Well, it’s been an exciting month, hasn’t it! We have obviously been blown away by the incredible reception we’ve gotten for Chapter 1.5, and we are so grateful to you all for being so patient with us. Hopefully you all feel like your patience has been rewarded.

But what have we been doing for the rest of this month? First off, we took a bit of a break. We needed it, and it felt good to rest and not stare at code for a little while. Then it was back to work for us!

We had some very necessary chats about the business side of Rotten Raccoons, most of which is not important for y’all to know. But the one thing that is important is our monetization strategy moving forward. Here is our current plan: Chapter 1.5 will be free forever, and is now effectively the demo for OBSCURA. When it’s time to release Chapter 2, we will do so via early access and we will charge for the game at a discounted rate. If you buy the game during the early access period, you will get Chapter 3 for free when it comes out. After Chapter 3 is released the game will be done and we will take it out of early access and charge full price for it.

There’s two main reasons for this monetization plan: the first is that for those of us who freelance, getting paid gives us the chance to put time that would otherwise go into other work into Rotten Raccoons. The second is that voice acting is expensive, but we really want it!! 

Alongside that important business discussion, our absolutely wonderful producer/business raccoon Yamiochi got everything set up on Steam. As we announced earlier, OBSCURA has a page on Steam now! You can wishlist it and everything! And please do wishlist us (and other great indie romance VNs!) on Steam, it does so much for our visibility on the platform. Chapter 1.5 isn’t available on Steam yet, but we’re aiming for a release this summer and as soon as we know for sure when it’s happening we will let you know!

On the more dev-focused side, us writers have put our heads together and done some story work, turning the old route outlines into much cooler, tighter route outlines. We have some very serious Plans in mind and we’re getting very excited about them. We are getting started with Chapter 2 with the hope that it will be released later this year. Obviously things could always change, but we are much more comfortable with our dev process now.

We have heard your cries for the new tunes and Cajsa is in the process of getting the new tracks from Chapter 1.5 available for streaming. They are up on Soundcloud right now for your listening pleasure, and she should be making her Spotify debut in the next month or two. When she does we will let you know!

That about sums it up for us! We’re going to have fun getting back to work this June, and hopefully we’ll have lots of exciting news to share as summer goes on!