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Dear Backers,
Every time I sit down to write this monthly update for you, it's a lovely reflective reminder that, "Oh yeah, we've actually done a lot this month!"
Still, I'd like to check in with you all on what the game's timeline is looking like so far:
The closer we get to the projected release window for the game in the first three months of next year, the more I feel the pressure to be bringing more to these updates — and rightfully so, with so much to be done. Though time is of the essence, I do think Q1 of 2025 is still a reasonable timeline for us to get the first play-ready version of OSAS out into the world!
This will, however, necessitate some adjustments to the first release version of the game.
In our November 2023 Backer Bulletin, I briefly explained what "done" means to us. The OSAS Extended Demo is considered to be an example of a play-ready, shippable version of the game — one that may not contain every cosmetic feature we'd like to include (such as extra sprite poses, outfits, or minor voiced scenes) but that still packs the narrative and interactive punch we want.
In that update, I also explained those cosmetic features are "floating tasks" which will be dealt with for the final release of the game. Due to the amount of work and play-testing still required to ensure the game is play-ready, those final polish elements will be postponed to post-release updates, which will be available to anyone who owns the game.These do not have a specific release timeline yet, as we will be concentrating on finishing the game's core experience before moving on to additional work.
🛎️ Feel free to relay your thoughts or questions on the above in the comments section below — I would be happy to clarify anything for you!
Now, let's get on with the fun stuff in this update:
For the past several bulletins, I've lamented the lack of sprite art progress I've been able to provide you — but that has changed enough that this month, I'm putting visuals right at the top of the pile!
At this stage of production, these two aspects of the game are well and truly intertwined, so I'm delighted to say there's been quite a bit of headway made on them as a whole!
First of all, George and Ananya's sprites are now ready for use in-game!
Ananya could be considered the "straight man" to her and Dr Lewis' double act/marriage, and I love how her sprite turned out! I think it walks a good balance of staying prim but expressing her personality. She doesn't have as large of a role in the game as we initially anticipated, but she and Dr Lewis are inseparable and become fairly important figures in Hugo's life through the events of the game.
George, I would say, is the "final boss" of Seamus' route*, seeing as they have a father-son relationship in desperate need of repair. It's very satisfying to have his sprite in-game, and to see his emotionally constipated expressions match his equally awkward fathering:
* At least, until Seamus figures out he's his own worst enemy!
As I insert new assets into the game, I'm continuing with scripting for the surrounding contents, such as this scene below which features the new Country Path background from last month's update!
I have also been making headway through some of the game's lesser endings — namely, the Growthless and Loveless ends (considered our "neutral" ends). These are light on assets and most of them are available already, so they're quite easy to implement!
As for CG illustrations, I've gotten down to business with two ending CGs as well as the Chapter 8 Omnibus scene CG, which you may recognise from this Voiced CG preview from last year:
This scene is probably one of my favourites in the game, and it's one I've been planning for for a long time — in fact, it's such a pivotal scene I've apparently been drawing it since 2021:
The latest version of the CG is informed by all my knowledge from scripting the game, prepping other CGs for it, and using the voice acting in scenes like this to their fullest.
The yearning in this scene is really important to convey, so I knew I wanted a good range of expressions to accompany the voicing.
Making the overall composition of the picture simpler allowed me to concentrate on what I'll have the "camera" zoomed in on all the time — that is, Hugo and Seamus' faces.
As such, these two are set up as "sprites" and borrow the main sprite framework to manipulate expressions for this CG! Though there are some differences because the CG versions have two head positions and a limited number of face parts, I can manipulate them exactly the same way I do our sprites through dialogue in the rest of the game.
Here's a preview of the scene as it stands, so you can see the CG in action:
By the next update, I should have this CG done, and I'll be able to share a video of the actual scene in all its glory! 💖
(Oh, and there's been some kissing going on in those two other CGs I'm working on, too. I'm starting to think this game's a little gay...)
Over the past month, we've finalised edits on the Hugo Good and Seamus Best endings, meaning they're now the best they can be! There have been a few additions made through editing, but the word count is still at roughly 107.5k words. With the addition of the last two endings we're looking to have by the end of October, we should be close to knowing the total word count of the game sometime soon:
We've also started working with our higher tier backers for the bonus scenes which are part of their rewards, and which will be available in the game for all players!
As we make our way through to the endgame voiced content, we've got our next two sessions lined up. These will encompass Act 3 content and two of our Good and Best ending scenes!
Our Audio Engineer has also delivered a chunk of voice lines to us, ready to be implemented in-game, and everything is sounding amazing. There is still more to go, though — and so, we'll be getting on with further engineering very soon.
The plan is to keep the art train rolling, really! It's full steam ahead — and I'm really quite tired of looking at my own unfinished art in-game, so all the better.
There's not much else to say but that everyone will be keeping on, keeping on, and we should have some more exciting updates next month!
I'd love to let you in a little more on the process of making the art for the game, and I'm happy to dedicate more space on our updates to write-ups like these!
Yours truly,
Ing
Dear Backers,
While it hasn't been all that long since our last update, it certainly feels like it has been!
For my part, I've just returned from a rather impromptu trip to the USA (and the post-trip illness which followed). Besides being able to spend time with old friends and to meet some newer friends (some of them VN devs) in person for the first time, I also got to see lots of cool old things:
Speaking of my fellow VN developers, there's another campaign here on Kickstarter I'd like to share with you today:
While very different from OSAS, Bitter Silver is another lovingly crafted visual novel perfect for anyone looking for something a little different to play!
When she ventures into a backwater planet at the fringes of the Milky Way, ex-soldier turned intergalactic bounty hunter Lucia Lopez is the closest she's ever been to finding answers to a curse which has plagued her all her life, and just three final bounties stand in her way.
Now more than ever, every decision she makes in taking them down will change not just her fate, but the fates of her crew-mates as well. Whether life or death, friendship or romance are in store — it's only when that final bounty is claimed that Lucia will know for certain.
With its comic book-styled sequences, wild cast of characters, and Bebop-filled soundtrack, Bitter Silver is a one-of-a-kind game. It's slated for release by Q1 of 2026, and the campaign is at nearly 80% of its goal with 10 days left to go!
Here's their page if you're eager for more: Support Bitter Silver - An Indie Game Love Letter to Cowboy Bebop on Kickstarter!
(Note: I may have a slight bias towards this project, seeing as I was the UI Designer for this game. My work is largely done and I won't be benefitting from their campaign, but I'd love to see them cross the finish line!)
Now, while I've been off traveling, our team has still been hard at work!
On the writing end, Rowan has added to the endings of the game — in specific, Seamus' Bad Ending and Hugo's Loveless, Growthless, and Best endings! It is, again, quite surreal for us to be at this stage of the story after so long.
Seamus' Bad Ending has especially induced some "ouchies" for us as a pair — we love Seamus, we really do — but sometimes, your characters do have to answer for their shortcomings...
That's the fun of writing endings, really! With so many directions to go, it makes for a fascinating character study.
At the start of September, we conducted another recording session with Shaun to cap off the main voiced scenes of his route, including a pivotal scene between Seamus and his ex-fiancée Leticia.
It's always a treat to wake up to fresh voice work, and in this case, we've had the other half of this scene recorded since...I believe it was April or so! In order to make the performance the best it can be, we used both the existing lines from Leticia's actress for Shaun to act against, and also provided music cues to influence the tone of the scene.
The final scene, when cut together, should sound seamless; as though they were recording together instead of far apart. The magic of editing! 🪄
Joseph has now finished the Country Path background, and it's a real beauty! Here's a sneak peek of it below:
In our last update, I also shared a snippet of the Seamus Chapter 8 CG in a demonstration of the working jaw movements I had implemented for it! What I didn't elaborate on, however, was the utter state of chaos this experiment left my CG draft in.
You can see in the WIP image below that I've chosen to focus on certain elements of the artwork more than others — most prominently, Hugo and Seamus' arms are completely un-rendered here! (There's no glamour at all to my artistic process.)
Yet, in the interests of getting all this done, this messy approach has been helpful. Having a working prototype such as this one gets us one step closer to having the artwork in game, in its final incarnation with cinematography, voicing, and all!
Now that I'm back to my work station, I'm catching up on all the work of the past month that I've been given to review! The next order of business for production on my part will be sprite art, as it's been a thorn in my side for so long.
We'll be getting more of our endings in to our Editor Liam for review, and even more voice acting and background art will be in store.
It'll be a busy upcoming month, and I'll be coming to you with lots to report in our next update!
Yours truly,
Ing
Dear Backers,
This summer has proven to be a fairly hectic one! I've returned from my month abroad to some incredibly rainy weather here in Hong Kong; I'd love to say it makes me feel a little closer to our story's setting and to our characters, but the humidity makes it difficult to romanticise...still, I need no better excuse to stay inside and work on this game — and that is exactly what I've been doing.
On the Kickstarter Rewards front, I've begun to collect and write content for the Making of OSAS book — seeing as we're in the midst of making the game, it only feels right to chip away at it as we go! I also started to put the in-game bibliography together, which is a pretty big undertaking in itself because we've done quite a bit of research.
But first, here's more on the making-of as it stands:
We are solidly in the home stretch of writing for Hugo's route, with Chapter 11 largely sorted and endings materialising. The word count for each route is now over 50,000 words each!
We've been doing a great deal of editing and polishing for Hugo's route too, but sometimes, story revisions only happen when I'm scripting scenes — when I'm forced to squint at a sentence and wonder how on earth it ever got past me the first time. In truth, I already know how — the pacing of writing is greatly affected by the addition of kinetic and interactive elements, so just looking at it in a document doesn't do the final product justice! I make a fair few adjustments after the full write-edit-review process, during the scripting and camerawork stage of each scene's development.
Having added much of the finalised story content to the game's files, I've spent some time making them into playable scenes. Work has already begun on several chapters of Act 2 and two of the game's endings are partway scripted — which brings me to CG Illustrations.
It's proven to be a great motivator to script gameplay with unfinished assets, as it pushes me to finish them so the scenes can be just the way I imagine them. In the case of Seamus Chapter 8, we have most everything completed, from story to voice acting...all but the CG illustration for a pivotal scene.
This particular scene has been sketched out for over a year, but I hadn't had the opportunity to return to it. It was to the point where my art style has shifted; and so, I decided to rework the illustration with my new scripting considerations in mind, including working jaw movements for when Hugo and Seamus are speaking:
As you can see, they "speak" seamlessly in-game. While everything else about the CG remains quite rough, I'm much more confident and motivated to complete it now. (And of course, when this CG is completed, I'll be sharing the end product with you all in a backers-only update!)
I expect the remainder of the assets required for the game, including character sprites, will be completed in a similar manner. One such case is that of Nathaniel, Hugo's older brother, who appears in just one scene that I've now begun scripting.
To avoid the horrors of using Ren'py's default silhouetted placeholder sprite, Nathaniel's sprite has started to materialise.
Our background artist Joseph has also been continuing with the Country Path background — this time with a chillier variant!
We have now received new recordings from Richard for Coulston's voiced parts as well as from a directed session between Max and Chidumebi (Hugo and Dr Lewis respectively)! Soon to follow are recordings from Shiraz (Ananya's VA) and Olivia (Camilla's VA) which will then wrap up Hugo's main voice contents.
We are very much nearing the final stage of recording, which will be for the game's main (romantic) endings. Time really flies when you're in the thick of it!
As we wrap up on writing the game's endings in September, it's pretty surreal to Rowan and I that we're in this stage of production at all! I'm going to be concentrating even more on getting art assets done to bring OSAS' gameplay to life, and we'll all keep trucking on as always.
Yours truly,
Ing
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