Hello, hello, my beautiful raccoon friends! It is now May (and a bit late! Sorry about that, this post had a bit of sensitive stuff that needed extra-careful writing), which means it’s time to look back and go over what’s been done in April.

The marquee event on our calendar was one of our regular meetings/jamborees, where we all get into the same room, check into the progress we’ve made, and make any major revisions to our plans that we wanna do. We also enjoy some amazing meals and get to have some fun together, of course! It was extremely fun and I’m already looking forward to our next get-together, but for all of you the major news is that we’re updating our release plans.

At the beginning of this year, our plan was to do two updates in 2025: a small one for Valentine’s Day doing some quality of life fixes+some polish and adding a second date with Vesper, and a larger one later in the year with Francesco’s and Oleander’s second chapters. At our meeting, we decided that it would be better for us to split up the releases of Oleander and Francesco’s updates. We posted larger explanations of our reasoning on Tumblr and Discord, but here’s the important information:

• We’re all dealing with life as it comes, and thankfully no one is in an emergency situation to force this change
• Tobi has less time she can give to Obscura due to her day job contract
• We don’t want to sit on a complete chapter (Oleander’s in this case) and leave Tobi feeling pressured to work more or faster on Francesco when she genuinely cannot
• Both chapters are still planned to be released this year, with release dates announced once we’re confident we can hit them.

Releasing Oleander’s second chapter first, then Francesco’s after, is not what we would’ve picked in a perfect world, but it’s the best option we have in the world we live in and we’re feeling better about our plans since we made that choice. So thank you for your patience, and we hope we can reward it with Oleander’s second chapter soon!

So, with that figured out, what did we do for the rest of the month? A lot! One big, exciting thing is that Cajsa is working her magic on the script to implement all the audio. She’s already completed her first pass of the script to implement the ambience of all the different spaces the story will take you to, and now sound effects and music are coming in to fill out the soundscape! I’m so excited, her audio work does so much to make the world of Obscura feel authentic and gives the VN an extra level of polish.

Mugi’s still working on merch to make sure it’s all up to snuff. Her side of the process is pretty snappy, but unfortunately delivery times have been less so. Nevertheless, I think we’re entering the home stretch! She’s also been putting some time into Oleander’s sprites, for reasons I can only describe as “extremely spoiler”. I think you’re really going to enjoy the fruits of her work!

On the writing side, Tobi’s continuing her fine work on Francesco’s route! This month was pretty bananas for her, but she managed to get in some solid writing. On my side of the writing zone, it’s been the same story of incremental changes; rejigging some dialogue here, adding in a little lore there, whatever the hell is happening in this scene

It’s been fun!

And now, what’s coming up in May. We’ve got Oleander’s birthday coming up on the 13th, for one! We’re also going to be taking part in the Otome Game Celebration later this month, hosted by the amazing Crystal Game Works over on Steam. There’s gonna be a lot of romance VNs participating, so I highly recommend checking it out! May is looking to be a good time for us both as Rotten Raccoons and also as a bunch of women enjoying the Swedish spring, and we hope your May is as lovely and refreshing as possible!

Love,
The Rotten Raccoons Team 💙🦝