Posted June 05, 2020 by trickster-kaja
Hi, folks!
WHA’EVER STUDIOS here, and we come with devlogs! In the upcoming weeks, we will share our process and progress on WINTERSANDS (WS). Sit back and enjoy :^)
WINTERSANDS follows the adventures of our girl Agatha, the Keeper of Fire, who faces choices that will define who she is in a magical world. An ancient story, right? All stories are ancient to an extent, so it’s all about the approach. Here’s how we approach our visual novel!
At the Library: prepare for some extra challenging choices!
These are the three pillars of the game. Time to introduce ourselves!
WINTERSANDS began way before we had a cool studio name and logo. And even before we decided to make it a visual novel! Some characters existed in our writer’s notepad since she was 11. Then they spilled over into doodles in our programmer’s textbooks. Then, there was a long break. But here we are again!
It was 2015, and we – j.s. (writer) and trickster.kaja (programmer) – decided to make a game. We both have our day jobs (all our collaborators must get paid, so we gotta bring home the bacon), and there’s often precious little time left to develop WS. We needed backup: an artist and a composer. Both had to be responsible people who’d share our passion for WS.
It wasn’t easy, but we found them! Meet the team:
As soon as Ami and Irony Love joined us, WS started taking shape.
This is what it looked like before:
And here’s the quantum leap made possible by our new team members:
The demo (the first scene of WS Chapter One) came out in September 2019, a thing of beauty visually and audibly. Today, we’re working on Chapter One, aiming to finish in 2021. We’re also sharing news and lore in our several social media in English and Russian:
We’re grateful to all of you for playing the demo and writing comments and reviews – your feedback is invaluable! There’s more than four people behind WINTERSANDS ;^)
And that was our brief overview. Next, we will boldly and very thoroughly go where no man has been before, and expose every nook and cranny of the process of making WINTERSANDS.
Stay tuned!