More Haruspex, A 'Short' Video, and About That Day 5 Preview - Update 7/30/2025

Hey ya'll, Ruby here! Hope all's well! o/

In case you haven't seen, a preview with nearly 90 minutes of new Haruspex content including Days 5 & 6 have been posted alongside this update.

This brings the current runtime of the entire project up to a little over 3h49m.

It's still missing a few key assets, most notably more voice lines on Day 5 then I'm really comfortable with, but putting that aside, I won't lie: I'm really proud of both how quickly I've been able to pull this together, how well it's turning out, and how much fun I'm having doing so. When all is said and done, I think this will be the best days yet.

So with that said, I recognize that I promised Day 5 at the beginning of this month and even promised it was almost done last time we spoke. So why is it only now showing up?

Well, to be completely honest, Day 5 has in fact been done for a couple of weeks now. As you can see, it's been done for so long that it gave me enough time to finish a whole other day and an intermission. However, as mentioned above, there are a few key assets missing, and it was in attempting to accommodate for this that I made a bit of a rookie mistake: I decided to give it 'one more day' for the assets to come in, for more than a couple days.

As ever, I always want these previews to be as complete as I can possibly make them, and this can incentivize me to try and let things bake longer when I really should just put it out there. However, by the time I realized that, Day 6 was already so far a long I felt it'd be best to just give it both the extra time and come back with both days.

I let the preview being perfect take priority over actually getting it out on time, and that was my mistake. My apologies.

Now, onto the immediate future. Big thing to note:

The next content I post here will not be Haruspex.

I have some big plans for next month, and most of them aren't Pathologic related.

First and foremost: Some of you may remember the script I posted about how Persona 3 Portable depicts gender a few weeks ago.

As mentioned in the June update, it's been my plan to try and get this script in order both as a bit of a breather on this project, and cause it's something I'm eager to get out there. Fortunately, this is already well underway: The script is fully recorded, I've got the art assets for it in hand, and I'm just about done capturing all the game footage I need. If all goes well, I'll be able to get this in order within the next two weeks, so expect more on that very soon.

Secondly, the reason I'm giving myself a tight deadline: I will be returning back to Europe again next month, this time to the Czech Republic, and then back to Scotland to partake in a bit of a unique experience.

A few of my friends and I will be participating in 97 Poets of Revachol, a multi-day Disco Elsyium LARP!

This is a bit of an atypical LARP, as you might expect of something pulling from Disco. It's an anti-power fantasy, an experience that's less about 'fun' and more about immersing players into intense circumstances as normal people. I've received both my character sheets, and they are each very grounded people with a lot of baggage, while conveniently being very extreme contrasts of eachother.

I will be doing two runs of this over the course of a full week. The whole thing is being played in an old hospital where we will be eating, sleeping, and staying in character for the whole time. To put the level of intensity we're talking about here into perspective, I do know there are some who will be sleeping in what might as well be a sewer. I fully expect it to be miserable both for me as a character and me as a person, and I couldn't be more excited about it.

Not only will it be a great time with an immersive experience unlike any I've had before, but I expect it'll make for a very good video at some point. What that will look like, it's hard for me to say until I've actually had the experience, but I would absolutely expect a new script within the next few weeks as well.

Perhaps most of all though, this will give me a bit of a chance to do some field research, for want of a better term. If you've been following the development of the Haruspex video or maybe even read the script, you know that I've been a bit obsessed with the overlap between how actors approach acting and how players approach playing. I've had a lot of experience in similar things of course, I've done a couple LARPs here and there, I have my own weekly Pathfinder game that's been running for years, and am not above a bit of roleplay in video games because, well, just look at the Patho videos.

A multi-day LARP like this, one fixated on emotionally intense storytelling above providing a power fantasy, is the one major gap in my personal experience I still need to fill. It's something I've desperately wanted to experience, in no small part to see if it could make me feel the way that certain video games like Pathologic have been able to make me feel, or if it does in fact hit different. And cherry on top of all of this: SulMatul has ran this LARP before and has subsequently sworn by it as one of the best experiences with games she's ever had.

Needless to say, my hopes are high. No matter how things turn out, I'm quite certain I'll have a lot of thoughts about it.

After that wraps up, I'll be spending a couple weeks with SulMatul as we compare notes, collaborate on somethings, and watch 100 episodes of Hunter x Hunter at my unyielding insistence (you should watch Hunter x Hunter btw). Haruspex will also be receiving some work during this time as well, as I've been slowly but surely building up a backlog of recorded audio to edit. My cheapo laptop can't handle video on the scale Haruspex needs, but I'm sure it can handle that much. Once I return to the States, I'll be able to put the next couple Days together relatively quickly.

So, tl;dr

-Day 5 reminded me that Perfect is the enemy of Finished
-New Haruspex preview will take a little longer than originally hoped because:
-New Persona 3 video in the next couple weeks
-Will be back with the experience of a very unique LARP

And I believe that covers everything for now. I'll be back very soon with something very cool.

Love ya all,
Ruby <33