Monthly Update - August 2020 (Patreon)

Hello again everyone! 

A quick note: if you want to join our Discord and have your special role, make sure you connect your Discord to your Patreon account! 

I hope you're all doing well and staying healthy. Let's just right into what we've been doing for the past month:

 The Divine Speaker

Art

We currently have a single CG left for the extended demo! Finally! 

It's been a wild ride to get here, and this year has thrown challenge after challenge at many of the people working on the game, but everyone's still done so well!

Here's a little preview of the last one:

Writing

In the last month, lots has been going on in the writing department:

• Fawn's route has now been completed edited, as well as finishing off his 18+ scenes and adding in his bad ending. His route is now approx. 69,500 words.
• Cyne's route has now been completed edited, and we've added in his last 18+ scene (he has four in his route, compared to the usual three, but you'll only get three on any one playthrough!). His route is now approx. 78,400 words, so a little longer than Fawn's!
• The outline for Leos' route is now complete. Previously we had been stuck on a few plot points, but after finishing the other two routes completely we've ironed out the plot. Unlike Fawn and Cyne, who have their own "mini-villains" to deal with in Sid Caeham, Leos does not. He's far from home, with no one he knows around him. I think you'll find that he is, in some ways, his own villain.
• We've started writing Leos' route. While only in the beginning stages, we're hoping that the writing process will be fast and painless! 

As you can see, everyone's been very hard at work to get to this point, and we're pleased with the writing progress so far. 

Finishing writing the last route of the game will definitely be sad (I can't say I didn't cry at the end of Cyne and Fawn's routes...), but also so exciting - we have so much in store for you all.

Here's a little preview of a scene at the start of Leos' route:

Programming

In great news, we've finished our final check of the extended demo portion of the game - the first 69,000 or so words.

We've ironed out a few bugs that we'd missed the first time around, as well as fixed some spelling mistakes. We had to check the voice acting very carefully to make sure the actors lines matched what was displayed in game (which, quite often, it doesn't! VAs tend to make the lines more natural and adlib, which we love, it just takes extra careful testing).

With that done, the demo just needs one final CG dropped into it, and it will be released on both Steam and Itchio.

Next, we will move on to our initial test of the common route - while there isn't any voice acting yet and we'll have to test it again for that, we can check for bugs, errors and spelling mistakes, as well as clean up the code to make everything run much more smoothly.

Voice Acting

Voice acting is sometimes hard to schedule around everyones busy schedules (Especially with so many VAs), because we do live directed sessions, compared to letting the voice actors record on their own. Although it's more expensive to do it our way, I believe it's worth it - you get a more natural performance where the talent can actually bounce off of each other.

With that said, voice acting has now been scheduled in to start on the 11th of August, and run for approximately 6 weeks. After, we'll have to jump straight into the routes to make sure we have enough time to record them.

Beyond the Abyss

Just a small update this month - we have a brand new sprite! Check it out below, as well as a preview of it in game:

Writing for the game will resume once Leos' route has been completed! 

That's all for this month - we'll see you all again soon!