Monthly Devlog #4: July 2024

Hello patrons! I hope you all had a wonderful July. As always, thank you for your continued support throughout another month.

We're currently experiencing a glitch with Patreon that's making it extremely difficult to upload images. To work around this issue, we'll be providing image links instead of embedding them directly here. I apologize for the inconvenience, but we're dyinggg to show you what we've been working on, and this is the quickest way to share it with you. Please bear with us!

Without further ado, let's dive into the updates from these past few weeks (including some early access content! 🥳)

The programming side has been as slow as always while Lumi waits for work from the other departments, however, we're glad to say that Threads of You: Beyond the Bay programming has started being reworked and reoptimised! We're hoping that our demo rework will be a much smoother experience for players, as we're aware there has been a few hiccups in the past.

As for our other upcoming games, we're very excited to announce that Monsterous Brew (our submission for Monsterous Desires) and Effervescence (our submission for SuNoFes) are coming along exactly as we imagined them! We'll start introducing the characters for both very soon so keep an eye out! 👀

We officially announced Monsterous Brew on our Twitter last week, if you want to go check that out!!

And finally...

Here's a sneak peek of Effervescence's main menu 🤫 A few tweaks and a logo are still needed, but it's all functional (thankfully)!

Moving onto our art update...

We have some sprites, backgrounds, 1 new cg, and more to share with you guys!

Firstly, Chris' CG rework is almost done

He's too cute to have MC drain his wallets...

We're obsessed with it and we hope you guys will be too! 😊

Secondly, you guys can finally put a face to the name Dante, along with the reworked Coral Inn! :

Dante Sprite

Hostel Exterior

Hostel Interior

Next, up we're excited to give you guys a first look at 2 characters from Monstrous Brew:

Mae, the bubbly potion witch

She's who the player will be playing as throughout the story!

Erik, the CEO of Hell:

He's one of the love interests, and we think you'll all really enjoy getting to know him!

And while we're feeling nice, we'd like to share a small treat for another love interest!

Any clue what's going on here? 😳

Now some of you might already know this, but our favorite green-haired boy's birthday is coming up, and as usual, we'll be creating a TikTok to celebrate. It's still a few weeks away, but as patrons, you get to see the WIP!

And, to conclude our art update this month, we have new and improved omlette art for TOY:BTB because of course we do:

To get here, our team shared their omelettes which went... well, we'll let you judge.

Guess which Lavendeer dev cooked this in the comments! We're curious who gives off the most "can't cook an egg" energy!

Threads of You: Beyond the Bay:

Over the past two months, our new writing lead has been working diligently with the director and the writing department to come up with a new and improved game design that our studio can be proud of.

Soon we'll be reviewing and giving the final go-ahead on some fun and interesting mechanics that better highlight the dating sim elements of our game! While the lead writer has been busy with the big picture and underlying mechanics, the rest of our script writers have been further developing the main character relationships and storylines of the colorful cast of Brine Bay.

With the help of our lead writer, soon they'll have the detailed groundwork needed to start writing the improved script.

We want to take the time to thank these new members of the writing department. They're all doing an awesome job of taking the studio's core ideas and elevating them, both from their professional perspectives and as fellow fans of story-rich romance games! We can't wait to reveal more once the time is right!

Monsterous Brew:

We're still in the early stages of outlining this one, but we'll have more to share soon! We have Erik's introduction fleshed out, and is nearing the second stage of writing!

Effervescence:

We've officially begun writing! We've had an amazing time creating these characters and coming up with a story we think you guys will love. If you're a romance lover who's a sucker for happy endings, this is a game for you. And if you're an angst lover who appreciates the impact of a sad ending...let's just say I think you guys will enjoy this one as well.

In summary, no matter which ending you end up with, have tissues ready 😉

We've had a busy month on our socials!

We had a campaign for Vince's birthday that will be released this weekend alongside his birthday TikTok!!

(everyone say thank you to dev Lily for this gorgeous collage and the paper doll template used for this campaign)

We have also shared all of the TOY:BTB background (non-backer) npcs!

We also have Vince's teen years TikTok coming up, so get excited to see your fav emo in high school! (๑ > ᴗ < ๑)°ᡣ𐭩

We're planning to have a pretty eventful month in August! We'll hopefully be having a meeting with Bright Gambit to secure a collaboration, and have a new Kickstarter up to further support Threads of You: Beyond the Bay! We'll be aiming to have 2 more backgrounds completed, as well as Kai's CG completed. By the end of the month, we'll ideally have 2 more buttons completed to get closer to ship out the backer merch by late 2024 - early 2025.

As for our other projects, we'll be publicly sharing the love interests for Monstrous Brew near the end of the month, along with the release of Chapter 1 for Effervescence!

See you all next month! 💕