Made Marion Development Update, Feb. 2025
about 1 year ago
– Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 01:40:42 PM
Festival Season Continues!
As I mentioned last month, we're in a variety of Steam festivals this Feb-Mar. The first one is the Storyteller's Festival, which is on now!
As part of our festival experience, we have a livestream preview of John's route! It's playing on repeat throughout this festival and our next one, as well as Steam's Visual Novel fest later in March.
Find it here: https://steamcommunity.com/broadcast/watch/76561199108480417
I got a few buddies and our faithful first reader/editor Edhie together for a blind playthrough of the first few scenes. Take a peek and learn a bit about John's impish side and, um, giant swords. This is pre-beta footage, so rest assured that the couple of bugs that made it into this stream will be fixed before release! (Today. They will be fixed today.)
John Route Progress
So the problem with deadlines when you're chronically ill is that, yeah, chronic illness. I wasn't able to finish John Chapter 1 by mid-February as I'd hoped (part of that was taking the time needed to code in the material for the festival stream, but hey, that coding had to happen sooner or later), but I am still truckin'! I was having brain issues and had to do a lot of re-writing. I will continue working and hope to be moving on to Chapter 2 ASAP.
That's it for this month, next month we should have some previews of the ongoing (improved from original plan, with full movie animation) lore intro!
Made Marion Development Update, November 2024
over 1 year ago
– Wed, Nov 20, 2024 at 04:34:40 PM
One Month Since Will
Happy one-month anniversary to Marion and Will! Thanks so much to everyone who stopped by our Tumblr and Discord to offer their thoughts and send in a few typos that were the result of some 3am writing sessions.
I'm currently completing a small patch that will fix a few typos, a small blocking issue in the Itch.io build of the game, add the final version of the final Will CG, and expand Robin's love scenes to better match the length of Will's (and the length that they will be from now on). It's been delayed a bit past my original plan due to real world challenges like difficult election results that had me taking time to care for my nearest and dearest in the USA, but it will be out soon!
I'm also outlining and idea boarding John's route. It's going to be quite the contrast from Will's, in which two young scions yearning to have control over their own destinies came together. In John's route we have the meeting of two responsible young people who were forced by circumstance to grow up before they were ready.
John is kind, protective, and can be stubborn in his own way. Despite technically being Robin's second, he's used to being the captain that steers the ship. So is Marion. When they meet, will she take it as an opportunity to let go and be protected for once, or will she challenge John's need to always act as the bulwark between the world's dangers and the people he loves?
Your choices will lead to different kinds of love and different kinds of struggles as you work toward the Challenge or Compromise Ending.
Art Team Priorities
While I get my stuff together on the patch and John's route, here's what our artists are up to:
Arrapso (Sprites, CGs) is creating some sprite models that are not wearing their trousers, for when I have sprites zoomed in during love scenes in which they're supposed to be naked. We still won't be showing anything below the waist, but some of our gents have some fairly high waists on their trousers and the visible belts were bugging me.
Lawrichai (cut-ins, lore intro) is concentrating on the animated lore intro. We've decided to make it a full animated movie instead of doing smaller animations in-engine, so Lawri has picked up Live2D and is animating away! I'm excited to see what she puts together!
Here we have some cool, possible Fae Lord sketches for the intro:
Sandra (backgrounds, creatures, cut-in assist) has finished all the backgrounds I currently need, and with FIFTY BGs plus many variations, I'm doing my level best not to need any more! We only have one more creature to design (Lord Geoffrey's favorite hunting hound), so she has graciously agreed to help us with cut-ins so that Lawrichai can focus on the lore intro and love scene illustrations.
Happy Holidays!
We will be taking December off from updates, so I should have some nice John route news to share when we return mid-January, 2025. I hope you all have a lovely holiday season, or if the holiday season is not lovely for you, that you persevere and are able to take time for yourself.
