April round-up

Hello, hello to everyone out there! Things are jumping out here, so let’s chat about what’s been going on.

There has been a lot of action going on in the raccoon den this month! Mugi has been working on some miscellaneous assets as well as developing an extremely important asset that we are so hyped about. Here’s one of the backgrounds she added this month, which is part of an absolute banger scene.

Cajsa has been doing the important work of making sure complete chunks of the script have ambiences, which already does so much to make the world feel more immersive. She’s also working on some music and the reviews are in:

On the writing front, Cirrus’ and Keir’s second chapters are looking solid, with lots of work done on both. We can safely say that Cirrus’ chapter two is going to have about double the word count of his first chapter, and Keir is going to be close but not quite double. And since last month we did a little preview of Cirrus’ script, how about some Keir script this time around?

And now that I’ve been released from the cage of real-life obligations, I have been writing like a machine. Oleander’s trash draft went from 5% complete to completely done this month, giving us a good idea of the structure and pacing of events while also being extremely dumb to read in a good way.

This is genuinely the way we write rough drafts here in the raccoon den, it’s surprisingly good for short-circuiting the urge to be perfect in a first draft.

We also had a look at our work output and did a bit of number-crunching, the results of which we talked about a lot recently. The decision we came to is that we’re uncertain if we’ll be able to release all of Chapter 2 at once. At our current pace, Keir and Cirrus’ chapter two will be done for our internal deadline, but Oleander and Francesco are less certain. Like I said earlier, it turns out these scripts are significantly larger this time around! And while all of us are doing Obscura as a hobby project, Tobi has extra restrictions on the amount of time she can put into Obscura that we have to take into consideration.

At the moment it’s looking like we’ll either have to delay our internal deadline (and therefore Chapter Two in its entirety), or split the release up, so we’ve decided to split the release. Our current plan is to release Cirrus and Keir’s second chapters together, then add Oleander and Francesco separately or together, when they’re ready. This lets us start sharing stuff that’s effectively done and ready to go, while also making sure we don’t feel pressured to crunch or overwork ourselves.

And that’s it for us here! April was a terrific month for us, and May is looking like it’ll be oodles of fun! We’ll be back with more to talk about soon 😊