Hello everyone. This is Hanji, the producer of Cursed Blacksmith.
Below is a VERY LONG letter I wrote to express my feelings throughout the whole production of the game. I repeat, it’s VERY LONG. Please take your time if you decide to give it a read.
* Contains spoilers. Please read at your own risk.
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Let’s start from a little flashback.
There was a 10-year-old kid. He spent hours in front of a TV holding the gamepad everyday.
The game he was enjoying is a so-called “Mystery Dungeon” game, featuring a chicken-like creature that’s ever so familiar.
It was the first time the kid experienced this genre. The playthrough was full of surprises to him. You never know what item you will get in the dungeons. You can use it directly, throw it, fuse it with something else and so on, all with its unique mechanics.
The ever-changing gameplay felt so fresh. It’s not an action game, yet it’s also not your ordinary RPGs.
Every step is like playing a chess game. Every single item has its use against enemies. Death is but a learning process and another step towards your preparation to defeat the bosses. After all the senses of achievement and loss, the ending is just that more satisfying.
That was the beginning for the kid. From the classics in the same era, to the great games made in the modern days. Every game fills him with everlasting impression.
And so, the Mystery Dungeon genre becomes his favorite genre. “If I got the chance to make a game myself, I’m gonna make a Mystery Dungeon game!” He thought. “I’ll add some mechanics of my own into this formula, with some content to spice it up. That should do it!”
Thus was the birth of the concept of The Shimmering Horizon and Cursed Blacksmith.
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I believe I mentioned in the past that I was a total noob, only able to work on the base RPGMaker engine. With games that complicated, I needed to learn some programming.
There was a time where I went to work when the sun is out, and dove into the coding materials at night, while finding my party member along the way. After a long bad-for-health time, the very first alpha was finished.
↑ BEFORE (v0.01 or such)
The alpha’s success led to the start of my Patreon page, bit by bit turning into stable income for the team to have faith in completing the game. The road has been real rough, with obstacle after obstacle, but we pushed through each and every one of them.
↑ AFTER (v1.12)
And it’s all thanks to your support. When our team members are facing family issues, or when I needed to do a long-term rehabilitation after a surgery. This ship might just sink, or the road might get even longer than what we already have, if not for all your support.
By the way, desk workers? Please, please, please, make sure your desk and chair are at the correct height for long-time work. You can prevent excruciating pain from stacked damage on your spine. Take it from me, okay?
Also, I want to go off on another tangent and thank everyone who enjoys my previous game, Cage of the Succubi. Every single encouragement that went in my e-mail is what keeps me moving forward. You let me realize that however small it was, my game is loved by someone in the world. You literally is what made Cursed Blacksmith a reality. Thank you.
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So, what exactly is Cursed Blacksmith?
From the very beginning, we understand that this is not going to be a breeze to go through, which is why we tried to warn players with so much “Ooh this looks difficult” hashtags.
In my opinion, Mystery Dungeon games are never easier than Soulslike games. They don’t test your reflex; they test your planning and decision-making. The strategy side of these games did make a lot of players then give up, which is Mystery Dungeon games are not in the mainstream nowadays.
(There have been difficulty choices these days for these games, but still.)
Enemies block your way with a variety of skills, and you need to literally utilize everything to get through. All bosses have a different theme and mechanic that you need to identify and overcome, making them all unique and relatively difficult by simply farming. This concept of mine goes way back to myself playing that one game, with the long dungeons, item-picking and all-or-nothing boss battles.
It’s not a walk in the park, yes, but the sense of accomplishment should come along.
So, are you someone who likes to overthink everything in a good way, handling your finite resources and feel the adrenaline running when those resources bleed drop by drop, as you fight to the very teeth against the boss?
Are you someone who likes Mystery Dungeon games?
Are you someone who enjoys fragmented story telling?
If the answer of either one of the above questions is “Yes,” then I strongly suggest giving Cursed Blacksmith a try. Even the free demo is good enough.
We don’t have eye-catching visuals and pretty effects, and there are definitely so much stuff we can improve so much more.
But even so, this is what we are capable at this point, and what we take pride in fully.
If you have read through all of this, I believe you will find something in Cursed Blacksmith that clicks inside you.
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Now, let’s talk about the aftermath.
So many players have enjoyed the world we built, and have been eagerly anticipating what happens after the main game. And now we are happy to fulfill our promise since release, and deliver some closure through the additional Memories.
At the same time, we apologize that it took longer than I thought since the beta period, where the update is already content-complete. We had to fix some more bugs due to our lack of expertise.
The beta testers in our Discord servers helped so much, and we are always grateful. Hopefully this will help us on our next journey.
Speaking of “bugs,” I still remember having my brains burned trying to fix the “bugs” caused by external tool usage. When you get the error logs, the reports, but don’t know how in the crap you can do with it, only to realize that it’s not the game’s fault? That was rough.
Cursed Blacksmith ended up having a total Chinese character count of about 360 thousand, waaay bigger than we originally imagined. Naturally the physical and mental cost of localization skyrocketed.
We weren’t aiming for an epic literature with our writing, but we still had to try and build the world behind the main game so the story makes as much sense as possible. Who knows? We might need them in the future.
Out of all the texts, 40% of them are in the Memories, 20% of them are flavor texts for items, and 40% of them are for the main game voiced dialogues.
You don’t need to read every single entry to enjoy the game, however it is recommended if you crave for the lore behind the world, the 30+ characters, their relationships and more.
Looking back, we probably didn’t ponder enough about the risk we were taking when telling the story through fragmented pieces. We were crazy. This kind of subtle presentation often leads to misinformation, misinterpretation and such.
Still, it’s really exciting and heart-warming whenever I see our fans crafting their theories, sometimes right on the bullseye, even confirming with me about the story. I couldn’t possibly imagine how Mr. Miyazaki would feel when he saw players finishing the puzzle piece by piece.
With this sort of experiment, it was really reassuring knowing there are people who adore the script, especially the endgame cutscenes. As a creator, nothing motivates me more than that. And for that, I am mostly grateful.
On the other side of the spectrum, we understand that we have missteps regarding introductions and revealing informations to the public, resulting outrages from players feeling betrayed by the relationships between characters.
We have been announcing and reminding that stuff will come out with a later update, but it’s definitely not enough. We have a lot to remember and take care of, and one promise on a game we don’t currently like probably doesn’t weigh that much. The misinformation thus snowballs.
Not to mention the bugfixes were the highest priority, to make sure the game works properly. That was why I kind of postponed dealing with the comments.
For this, on behalf of Ason and the whole team, I would like to apologize.
And I would like to properly invite you to check the Event Gallery we added during the latest update. If you still have more questions you want to ask, feel free to find me on our Discord server. As I just mentioned, some fans have been discussing with us about the world-building, sometimes even asking stuff we haven’t thought of, and that’s a win for us, to learn more!
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Cursed Blacksmith’s protagonist is your average Japanese-esque silent guy, much like a certain red-headed guy in an ARPG series where he takes on several adventures. The story will need to be unfolded by other characters’ dialogues and actions.
Sometimes when I see comments suggesting the player is just a cameraman, I’m actually a bit torn about what to say. Yes, you won’t find much heroism or fame in this story, but the protag and other main characters will bond gradually through the whole journey, towards the final goal.
The outcome of the main game will be a foundation to whatever comes next, or at least, that’s what we hope to achieve, hence the epilogue updates for story.
In my opinion, Cursed Blacksmith is like a prelude to a greater storyline. It tells a tale of how a young man’s sincere gift to his friend/partner, turns into a literal catastrophe, not just to her, but to the whole world.
Players get to know the world through flavor texts for items, get to know the relationships between characters through Memories, eventually realizing what he was set to accomplish, and with everyone’s help, escaped the never-ending nightmare.
That was the end of the game. Much more behind the scenes are not shown in front of you, but I hope I could get the chance to continue their journey through sequels and such. Maybe even give the elites actual names instead of “Elf Archer,” who knows?
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With all that said. Before I got pulverized by the translation guy having to sit through this essay.
What’s next for Ason?
First and foremost, I would like to declare Cursed Blacksmith content-complete after the Epilogue update.
Unless of course if there are serious bugs that need fixing, which I’ll make sure to kill them with another hotfix.
I understand that there are requests for paid DLCs, but due to budget constraints and the game engine being outdated, we have decided this is not the best way to continue on.
For now, this is a nice timing to close the book for “This World,” and embark on another adventure.
To be totally honest, I couldn’t wait to make the sequel, with the same world we built throughout the game. Maybe some of you could have guessed the beginning of the next game, probably something about our main casts reviving the town, the city, and finding out what to do with all the knowledge they have. These concepts are already taking shapes during the development of Cursed Blacksmith; we have even left some breadcrumbs in the end.
Yet, this direction is not currently feasible. For 2 reasons:
We simply have not enough resources. And that’s mostly on us; after a series of missteps, we eventually didn’t turn Cursed Blacksmith into a success we originally projected. I would like to stress that we are not blaming anyone else with this fact. We didn’t promote properly; we didn’t share with you about the game’s genre, etc. These are experiences we will definitely utilize in the future. With that noted, rushing another project this big of a scope right now will just be following in our own footsteps. We’ll get stuck with budget and talent, going slow as crap on development, you know the rest. And we don’t want it to happen ever again.
Watch on YouTube 
With no additional resources to have more people work on the development, we need to search for a new game engine ourselves, learning new stuff. Remember what I said about the engine being outdated? The engine, RPG Maker MV to be specific, crashes on me like half of the time I save the project ever since the animation folder gets bigger than 12MB. Sometimes it just erases EVERYTHING I made the past month. I think you can imagine what that would do to a man, not to mention having my members go through the same stuff for years. No sir.
Which is why we probably will start small again, making stuff with new tools and even genres. We will make sure to let you know what we’ve been cooking once it’s at least edible.
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Lastly, please allow me to ask that if you find the latest update good, whether it’s the story, the QoL, the new feature, anything, please leave a good review on us. And maybe share it with your friends! Every single thumbs-up helps more than you could ever imagine. I am not joking.
If our work doesn’t satisfy you, that’s okay. We appreciate you giving us a chance to prove ourselves, and we’ll come back eventually, hoping to make you smile next time.
That’s all, folks. Once again, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to every single one who have played and loved our game.
We are on Discord 24/7 for some reason! Come join us to chat!
And with that, I wish you all a promising, heart-warming future.
May the Horizon Light shines above all of us, guiding us all the way.
Hanji
Producer, Director
Ason