Hi again!

We’re looking for musicians! Our main composer has been preoccupied lately, so we’re looking for new blood to work with us on WiP’s audible part.

Consistency is a very big deal for us, so you’d have to be able to create stuff that blends in nicely with our existing soundtrack. Some kind of impression of what you can do is nice, and we may ask you to whip up a rough sample of what you’d think a WiP song would sound like! What you’d work on would range from day-to-day background music to specific location and mood themes.

If you think you HAVE WHAT IT TAKES (or not and want to try anyway), join our IRC channel or shoot us an email and talk to us!

Hello again! Yesterday was a bit of fun, but today we wanna talk about some of the stuff we hid in the cracks of our obligatory joke post.

You may have noticed, but we’re in the process of going over some of the older sprites and giving them a fresh coat of paint. Yesterday’s screenshot had a brand new Caprice, for example.

While not all of the demo characters are getting this treatment (pretty much all of the writing club members sans Mekki are fairly recent), a fair chunk of them are. This’ll likely be the last time we ever try and touch up older sprites—our current goal is to get every character in the VN a default pose ASAP, which should equate to a more consistent style regardless of how much time goes by during the rest of development. We’ve actually finalized our entire cast as well as their designs recently, so we can now focus entirely on sprite creation, instead of mixing it with brainstorming.

Secondly, you may have noticed a few Skrats pictures on our blog(s) lately. That’s because recently we asked Skrats to join the team. His role is to redline the sprites and CGs, as well as actually provide creative input/criticism on both. It isn’t something you’ll immediately notice, as his job isn’t super IN YOUR FACE, but the results have been apparent. Here’s a (tentative) example: the image on the left was a CG present in the demo, while the image on the right is some brainstorming he whipped up to make it a bit more interesting. Of course, All-Maker is still doing the CG lineart and ultimately has the final say in terms of composition and the like. Even with the samples attached below it’s easy to see how big of a deal this has ended up being.

We’ve set a writing deadline of a minimum 2-3 scenes completely finished a week, which may not seem like a lot on the surface but in reality it’s pretty brisk and has been consistent which has let us start planning schedules around it. Likewise, Shiz continues to chip away at our custom VN engine constantly.

So basically good, consistent progress all around with a nice focus on improving our overall quality.

Hello again! It’s been a while, but that’s just cuz we’ve been hard at work taking feedback from the demo into account as well as working ahead in the story. Very recently, we were able to finalize the details on one of the more drastic changes the feedback has given us, so we wanted to share it today.

So basically, when we were designing the groundwork for the VN’s story, we didn’t want Oliver to be a likeable character. Obviously this ended up working quite well, but the results were TOO extreme. You guys loathed him, to the point where we couldn’t actually expect his character arc to matter to the audience. Thus, we were faced with a dilemma: we need to keep his character the same, but make the audience like him more. After a bunch of failed attempts to find a happy medium, someone on the team proposed an idea as a joke: make Oliver a girl to pander to the yuri crowd. We brushed it aside after having a laugh, but the longer we sat on the idea the more it slowly started to make sense. So we did a quick mockup, changed some small things around and pitched it to a closed group and the results were super positive so we ended up sticking with it.

So here’s our big announcement: Oliver is now Olivia. Not the most original choice of names, but no point in trying to complicate things. This affects very little outside of the protagonist, and the VN should stay mostly the same. The biggest change and really the only change that should be apparent to you is that Caprice and Mekki are now lesbians. Unfortunately due to how the story is structured we did end up losing some planned concepts (we were planning a Hayley route, but the story requires her to be straight so we had to cut it after finalizing Oliver’s gender swap) but please believe that any of these cuts will be worth it. We hope you’re as excited as we are to fully embrace the PUREST FORM OF LOVE.

We haven’t fully decided on a solid design yet, so here’s a few different concepts:

Finally, some of you remember that lewd week was mentioned a little bit back in a Paper Trail post. While that’s not quite ready, we did want to leave you with a preview after waiting for so long, so here’s a picture of one of our Olivia concepts (click the thumbnail, the full version is nsfw obviously):

See you next time!

It’s December, which means it’s officially time to get excited about Christmas! We love the season (as announced last year, WiP’s story will eventually take you into Winter) and we always want to celebrate it in a large way. This year, we’ve decided to start the celebration a bit early. Specifically, TODAY.

So what we’ve gone and done is made an advent calendar, which will give you a little gift every day from now until Christmas Eve! Expect some cute Christmas artwork, maybe some in-VN assets and, you know, other things.

Click here to visit the Calendar and click today’s box for your gift. Remember to check back each day for something new!

Woah, an actual big blog post…post. Been a while since we had one of these! So, as you may have noticed, Paper Trail has been rather inactive lately. The truth is…we got burnt out. There were trickles of progress here and there, sure, but the fact of the matter is we’ve been totally reworking large chunks of the demo (we’ll show you a new background for a brand new scene sometime soon, maybe!) , and retreading the same 20 scenes over and over and over AND OVER will wear just about anyone out. To fix this and get out of our slump, we’re going to put the demo aside for now and strictly start working ahead on scenes 21+ for a little while.

So there’s our progress report, hopefully it clears the air a bit. I feel like I’m forgetting something, though…oh, wait, its Halloween today! Well we don’t like half measures, so instead of some promo art pieces or whatever, how about we give you…

A PREQUEL STORY

FROM HAYLEY’S POINT OF VIEW

THAT ACTUALLY SETS UP IMPORTANT PARTS OF THE VN

Click here to read it, Happy Halloween!