May 2023 Monthly Update (Patreon)

Hello lovely patrons!

I hope you all had a great April - and if you celebrate Easter, ate lots of chocolate too. I was in Japan for the month of April, but still made a little time to write for our games while away.

(I have some personal photos from the trip on my Twitter if you're interested!)

Anyway, on to the update:

The Sun and the Moon

We're finally in the final testing stages - The Sun and the Moon will launch this month! I'm currently 2/3rds through my testing, adding in additional SFX and writing tidbits as I go.

Art

Here's a little teaser for a naughty CG in the game:

Aemyl and Caspian both make me very happy and very sad. Both of the couples do in the prequel, in fact.

Steam Approval

We have approval! Steam has gone through the game build and approved it to be released!

Programming and Screenshots

As we're currently going through the game build and testing it, we're using to chance to upgrade some of the visuals and polish everything up.

Here's some new screenshots:

Lucius needs to be hurt a little but that doesn't stop me from loving him.

Dreambound

Writing

Currently, we're working on going over Crow's bad ending. 

We plan each route in Dreambound to have three endings - bad, neutral and good. We want each to feel like a complete storyline, so we're taking our time going over them!

Art

We're still working through the Ivan route CGs! We have around three left until they're all complete, and we move on to Kaine's route. 

Here's a preview of a WIP CG from his route. Tensions run a little high during scenes with Ivan.

Our background artist has also been working on a few additional backgrounds for the game.  There's not too many left now!

A Date with Death

Programming

Oh boy, I spent way too much of my time programming random things in A Date with Death.

I would say the core programming - the UI, gameplay elements and such, are roughly 80% complete.

We still have the character creator to work on (though, it should be relatively similar to the room creation feature code wise), and the pronoun selection feature. We plan to have some set pronouns to choose from, but also the ability to go in and edit them to your hearts desire.

As for unimportant, not at all needed features, I worked on quite a few in my spare time before heading overseas. This includes the pong and runner minigames I showed last month, as well as the "ms paint" feature. I've also added a computer background selector (you can have a TDS background!!), a music player, an image gallery, and more. I plan to add some kind of internet feature but we're still deciding how it should play out.

I'm still working on the wordle knock-off, and plan to implement a few other minigames later.

Opening Animation

This is a free game, I remind myself as I pile up the bills on things completely unnecessary to releasing the game:

By that I mean, we're working with a talented Japanese animator on a 30 second opening/promo video!

So far, we've spent some time talking about what we want to include, the music, the atmosphere and the message we want to convey. We're currently in the stages of beginning work on the storyboard!

We plan to have this complete around late June to early July. This should give us a good amount of time to get the writing complete!

Steam Page

We've paid for our Steam page for the game, set up a basic shell, sent it for approval... and it's been approved! Yay!

We're not quite ready to set it as live yet, but we'd appreciate your wishlists once it does go live.

Here's a little preview:

It still needs some filling out, but you get the general idea.

The Divine Speaker Art Collection 2020-2021

We're finally releasing the next TDS art collection book! This will be a collection of promotional and patreon exclusive images from the years 2020 and 2021. Everyone on the correct tier will get a free copy here, also (though it contains images you can already see, anyway!).

We'll release it once we have approval on Steam, hopefully early next week.

Focus for the next month

Here's our focus for the next month:

• Dreambound: Ivan route CGs, Crow route additional editing
• The Sun and the Moon: Additional animations, editing, release
• A Date with Death: Day 5 writing, editing, additional coding

Thanks once again for reading, and I'll see you next month!