Hello hello, my dear raccoon friends! It’s a gorgeous day (this is a lie, it is extremely grey and windy, but a girl can dream) and we wanted to share our October progress!

As mentioned last month, October was unusually busy for us in our personal lives, so progress was on the slower side this month. That said, we still got some stuff done. We’ve just wrapped up the Steam Scream event, which has been a nice success for us! If you missed it and wanted to get Obscura on sale, rest assured we’ll be participating in other events that we qualify for throughout the year, and that every discount on Steam has an identical discount on itchio, too. 

On the public-facing side of things, last month I put out a call on Discord and Tumblr for things folks would be interested in being able to ask an NPC whose job is knowing things. Including duplicates, I got over 900 suggested terms. Most of them are admittedly not really relevant to the game or the NPC in question (they do not know what elephants are and so asking would be useless, sorry), but basically any term asking about a specific marketplace thing or character has been included as well as some interesting lore background terms. It is, as far as these things go, mostly a toy for the most dedicated players, but one I’ve been having good fun with as I write 80+ little entries.

Given the way things are going over on Twitter, we also decided the time was right to pick up a Bluesky account. Mostly to make sure we got our name, but also because a lot of romance VN devs are picking up sticks to move there and we like the crowd there. At the moment the account will mostly mirror what we write on Twitter, but hopefully I can get into the habit of using it a little more casually. For anyone following us on both Twitter and Tumblr, you can imagine our ideal Bluesky persona as falling between those two.

In gamedev news, Francesco’s script is trucking along beautifully. Tobi has a little gang of NPCs for a scene that we’re falling in love with, and the boyo himself is being his usual sweet-but-reckless self. I am very excited with some of the scenes coming up, they are so much fun.

On Oleander’s side of the script, things are moving very well! I’m really happy with how progress has been going with him and excited with all the weird shit I’m getting to do in some scenes. For a sneak peek, how about this choice menu? One option is being hidden for Reasons, but otherwise this is how it should look in the actual release.

This time, Vesper isn’t doing chores for Oleander to prepare for an event. This time, you get to decide how to prepare for an event. But the chores are still mandatory.

And that’s it from us in October! If you’re reading this soon after it’s coming out, Cirrus’ birthday is coming up on the 6th (or has already happened), so we hope you’re looking forward to that. Otherwise, we’ll talk to you soon.

Love,
The Rotten Raccoons Team 🦝💙