Monthly Update - December 2020

Welcome back to our monthly update for December!

We hope you're all enjoying the festive season so far and having a well earned break. We've been very busy the last month with all manner of tasks for The Divine Speaker, so let's get right into it!

The Divine Speaker

Art

Art this month has been a mix of work on sprites and CGs. As you may have seen, we posted a new sprite sketch the other day. Below, you can check out the finished sprite for Cyne's mother! We'll make a separate post with some of her expressions later!

We also welcomed Alyssa to the team as a promotional artist. Her first work with us was on an illustration for Veras' birthday!

Writing and Editing

As you may know, writing and editing is complete for The Divine Speaker as well as the prequel, The Sun and the Moon. Even so, we're still tweaking small parts here and there as we program and prepare the scripts for the voice actors.

Programming

Cyne's route is now completely in game! While we still have some things to add (namely one additional sprite plus one new track), we're happy you can now play the game from start to finish.

With that complete, we have moved on to start the programming for Leos' route. He has the longest route out of all three characters, but seeing as some scenes are common between routes, we're hoping to have his programming done soon.

You can check out a little preview video here! 

Lastly, we've spent some time testing the common route in the last few days, as well as adding additional entries into the journal. We hope to get the common route completely finished so that all we have to do is add in CGs and voice acting.

Voice Acting

We currently have one script left to record for the common route before we move into voicing Cyne's route.

Many of our voice actors have been away for thanksgiving and are now away for the Christmas period, so we may have to wait until the new year to finish this part of the voice acting recordings.

We've also trialing a new audio editor, as our previous editor Glenn has become too busy to work on the game. We wish him so much luck into the future!

Screenshots

Beta Build

We released a new beta build at the end of last month that includes the ENTIRE Cyne route! That's right... you can play all the way 'til the end of the story if you're on our beta tier!

We are so excited to sit down and test the game through all the way.

Like I mentioned above, it is still missing some things (like voice acting and CGs), but if you're interested in helping us to test it, you can still grab the beta on our Patreon.

Please note that in general, this is not going to be the best way to experience the story. I strongly suggest you wait until the finished product if that's what you're looking for!

Focus for the next month

Here's our focus for the next month:

• Continue Leos route programming
• Continue common route testing
• Add in more journal entries from common route

We also will continue adding in additional voice acting once our new sound engineer finishes up their trial!

Beyond the Abyss

Work on Beyond the Abyss this month has consisted of editing and adding in additional scenes. 

Currently, the game is sitting at about 51,000 words, and we still have more to edit and add before we continue writing the story. At this rate, the game should be longer than the 50-70,000 words than we first expected.

Most of this additional scenes come from working our two backer characters, Sun Liying and Yang Ruhao, into the plot. We really love the direction they're taking the story, and we're so happy we were able to fit in two backer character slots.

Although these slots have already been filled, it's encouraging to know that they are sought after enough to prebook them! We'll definitely try to continue having backer characters in our games in the future.

Let's take a little look below at a new scene:

We've also FINISHED editing on what will be the demo. It currently sits at about 25,000 words, so definitely on the longer side. It showcases the first two days of the game. Once we're further ahead with The Divine Speaker's programming, we will create a beta demo and upload it for testing on Patreon.

Other News

Mailing List

We've just started a mailing list! Mostly it will be updates similar to what you'll read here (but with less art/information), but we'll also use it for important announcements (game releases, game announcements, sales, you know the kind of thing!).

It'll be a great way to keep up to date with what we do *after* The Divine Speaker, so we encourage you all to sign up here! We'll also send you a Fawn wallpaper for signing up <3.

Discord

As usual, you can join our Discord here! (If you want to be given your tier role, please connect your Discord to your Patreon!)

CuriousCat

Lately, we've been answering questions related to gamedev and The Divine Speaker on our Curiouscat! If you want, feel free to send over any questions you have.

We hope you all have a lovely Christmas (if you celebrate it!) and a nice break over the new year. We'll also try to encourage the rest of the team to relax over the next few weeks.