Time for our end-of-the month report. Unfortunately, thanks to a string of unfortunately timed absences, delays and so on, we haven’t had the chance to update the build this month, though we have one almost ready to go, minus the art assets. This update touches up on scenes previously in the build, lays the groundwork for the previously discussed crowd system, and doubles the amount of scenes. On top of incorporating feedback we receive over the next few days, we’ll be continuing to work on art assets for the newly added scenes, while the writing team continues editing scenes currently in their first draft as well as writing ahead. We hope next month’s update is a good deal larger than this month’s and that we’ll be able to post up some new media as a result. Background details for the lead characters are still coming as soon as we can get it presentable, please be patient.

Another small note: we’ve been trickling out new information on occasion on our Twitter, so follow it maybe. For example, there was recently an impromptu Q&A on our public channel, which resulted in some new information about WiP and it’s characters. You can check that out here.

Oh, also, Halloween. That’s today. PICTURE.

First off: welcome to our new blog! No more Wordpress, so hopefully things run a bit smoother after we straighten everything out. With that out of the way, here’s a quick update on where we stand and what we’re working on:

We’ve just ended our first month of closed feedback, and we’ve already received a ton of useful thoughts and opinions from our testers. We’ve spent a good amount of time refining the art and writing thanks to all of the great feedback. Hopefully it’ll end up being worth it once we get the chance to share everything.

Our demo plans are calling for a total of 20 scenes, ending with the first (and potentially most important) choice in the VN. We’re still quite a ways from this goal since it’s been a bit difficult to get over the initial hump, but we hope to speed up our output once our art needs plateau and we need fewer sprites and backgrounds to be created for newer scenes.

Apart from tweaking the art and writing, we’re also playing with a couple of technical ideas. In the beta, one piece of feedback we’ve received repeatedly is that the world can seem a bit empty and lonely. To counteract that, we’re testing a system that lets us emulate a crowd of people moving in the background. It also lets us control things like the crowd’s density, speed, direction and so on. To further complement our visual aesthetic, we’re testing a sprite effect which allows them to flip as if they were actually paper. We’re trying a few different methods to see if we can come up with something that suits our needs without being visually distracting.

Outside of the VN itself, we’ve been wanting to talk more about the main characters outside of their obvious art and writing hobbies. We’ve been brainstorming how we want to do that, so please be patient and keep checking back.

BREAKING NEWS: Salty Salty Studios has successfully met a deadline! After over a year, we’ve finally gotten to a point where we can start distributing builds around to get feedback. Today we’ll be handing out builds to internal testers containing the first few scenes. Past this point, we’ll be doing monthly blog and build updates so progress should be a bit more transparent than it has been. The next post should be a bit more interesting after we’ve had the chance to collect the first round of feedback and are able to talk about it.

For those not in the beta, we still have stuff to share! We’ve prepared a collection of songs in the VN to download. It’s nine tracks (20:47) long and you can find it here.

That’s all for now! It’s a really exciting time for the group and we hope it only gets better from here on out.

We’re mid-August now, which means we’re getting really close to our beta release. We just wanted to make a relatively quick post explaining how it’ll work and give a minor update on progress.

We’re inviting a small number of people to help give feedback on WiP on a monthly basis. We’ll be updating their builds every month with fixes, more scenes, etc. Every time we update, we’ll be posting the patch notes (with some trimming to avoid spoilers) on the blog. After we hit the first branching point in the VN, we’ll get one last round of input and then release that as our public demo.

The initial release will contain the first couple of scenes in the VN. The writing is done, the majority of the art is ready and music is still making progress. We’ll be bringing people in on the 31st, so we’re really close to hitting our deadline. We also plan on doing some outside work including moving the blog away from Wordpress to something a bit more reliable.

As promised with our previous post, we’re going to start working on monthly updates detailing our progress. Typically we plan to shoot for the middle of the month, but this time is an exception as we already made quite a bit of progress since our last update. We’ve made massive strides forward in terms of art and writing output and made two relatively large changes that we’ll detail below:

-The Textbox We got a lot of useful feedback after we released our April Fools build that we’ve been working into the actual VN. One specific issue was that the textbox had a few concerns floating around it, namely how the shape of the box made the text seem awkward and how it seemed larger than it needed to be. We went through a couple months of iteration and came up with the following solution:

Despite the change, one thing everyone on the team agreed with is that we didn’t want to lose the moving speech tails, so those are still there for left/ right and when Oliver is speaking.

-Mekki Mekki’s gone through a total of three writers, all pulling her in different directions. When Mekki was originally designed she was an entirely different character whose appearance fit her personality. Despite numerous iterations on her character, we kept the short hair and glasses design because of the work we’d need to do to update everything. Recently we came to the realization that there was a pretty large quality gap between our earlier sprites and the stuff we were producing now, so Twr agreed to update all of our older content. We figured since the slate was being wiped clean we’d also take the opportunity to update Mekki’s design.

A couple of interesting changes in the middle of progressing towards our end-of-summer beta goal.  Hopefully you found this post interesting.