Hello, hello my beautiful raccoon friends! Wowie did the back half of August fly by! Things are starting to stabilize here in our lovely raccoon den once again as work resumes for everyone and we settle into the final third of the year (which is full of things we're looking forward to). And here's the skinny on what we've been doing this month.
Events
We had such a good time last year that we had to come back for the Fall in Love Visual Novel Festival this year! It's wonderful seeing all the different facets of the romance VN being celebrated, and now I get to do my favourite thing and dive into the demos section to see what upcoming titles I can test out. There's still a little time left for the fest, so enjoy it!
OBSCURA is discounted 25% for the event, and we're bundling up with our friend's game Knight Case Files to enjoy the festival even more. If you've played the demo and were waiting for a discount to pick up the game, now is a pretty good time.
Art
As previously reported, Mugi is throwing her all into getting art assets made for the NPCs as well as for additional material while writing finalises. She and Nekome are finding a groove with their workflow, and we're up to 7 NPC sprites now! There are still a ton of characters left to work on, but progress is smoothing out as we go. I don't have anything I can show this time around (it would be the same mock-up with a different pixilated sprite, which I imagine would get old), but I can say that Mugi is making great progress.
Music
Cajsa's been pretty busy this month, but she and Tobi arranged a meeting to figure out what Cirrus' route needs in terms of audio. Cajsa is getting a head start on it, despite Cirrus' script not being locked yet, since she is going to be stepping back from Rotten Raccoons work for a little while at the end of this year and beginning of the next. It's for a happy reason, but she is going to be occupied for a bit, and we have a rule that if working on Rotten Raccoons would be stressful, you step back instead.
Before that, though, she'll be working her audio magic and we're so excited to hear what she cooks up!
Writing
Since Tobi finished the script skeleton for Cirrus' third chapter she's dived right into working on getting the proper script ready to go. And while real life obligations interrupted her a bit, she's gotten a solid start on the work. Cirrus is starting to sound like himself in all the bone-chilling ways that implies. Most of the writing done is spoiler-tastic, but here's a little exchange that made me smile.
As for me, I have one foot out the door of Non-Linear Hell (the big writing challenge I accidentally gave myself), with only a few small sections to wrap up before I can work on more linear text again. Non-linear stuff is fun, and it sure adds to a route's replayability, but I am so tired of doing math and thinking about game balance, I wanna be writing the framework for flirtatious dialogue again. And I will be!
And that's it for August! It's been a pretty wild month for all of us, so I'm hoping that September is busy but stable for all of us as we move forward. September is looking bright, so I'm certain we'll have fun stuff to report next month. Until then,
Lots of love,
The Rotten Raccoons Team 🩵🦝