Hello, my beautiful raccoon friends! April is here and it is… cloudy! At least for this social media raccoon. Still, we can safely say that spring is here and it’s lovely. The update for this month is pretty short, for a couple of reasons, but there’s definitely stuff you’re going to want to hear about!
The Raccoon Jamboree
In March we got the team to meet up in person and spend some time together! There was some incredible food and generally fun times, plus we did our big post-Chapter Two debrief and some Chapter Three planning. Getting to tell the team my devious plans for Keir and Oleander was a blast, and there are some things we’re planning for Cirrus’ third chapter that got everyone extremely excited. While a lot of the stuff we talked about has to remain behind closed doors for the time being, there is one important thing we can share.
When talking about Chapter Two, Cajsa and Mugi in particular were in agreement that the one-at-a-time release structure for Oleander and Francesco was much easier to manage. Tobi and I already put our effort into one character at a time anyways, so we’ve decided to just formalise that release structure. We also did a survey asking folks what kind of release structure they prefer, and releasing chapters as they come was easily the most popular answer there, too.
So! While we definitely don’t have anything else to announce right now (god no), hopefully the individual Chapter Three releases will be a tiny bit more frequent and a little more fun, with each lad getting some time in the sun.
Writing duties are shifting
Getting Francesco Chapter Two finished was extremely satisfying for the whole team, but it was a more stressful process than we would’ve liked. A lot of that comes down to personal circumstances that we’re going to keep private, but the end result is that we’re reorganising writing responsibilities a bit. Francesco’s third chapter is going to be split up: Tobi is still going to decide the structure of the story and write the skeleton, but I (Violet) am going to take the lead on adding the flesh to those bones when Tobi needs to step back.
We already did a bit of this in Chapter Two. Hopefully you didn’t notice any changes in the scenes that I wrote and everything felt like a smooth experience. And with this arrangement we can try to get the best of both worlds: you get Tobi’s vision for Francesco, and Tobi doesn’t get stuck in the stress.
We’re gonna be busy
One fun consequence of the meeting was just having everyone lay out their plans for the next couple of months and realising that we’re currently very busy, and expect to be so for the rest of the spring and part of the summer. We’re absolutely still putting work into Obscura and having fun with it, but it only feels fair to warn you all that for the next couple of months we expect to be prioritising other stuff a little more. You’ll still be getting monthly updates from us, of course!
Finished work
With all that said, what have we done this month?
Mugi is still on poster duty. Delivery of the test print has been really slow this time, so we’re still waiting on the official okay to put it up. When it’s ready, we’ll shout it from the rooftops!
Yamiochi, our beloved business raccoon, is wrangling a few things at the moment. We can’t talk about either of them yet (sorry for the tease!), but one of them is moving along at a nice pace, and if the other works out then we’ll have some very exciting news to share soon.
Tobi and I have been writing skeletons! Tobi’s getting Cirrus’ chapter started with what I feel like is the best possible opening.
Meanwhile, Oleander’s third chapter skeleton is trucking along, with one of my favourite bits of optional text so far.
And that’s about it for March! We’re all trapped in Busy Times at the moment, but honestly that seems to be a feature of March and April out here (previous March/April update posts elsewhere also talk about busy schedules and needing to change/update release plans). We’ll be back in a month, of course, to catch you up on what’s going on! Looking at the calendar, there are some nice things coming up on the horizon, so until then!
Love,
The Rotten Raccoons Team 💙🦝