Oh gosh is it Friday already?  This week has gone by way too fast and that means it’s time for a LAST MINUTE BLOG POST~
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First thing’s first, here’s a list of what’s changed since last time:

• Something something art something writing something something getting done (also music now)

• Wrapped up some loose ends in regards to replacing some art

• Another character design was finalized

• Our shared development folder is getting pretty large…
  -Then there’s Curchack’s own personal work folder.

So tonight we’re going to answer one question that we’re getting asked more and more nowadays:

What the HELL is taking us so long?

Salty Tears began as a late-night joke in the Capschat group on Steam.  We planned to -maybe- spend a month on it and hastily release it out to the world.  We were set for an April 1strelease date, thinking it would be a fun little thing to throw out in the wild for maybe 10 people to read.

So, needless to say we missed that date.  By a large margin.  As we continued to build the project up mid-March, it became painfully obvious we weren’t going to hit our April 1stdeadline.  At that point, we decided to say “well, we aren’t going to hit our original date, no point rushing it now!” so rather than trying to push it out soon afterwards, we decided instead to revamp what we had and aim for something a little more quality oriented.  To compensate, we hastily threw together a joke build over the course of two days.

Totally legitimate

There was also the small complication of over-exposure.  As mentioned earlier, this started as an in-joke that we expected maybe 10 people to download apart from the actual developers.  For that reason, the original draft of Salty Tears was to be filled with a ton of silly references and slapstick that only that small audience would appreciate.  Then for SOME REASON that we honestly can’t explain, it started getting attention from people we didn’t expect. At the time of this writing, the blog is sitting on a comfortable 11,798 hits from a varied number of sites and pages.  When we decided that we’d slow down and take our time, the first order of business would be a change of direction for the project.  We couldn’t write out the story for a narrow target audience, it would need to be expanded and generalized a bit so that everyone who downloaded It would be able to get some enjoyment out of it, while still leaving some “HEH” moments for the people we were originally designing ST for.

In other words, everything that wasn’t “self-insert VN” was thrown out the window.  Fortunately, a new direction for the writing was fairly straight forward to figure out. UNfortunately as a result of the change, we’ve admittedly been pretty sloppy about explaining what exactly Salty Tears is and everyone seems to have a different idea of what it is or should be.  That’s something we plan to fix soon in the form of character bios and some general plot information.

So yeah, ever since we missed our original deadline we’ve had to re-evaluate several things and that’s caused a pretty hefty delay, all things considered.  We don’t have a solid release schedule yet but you should know that we’re still plugging along at a nice pace and they delays haven’t been without a purpose.
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And with that, this blog post has come to an end. See you next week!

Oh boy oh boy, BLOG POST TIME~.  Let’s get right into it:

Changes over the past week:

• Art and writing continues to blah blah blah
• Found a musician!
• More minor text attributes added
• Jackie’s first name has been changed to Hayley to accommodate the musician change.

So yeah, busy busy.  Biggest news this week (for us at least) was introducing qwheeler to the team.  He came out of nowhere and said he could compose some music for us and everyone was really impressed, so it didn’t take long to bring him aboard.

After filling him in on where we were in terms of development and giving him the stuff needed to give him an idea about the tone of the project, we asked if he could work towards a “jazz-influenced” soundtrack, and we were really happy with his first attempt.  So happy, in fact, that we decided to share it!  Keep in mind that it’s not done and as a result is a little on the short side but it should give you a basic idea of where we want to go with it.

So we at Salty Salty Studios knew we’d be getting 10,000 blog hits soon.  We began thinking to ourselves about what we could do to celebrate the occasion:

Show off some neat coding stuff?
Reveal another character?
Actually reveal some plot details?
Prepare a short demo?

In the end we decided to settle on a picture of girls in swimsuits.  Enjoy and thanks for the hits~

Another Friday, another blogpost~

Major changes since last time:

-Writing and art continues to get done (SURPRISE)

-We’re now running on a custom version of Ren’py

-FINALLY fixed text disappearing during effects like screen-shake

-Some other stuff that I will get to RIGHT NOW

So let’s go over what’s changing.  First off, our sprites are being colored by a different artist.  Curchack, specifically.  Considering Curchack already draws and colors our backgrounds (and helps design the ui, composes a bit of music, and has probably done some writing and coding when no one’s watching) our sprites and backdrops should mesh really really well now.

Second:  Twrlare has taken up all sprite lineart.  We mentioned before this is a lot of work, but he’s offered to do it to keep everything looking nice and even, so give him a hand, because that is AWESOME.

Also, one more thing:  we are currently looking for musicians!  That’s right, YOU can now work for this terrible circlejerk VN, so long as you can compose a few tunes.  If you’re interested, feel free to email us, hit up our IRC, or….well, I’m sure there’s a third option I haven’t considered.

Oooooookay, I’m back, Izzo has been kicked off blog duty, and it’s back to business.  Let’s get started~

What happened since last Friday:

-Art assets and writing continue to get done (herp derp)

-Multiple writers now proofing everything

-Set up an internal set of proper deadlines

Okay, so we’ve namedropped this guy a few times in screenshots and people have idly mentioned him in irc and the steam chats on occasion, so we figure now would be the ideal time to actually reveal our protagonist.

Oliver Penn

After we had a basic outline of what we wanted to do, our first decision was to try and figure out who would play the leading role.  Given the circlejerky nature, we could have gone with a member of the community, but that would lead to some arguments about narrowing It down to one person and defending that choice.  Our ultimate decision came naturally once we considered those things:  our protagonist would be Anonymous personified.  Easy decision, and an obvious one at that!

BUT IT TURNS OUT that trying to design and write a character based on a group of people can be DIFFICULT.  Yeah, that was pretty terrible foresight on our end.  How can you give a character a set personality when your source material couldn’t be any more varied?  Can we even allow for things like character growth?  These questions sound really dumb, but when your goal is to create a character that represents everything and everyone while at the same time making him a unique character things can get rather confusing.

THE ANSWER IS:  we’re working on it.  We have an idea of how to get Oliver to work best, but we can say he is very much his own character with a proper backstory and list of motivations.  Our philosophy is that in order to get a story that at least somewhat works properly, we need a solid character we can rely on.  We have to sacrifice some of that anonymity of the character to make it happen, but we’re compromising by building a personality that summarizes the more noticeable traits of the anonymous posters of the KSG as well as giving the character room to grow in several ways, enforcing the “several people in one body” idea.

PS we have a Twitter now.