Hi everyone! Today we have something important to tell you, as it concerns a shift in the way we handle one of our Patreon rewards. This will be a long but nonetheless interesting post, and we will welcome any feedback and suggestions for improvements you may have.

What are dev diaries?

You may be wondering why we chose this title for our post. Dev diaries are traditionally blog posts that describe parts of a game's development in detail and provide context to the decisions being made behind the scenes. We have made quite a few of these posts on our Patreon over the years, even if we didn't name them this way.

Lately, we have shifted away from writing standalone WIP art or music posts, and towards more general development update posts instead, and for a good reason. In short, we believe that developer diary posts discussing our monthly progress across all areas of development (story, art, music, programming, etc) or diving deep on our lore and concepts, would be so much more rewarding for higher tier donors than what we used to offer.

Starting from today, we will publish dev diaries around the middle of each month (excluding this one). As a bonus, this first diary post will be free to read, while the rest will only be visible to $10+ patrons.

Some other important things to note: Broader project news posts will continue to be free to read, and we will make sure to keep news-worthy information outside of dev diary posts. With this occasion, we will also shorten the regular release posts, only offering key information (update summary, changelog and download links), while moving the more casual lengthy description of our update posts to these dev diaries.

So, all that said, it's time to present our progress on the game!

Story

Many of you are aware of our hardships and challenges when it comes to developing the story. The project has been through a lot, but we’re quite happy to be moving forward with the main story. V0.3.5 introduced day 6, and with it, a new character: the deer you meet in the VIP bar. His name is Morias, and he will also be featured in day 7. He has a bit of a mission for Yarin, something that will lead into a new area.

With the advent of day 7, the original Brym dates will be fully merged with the main plot. Not to worry though, as we already have some new dates for him in the pipeline, the first of which is currently being written. The first Lucra date is also finished and about to be implemented.

Detailed planning of the daily structure is now also mostly finished up to and including day 10, following a number of team meetings dedicated to story planning. Some of the pre-production work we did throughout 2020 and 2021 will be reflected in the next days of content, marking a tonal shift for the rest of the game towards introspection and the supernatural.

Artwork

Speaking of Morias, we realized that v0.3.5 had a distinct lack of spotlight for his reveal during day 6. So, as can be seen at the top of the post, we decided to try something new: we asked Rauch, our background/concept artist, to make a CG-like closeup shot of him sleeping at the bar.

It came out way better than we initially expected, and as such, we decided we will have more of this kind of artwork in the game. There are many spots in the story that could use more than just a regular background/sprite scene, but don't require the level of detail of a Lumix illustration, Rauch's illustration style fits really well for more emotional scenes, looking at his extensive track record on FA. Of course, we will keep commissioning Lumix for sex scenes and more unique pieces where we feel like her work fits better.

Folsky has been hard at work as well, and it seems the new workflow has been paying off, as he has now finished an entire sprite set for Garreth. From left to right, the expressions are: concerned, laughing, stern, neutral, grinning, blushing, flexing, flirting, dismissive.

We might add a few more over time, but in our analysis of the current content, these emotions were the most frequently encountered when interacting with him. Currently, Folsky is focusing on creating a complete set of expressions for Yarin, building upon the test samples we created some time ago. Those will also be slightly adjusted to make Yarin look more like the twink he is.

Audio

Samples has also had a pretty productive month, having created 3 separate tracks. They are attached on the Patreon version of this post (we cannot upload audio files on Itch.io posts), and you might notice a pattern between them: they are slower and more gentle than his usual works, perfect for romantic, laid-back or melancholic scenes.

Kovle's theme in particular had a pretty big redesign. It was more upbeat before, but the new version is more calm and serious, bringing forward Kovle's attitude and the way he presents himself. It also incorporates traditional Chinese instruments, such as the erhu and pipa. The track ends pretty abruptly though, as it is still a work in progress.

Others

Programming-wise, not that much progress has been made since the release of v0.3.5. This is mostly due to Rriik and Wattson being both pretty busy in real life. However, Rriik has combed through all the Patreon posts we've made, cleaning up old and unnecessary posts and simplifying the tagging system we were using. This will make it easier to find dev diary posts, even prior to this announcement.

This about sums up the progress we've made in September. As mentioned before, we want to know what you think of these changes, so take advantage of the post being free for everyone and shower us in feedback, haha!