June 2024 Progress Report (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

It’s June, and without a new build drop this month that means it’s time for another progress report! First thing’s first, I want to announce the winning concepts for the SFW and NSFW side story polls from earlier last month.

• For the SFW story, the winner is “Blood on the Snow” featuring Ben and Karina during the timeframe of Jess’s death.

• For the NSFW story, the winner is “The Thing that Fills (the Void)” featuring Ben and Russell in a what-if scenario where they start an on-again, off-again relationship.

Thank you to our Tempest tier patrons for participating in these polls! We can’t wait to start working on these side stories.

Now onto the meat of the post. We’ve been gearing up the past few months for an update to Homecoming. We have the complete script for Kyouji’s route now going through editing passes, then it will be handed to me for coding into the game. Now that all the main characters have their sprite revamps, Dev has been focusing his efforts on updating the side characters. You can see an example of Haru’s updated sprite in this attached image he made for World Otter Day a few days ago. There may be a little bit of crunch involved, but we’re expecting to be done with the next Homecoming update by July at the latest, ideally sometime this June.

As for me, besides working on the outlines for the next portion of Carlos’s route, I’ve also been working on the future project concepts I’ve mentioned before. With Santa Lucia approaching its conclusion, and with me more or less being up to date on my work with Homecoming, I’m trying to be forward thinking as to what Stormsinger Studios is going to do afterward. The worst thing that can happen is to have a large gap between my creative works, so I want to ideally be ready to go with follow up projects as soon as a slot opens up.

As it stands now, I can say that I’m only able to juggle two projects at a time given my current work and living situation. Homecoming occupies one slot, while Santa Lucia occupies the other. Going forward from this point, though, I want to diversify our portfolio a bit. RPGs have always been a passion of mine, which is why Santa Lucia’s follow-up Last Sorrow is going to be a JRPG, but I also know we’ve built our team’s reputation off our visual novel offerings. Ideally, when Homecoming’s slot opens up for me, I want to fill it with another VN project, and once SL has concluded I want to fill its slot with an RPG.

At the moment, I’ve got two potential concepts for the VN project, and I’m unsure of which one I’d like to continue on with. For the first concept, I have an idea that’s inspired by comedy-drama shows like Pushing Daisies or Dead Like Me. I want to write a more mature yet still humorous story about a man who’s life falls apart around him, forcing him to pick up the pieces and “unfuck” his life. For the second concept, I want to write something a bit more salacious and sexually liberated while still having a narrative to tell. I’m thinking along the lines of a teen/sports film style story, like Bring It On or Pitch Perfect.

I’m still working on the concepts for these two ideas. I’m thinking I’ll have more solidified ideas to share by the next progress report.

One of the things I haven’t talked much about is how my roots as an indie developer stem from a couple decades of on-and-off experience with the RPG Maker engine. I’ve been making projects with RPG Maker ever since I was a pre-teen, so in a way...me wanting to make an RPG this far into my adulthood is like my story as a developer coming full circle. I started off wanting to make RPGs like the ones I played during the golden age of JRPGs (Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Wild Arms, etc,.), and now I’ve found my way back after all these years.

As much as I’d like to jump right into developing Last Sorrow, I recognize that this is the first time I’ll have expectations and quality thresholds to meet for an RPG project of mine, so I want to make sure I’m ready for it. As easy as RPG Maker is to use, it’s not ideal for making projects that stand out (or stand the test of time), so my goal is to build up my skill in an engine that isn’t RPG Maker. And to do that, instead of working on Last Sorrow right away I instead want to work on a new IP. One that doesn’t have any previous expectations and gives me some wiggle room to hone my craft in a different genre. This RPG project will go into the SL slot once SL is finished, and it’s going to be fantasy themed (while still being furry, of course). So far I already have four out of five acts concepted out for the project, and it’s one I’ve been thinking about doing for a long while now. Long time patrons may remember some old fantasy RPG themed soundtrack tunes I made several years ago…

Well, looks like I’m finally gonna be able to put them to use!

What I’d love to have is for this new fantasy IP to be the “Shin Megami Tensei” to Santa Lucia’s “Persona”, or perhaps a more grounded comparison would be the “Dragon Quest” to Santa Lucia’s “Final Fantasy”...

Anyway, that’s about all for this update. Just wanted to give you guys a little idea of where we are and where we want to go in the future. Attached to this post I’m also including a few sample songs I’ve already written for the RPG project, as well as a new one for Last Sorrow that I think you guys might like. This song is going to play during bonding scenes between the party members, something along the lines of Social Links in the Persona series.

See you all next month!

~Dzahn