I am allowed to post links to crowdfunders, I'll refrain from doing so. If you are interested in helping me out, drop me a private message and we can solve the issue in private.

Thank you a lot for having taken the time to read thus far. It means a lot to us.

Edited by Eternals-Eiliya
updating the original post
Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

You need to format this so it doesn't look like a wall of text and add pictures.  Most readers aren't going to get past the first paragraph with a post like this.

I actually thought the same but when I saw the pictures on the artist's spots, I thought in myself - no need for pictures on Fuwanovel for these xD ... I have read the entire post, I think he made several repeats of himself (in the parts where he speaks about how much of what was completed) but overall it did give enough info to make me interested a little bit ...

Though it needs a little bit of formatting here and there, overall it looks fine to me (I am used to reading posts like these on the net all the time but I agree many will just skip it if's a very long post without pictures like this) ...

I don't think that there are many people on Fuwanovel that are interested in these kind of VNs (maybe I am wrong?) but since it is a VN with gameplay elements I think it can become preety fun, who knows, maybe it becomes popular like Sunrider and some other VNs of that sort ...

I'll be honest and say that I actually like the art, that picture at the beginning of the post looks uninteresting but the actual artist's pages look awesome, not Japanese style of awesome, but awesome nontheless, they do have solid artists, as for the writing, I will try reading it later, I see the scenarist has some previous work on his blog so I am quite interested to see what he has to offer :) ...

I'd just like to ask @Eternals-Eiliya what engine are they using for this VN? I see it has dungeon crawler elements which I am personally not against (I kind of liked Raidy series) but other mentioned things like city management can be preety boring to me, but if it's done well, who knows, maybe it becomes a classic one day XD ...

Also, I'd like to know where do they plan to publish this game? It looks like Nutaku or MangaGamer material to me ...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, sanahtlig said:

You need to format this so it doesn't look like a wall of text and add pictures.  Most readers aren't going to get past the first paragraph with a post like this.

I was going to add more pictures to the post, since the whole thing really is nothing more than just a big wall of text right now, but I don't really know what pictures I can put where in the text. Except for the screencapture of the main menu, I don't really have any images that go well with the text, and I didn't want to put random images there just for the sake of having images. But maybe I should do that... I could maybe make something like a montage of the characters and backgrounds, and splice in between the various segments of the text. I'll see what I can do about it.

4 hours ago, Infernoplex said:

What engine are they using for this VN? Also, I'd like to know where do they plan to publish this game?

We are using RenPy as the base engine, and supplementing it with a lot of specialised python scripts to make up for what the basic RenPy engine can't handle. I'm not a programmer, so I don't know the full details, sadly. As for where we are planning on releasing it, I haven't really thought about that yet. The only thing I know for certain is that I'll try to have it available through the patreon once it is updated. I've also made plans to make hardware copies (complete with a box and some extra stuff in it) for the rare occation that someone actually wants to buy a hardware copy. As for selling it online, well, I've heard DLSite is a good choice, but I haven't checked it myself yet. I've also been told that Nutaku can be a bit difficult to deal with, and I've not heard anything at all about MangaGamer. I will look into both of them further, of course.

Thank you for taking the time to read and give your opinions and feedback.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, Eternals-Eiliya said:

I was going to add more pictures to the post, since the whole thing really is nothing more than just a big wall of text right now, but I don't really know what pictures I can put where in the text. Except for the screencapture of the main menu, I don't really have any images that go well with the text, and I didn't want to put random images there just for the sake of having images. But maybe I should do that... I could maybe make something like a montage of the characters and backgrounds, and splice in between the various segments of the text. I'll see what I can do about it.

You need to think about your target audience: likely people who've never heard of your game before.  You have about 10-30s to capture their interest and make them want to learn more.  You might want to separate the content intended to make that first impression from the content meant for those who are already interested.  Try using Steam store pages as a model of how to lay this out.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Eternals-Eiliya - I thought as much, Ren'py is the most common one, but lately people are moving on to Unity and other more powerful engines, nevermind though, Ren'py can be perfectly fine for everything too, especially if it's powered up by good custom python scripts ... As for the publishers, DLSite is good too I guess, I mentioned Nutaku and MangaGamer because I know that in the west they are popular, though I can't tell you how difficult Nutaku is, they are kind of censorship-happy so I don't know whether they are a good choice and I mentioned MangaGamer because they sometimes give their platform to developers like you to publish their games, for example, this one came to my mind but MangaGamer is mostly into Japanese VNs only ... I don't know much about DLSite but I do know that they mostly sell Japanese H-RPG games if I remember correctly, they might be better than others, I don't know though ...

You should also follow Sanahtlig's advice, this wall of text might be okay-ish to someone like me but regular users don't pay much attention to this kind of presentation so you should try working out on that :)

Edited by Infernoplex
typo
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...