Hello, hello to our beautiful raccoon friends! It’s been a glorious June (if a bit hot for a bit there!) with plenty to celebrate. So let’s talk about what’s happened here in the raccoon den, and what’s going to happen in the coming month!
Events & Sales
First off, at time of posting we’re in the middle of our annual Summer Sale! OBSCURA is on sale with a 25% discount, which some of you may have spotted is our biggest discount to date (compared to the 20% previously). If you’ve only played the demo and are looking to pick up the game, this is a pretty good time to get that done!
We’re also taking part in a little summer cross-promotion event hosted by DEADline Studios: Embrace the Unknown. The games taking part are romances with darker themes/aesthetics, monstrous LIs, or unknown worlds, so you can probably guess why we were invited to participate. I am champing at the bit to play all the games involved, so instead of rhapsodizing about them individually here’s a little preview video that DEADline helpfully put together!
View game pageEmbrace the Unknown will be taking part across all of July, so there’s plenty of time to give our fellow participants a look (and us, if you’ve found us from a different game)! We’ll definitely be chatting more about it a little later.
Art
Mugi has been working like crazy on two Obscura-related things this month, and while one of them is still very hush hush, we’re finally ready to announce the other!
We are getting those NPC silhouettes filled in 🎉🎉🎉 We’re working with another artist, Nekome, while Mugi supervises and guides her work, in order to make the world of Obscura feel a bit bigger and more populated!
For the time being we’re not going to reveal any designs; Mugi wants to save that surprise for a bit later. Buuuuut I think she’ll let me get away with showing a mock-up she did with one of the first completed characters, if I censor it properly.
We as a team went bananas over this, lemme tell you.
Music
We don’t have much to report regarding Obscura’s soundtrack, but we did want to share some very exciting news from Cajsa: the game she is working on for her day job has been announced!
View game pageIf you can’t watch the trailer right now, let me just say: cozy gaming + Porco Rosso. We’re so happy for Cajsa and her teammates, this game looks incredible! And if you want to hear a sunnier take on Cajsa’s musical stylings, Into the Wind is sure to have it!
Writing
Tobi spent June completing very exciting and very time-consuming obligations that left her unable to work, so I picked up the baton and got to work on Oleander’s final chapter instead!
Oleander has always been a complicated fellow, in part because of his personality but mostly because his route is meant to be pretty open in comparison to the other routes! A part of my personal process is that the more big or complicated any branching or exploration is in the game, the more I want to diagram it in order to sort of get my brain around it. Oleander’s got a couple of bigger branching moments in the game (including some pretty big dialogue trees a la the bathhouse chat in Chapter Two), so I took the time to diagram them out. Be warned: my penmanship is not pretty.
A lot of stuff has been obscured for pretty obvious spoiler reasons, but you can maybe get the basic structure that the second act of the chapter is going to use: an open-world visual novel (not actually open-world). There will be opportunities to take advantage of, doors that are only open or closed to you depending on the choices made across several chapters, and a bit of a ticking clock forcing you to move as fast as possible.
There will also be a lot of menus. I am going to be programming menus for all of July at this rate. But there will be some fun dialogue to work with, too. Here’s a bit I got done before I had to enter the world of diagrams.
This moment is conditional on a couple of things happening in Chapter Two. I wonder how many people fulfilled the conditions needed to see it?
And that is it for us for June! It feels so good to be back in the saddle, and to once again enter a phase of development where we actually get to show you some of what we’re working on! July is often vacation season here in Sweden, but I get the feeling that some of us are going to be able to use the month to get more work done. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy embracing the unknown, enjoy the good weather if you’ve got it, and play plenty of games about smooching hot people.
Love,
The Rotten Raccoons Team 🩵🦝