[RPG Maker] Daughter of Essence [Big Update 01-24-20!]

[IndoorMinotaur]

Presents



Hi, we’re Indoor Minotaur, a duo of experienced writers and game-makers, and we are creating an adult JRPG called Daughter of Essence.

Here's our latest trailer: https://youtu.be/X3xsrvi8aQM

UPDATED! The public build of Daughter of Essence received another big update on 01-24-20, jumping from 0.94 to 0.116! You can always find the public build at the top of our Patreon.



Want to know more?

In Daughter of Essence, you play as Mercy, a young woman who yearns to be free from mundane obligation, free from the oppressive watchfulness of her wealthy family, and free from the harsh laws of the empire. As one of the only living daughters of essence, however, freedom is not so simple. The Oldlight Empire and the Church both want her captured, and countless other factions want her strange gifts for their own gain.

To be truly free, she must learn to sacrifice.




Features:

- Relevant, fun and meaningful sexual encounters, written in detail and illustrated
- Draw "essence" from elemental enemies, enchanted items and sexual encounters and use that essence to unlock new spells, potions, equipment upgrade runes, weapons skills, key items, and more!
- Thought-provoking and deep character-building potential
- Choose your class specialization, distribute stats how you want, equip different skillsets for different battles, change weapons mid-fight, raise proficiency with weapon types by using them, mix-and-match equipment to create your ideal build!
- Sideview RPG combat with an Active Time Battle system and distinct timed-attack patterns for each weapon type and spell
- Character-driven narrative with many paths and secrets
- Base-building
- A large, complex world with many factions, races, religions, and interesting people




Keep in touch!

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/indoorminotaur
Blog: http://indoorminotaur.blogspot.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/IndoorMinotaur
Discord: https://discord.gg/7hTwuTH
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3xsrvi8aQM

Other outlets:

Itch.io: https://indoorminotaur.itch.io/daughter-of-essence
Game Jolt: https://gamejolt.com/games/daughterofessence/336983

Guest Artists featured:

Javier Martinez: https://www.patreon.com/JavierMTZ
Miuseorin: https://www.patreon.com/miuseorin
Francisco Balbuena: https://mesiasart.deviantart.com/
Glazen: https://www.patreon.com/tsunderebaka
Falkeart: https://falkeart.deviantart.com/
Slimii: http://slimii.tumblr.com/
Lusty Bumble: http://lusty-bumble.tumblr.com/
Numinox: https://www.deviantart.com/numinox
Shape: https://twitter.com/ShapeIsReal

Voice Actors:

Dorn: https://twitter.com/DornVa
Midnight Datura: https://twitter.com/MidnightDatura
Chloe Angel: https://twitter.com/ChloeAngelVA

[YSlayer]

I like what there is so far. Never found a fishing rod but I didn't look all that hard. For anyone thinking about checking it out theres about half an hour of content so far and a few scenes. I especially like that every NPC has a name and a real conversation, makes the place feel much more alive than talking to "townsperson" about "generic rumor you eventually fight". The combat timing thing is pretty easy but its still fun. Not sure if theres a way to full heal outside of combat besides just buying up cheepo carrots (best hp to gold ratio at 1 gold for 15 hp). We get several mana recovering items from people but theres no real use for mana yet. Even using plunder on every enemy would only use up like 20 mana and even then it usually steals like 6 gold which converted to carrots is only 90 hp so its basically not worth using. No idea what the cooldown on the dildo is either but its healing was somewhat underwhelming. I only got 30 hp back for walking around for a bit before it wore off. Spending SP to level up stats is pretty cool.

TL:DR: writing is pretty good, town feels alive, music is good, art is good although a little sparsely used, rpg aspects pretty good.

[Lucky777]

What's the free release schedule?

When you edit the first post to include that information, the entire thread will disappear (so long as you're still "newly registered", ie until you have 10 posts.)

Do not be alarmed at that disappearance; it will most likely be for no longer period of time than it takes for a post to get approved.

[Darthjake]

i have not found the fishing pole yet either, but I did select the spear from Hammond, and the timer icon for OK / Great / Poor vanished from where it was for the heirloom dagger, making fighting the bat a bit iffy at best.

I think you might need to work on balancing your combat some, but this is an early stage of the game as well, just seems harsh that the intro area mobs hit so hard for someone who supposedly trained with someone as good as Marlan for all these years.

[YSlayer]

I tried the rapier and the sword and both of them had different bars at the top with different timings. Perhaps the spear version is missing? You can make life a little easier by going to the nun area in the northwest and selecting a class before fighting anything. The added stats can help. I survived while poisoned with 1 hp because I countered an attack cause I chose moon essence (presumably, unless there is a default counter rate but still).

I should actually mention I had a bit of an odd glitch happen in some conversations where mercy's picture would appear and then disappear almost instantly. Didn't cause any problems but looked weird. Perhaps it was actually supposed to display a picture and I was just hitting Z too fast and instantly skipped it. Not sure. Theres a bunch of money you can find in various dressers and the well and stuff which you can use to buy some armor and also carrots for healing out of combat. I do agree that the difficulty is a bit high for the start of a game but I didn't really mind, maybe it's just supposed to be a hard game. Oh also make sure you plunder from the guard guy in the tutorial since its an auto lose and you get a full heal afterwards (I assume you keep the money, haven't actually checked).

Honestly I'd make it so you can rest in the bath in the nun place for a full heal since its the starting area, but thats just me.

[IndoorMinotaur]

Hi everyone,

Thanks you so much for playing and for your time.

Re. the spear, its timing feature is a little different--an animation appears on the target and shrinks down, and you have to time the input when it's as small as possible before it disappears.

Message received about the difficulty, too--I do want it to be a little challenging, but since it's before you can properly choose your specializations & set up, I don't want it to be overwhelming.

- You can rest for free in Mercy's bed at any time
- The fishing rod is sold by Ginny, an NPC at the docks (after you have the quest)
- I have been looking into that slight portrait flicker. I think it might be a javascript issue, but I'll keep digging.

And thanks for the heads-up about the update, Lucky. I wanted to see how people reacted and give myself time to adapt to feedback for a bit before I set an official release for the next update, but I'll be doing that before much longer.

[Darthjake]

Yeah, I was experimenting around, I went to the nuns later and got the moon as well counter attack is nice! but yes, there needs to be a better way to recover, I did not go hog wild on food because I thought I had to save money for my passage.

[YSlayer]

Gotta buy carrots. Carrots OP. It's also possible that with the fishing rod we could have gotten another good chunk of money.

[IndoorMinotaur]

Gotta buy carrots. Carrots OP. It's also possible that with the fishing rod we could have gotten another good chunk of money.

Definitely check out the fishing!

We think it's really cool! 8)

[Darthjake]

First we have to find the fishing rod.... Hints, teasers, outright 4th wall breaking????

[kvier]

You have to find the right person to buy it from. And an in-game reason to want to buy it.

[Briheas]

I feel like there's a lot of potential. It's just a shame that the demo doesn't really get to highlight a lot of the gameplay. It sounds like there will be a lot of interesting mechanics, like how essence will work and that we can choose our skills, but none of that is in the demo. It's really selling itself short.

The story and characters seem very well thought out. You must have put a lot of time and effort into that. Though personally, I'd be thankful if there was a way to progress through the dialogue faster. I'm the kind of player who talks to everyone at least twice (so I don't miss anything), so having to go through a rather long dialogue with pauses in the middle gets a bit tedious the 2nd or 3rd time through.

I also think the current fights are too hard for a starting location. We don't have the opportunity to test things out or make mistakes during a fight. I might have 8 turns before the enemy will kill me, and I probably need to land about 6 good attacks if I want to win. That means if I spend anymore than 2 turns missing the attack timing (which is unavoidable for the first turn when you get the new weapon), or stealing, or doing anything else, then I'm dead. Us players learn how to play and find out what's good and bad through trial and error. And there's very little leeway for error.

[kvier]

I also think the current fights are too hard for a starting location. We don't have the opportunity to test things out or make mistakes during a fight. I might have 8 turns before the enemy will kill me, and I probably need to land about 6 good attacks if I want to win. That means if I spend anymore than 2 turns missing the attack timing (which is unavoidable for the first turn when you get the new weapon), or stealing, or doing anything else, then I'm dead.

The different weapons are really different, not just in terms of what the player has to learn, but also in terms of how forgiving they are.

Something like the axe (which has a poleaxe as its icon; seems a little misleading) almost doubled my HP, and that made most combat perfectly tenable without worrying too much. On the other hand, when using the dagger you start with it seems nigh-impossible to win.

That said, I agree: it would still be nice if there was a place to test out the different weapon's to-hit methods before you make your decision.

[IndoorMinotaur]

Hey guys, Nym here, the lead dev.

Thanks for taking the time to comment about the mechanics of things. As Kvier mentioned, in the early levels, the weapon you use makes a considerable impact on the difficulty of the encounters. Some don't start to pay off until a little later--especially the the spear, and to a lesser degree, the dagger. Others, like the rapier, have out-of-combat advantages that makes their in-combat functionality overall less powerful (unless really min-maxed).

I have toned down some of the early fights for version 0.2 and will continue to adjust the balance as we go along, but all-in-all, the combat experience may still be a little more difficult than average and may sometimes even require careful investment in consumables before a fight starts. There's also a cooking system whereby you can cook some of the fish you catch, which is a decent heal quantity for essentially free.

As to the point about the demo not offering a real glimpse into the depth of character-building, this is a really good comment and something I have been wrestling with for a little while. On one hand, the process of building a base later on coincides with unlocking your character-build options, and the process itself is important to the game's mythology. On the other hand, not allowing access to that depth could really hamper first impressions.

An option I'm considering is making the demo entirely non-canonical and allowing access to a wide range of abilities right out the gate, but with the caveat that they don't exist in the real game.

In any case, thanks again for all your feedback. The project is still young, and we're excited to see how it continues to take shape.

Here's a link to the patch notes for version 0.2: https://www.patreon.com/posts/patch-notes-for-14658729

[IndoorMinotaur]

Here's the patch notes for version 0.3 https://www.patreon.com/posts/weekly-release-0-14777169

If you haven't played the free demo--please do! If you know someone who might enjoy it--let them know.

And thank you for being such a friendly forum!

[IndoorMinotaur]

Hi!

Today has been a big day for us--we just dropped 3 releases!

Weekly version 0.4! Here are the patch notes: https://www.patreon.com/posts/version-0-4-14898318

Alpha version 0.3a!

Perhaps more importantly for this forum’s purposes, we uploaded a NEW version of the free demo! It includes some of the bug-fixes, polish and details added in later versions but without any of the post-Shiveworth content.

We listened to your feedback and the demo now also starts Mercy at level 10 and gives her a bunch of skill scrolls to play with, so she can experiment a little and breeze through the starting fights quickly if so desired.

You can download it from our patreon: https://www.patreon.com/indoorminotaur or the direct link is here: https://mega.nz/#F!NPwVRQqZ!6O0hUM-PSbxR1493feEXaQ

[IndoorMinotaur]

It's weekly build day! You can see the patch notes here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/weekly-build-0-5-15012731

If you haven't tried the free demo yet--please give it a try! You can find it on our patreon: https://www.patreon.com/indoorminotaur

[Briheas]

I didn't expect weapon skills to be there on top of regular skills. If we're going to be swapping weapons, then we'll also need to be able to swap weapon skills as well. Otherwise we'll just have wasted skill slots, and that would be incentive not to switch weapons.

The buffs seem pretty weak. They're probably balanced if there's going to be multiple party members, but if it's just Mercy solo the entire game, they're fairly weak since we need to spend turns using them, and turns spent buffing are turns spent taking damage and not doing any damage back.

The more I think about the combat system though, the more it looks like all fights are going to turn into "kill before I'm killed". Without a healing spell, taking damage is essentially losing gold, so the only way to fight economically is to just nuke the opponent down asap while taking as little damage as possible. So a HP pool tank build will have to spend way more money to heal after a battle than a glass cannon. Only a high def build might be able to match it, if you can get damage down to negibile levels. However, poison (and possible burn) seems to do damage based on max HP and ignore defense, so high def/low att won't be as effective as a glass cannon build. So my guess is glass cannon will be the dominant build.

[IndoorMinotaur]

Hello! The bulk of the game will involve 2 party members, Mercy and Orus, the wolf from the dream.

You get access to healing spells and items that restore percentages of HP as well as scaling with spirit, so it does balance out the stats decently well. Peripheral stats, like crit, evasion, accuracy and counter-attack chance will also dramatically affect the flow of combat.

Thanks for playing, and keep an eye out for updates!

[IndoorMinotaur]

Weekly Build 0.7!

Hello!
We've got a pretty wild build for you this week, so scope out those patch notes! Looks interesting? Please try our free demo!

https://www.patreon.com/indoorminotaur

We know the last couple of weeks has been a lot of mapping, spriting and exposition, so we hope you enjoy some of the payoff!



Version 0.7 - 11/6/17

- Finished up White Rat Maps
- Exciting New Storyline Content!
- 2 New NSFW Scenes!
- Dozens of new NPCs to chat with!
- Added lots of new equipment and restorative items
- Changed restoration values of cooked food to scale better with higher max HP
- Changed restoration values of alcoholic beverages
- Added Roasted Toothtube Fin to cookable items
- Added Roasted Seaweed to cookable items
- Modified a few recovery skills to scale better with higher max HP
- Populated Castle District and added 5 new shops:
Blacksmith
Fruit Vendor
Tailor
Jeweler
Butcher
- Made Hallie talk to Mercy automatically when she tries to leave the square
- Made speaking to the innkeeper mandatory before leaving square
(Game will want you to do this again if you already have)
- Mercy can now dig up buried chests (but has to be sturdy enough to open them)
- The percent change from stat modifying skills are scaled up from 25/50/75 to 33/66/100