Hello, hello, my beautiful raccoon friends! It’s been a lively May here in the raccoon den, and now we’re enjoying June (in my humble opinion, the best month!). I think the best word I can use for May is productive, as we got a bunch of things on our checklist done! So let’s discuss what’s happened for us this month, and this time we have headers.

Sales and events
May is a fairly low-key time for us, but we did get to enjoy one sale event! The Otome Games Celebration, hosted by the wonderful Crystal Game Works, was a lovely little sale showing off some of the best in indie otome and getting to smooch fictional men. While the big co-ordinated sale event is over, the event page is still up if you’d like to see a big selection of romance VNs about wooing fictional men. I highly recommend it!

We also wanna highlight an event we’re not taking part in, but really love: the Women-Led Games summer showcase, which will be happening on the 7th (or early on the 8th in certain time zones). We’re a team of women ourselves, and we love seeing the work of other women in the industry get highlighted! They’ve also been very welcoming of us and included Obscura in their sale events in the past, which we’re very grateful for!

Audio
It hurts me that I can’t beam audio directly into your brain, because Cajsa is killing it. There are a couple of scenes that spend an extended amount of time in one area, and she’s been making sure the music that plays for these scenes has variations to keep up the aural interest. This is one of the bits of feedback I offered this month, to get an idea of where she’s going with her work.

Art
Mugi has been working hard on updating Oleander’s sprites for his second chapter, giving him a general sprucing up and also giving me some very exciting new options to play with. There is a lot to be excited about, but one thing I really wanna highlight is that the new sprite system enables me to do stuff like these poses

which keen-eyed observers may notice were not possible in his original sprite set! It goes without saying that I am very excited to make good, good use of the new opportunities this presents.

Writing
Writing has progressed really nicely this month! Tobi needed to revise some of her planned material, but that ended up producing some really exciting new ideas that I’m hyped to watch come into play. She also wrote a nice chunk of a big emotional scene we’re really excited for you all to see. Going through it now, my reaction is just ❤️‼️

On Oleander’s side, Cajsa caught a few visual bugs while programming the music, so I’ve been ✨bugfixing✨. There are some old-ass bugs in the game code that I am just so happy to finally be getting rid of. I’m also starting on getting the new sprite system for Oleander working while being minimally disruptive to the stuff that’s already in the game. It’s going to be super interesting work, and since I’m going to need to dive through the whole script again, I think I’ll keep a typo tally and see how many little errors snuck through my spellcheck. And speaking of bugfixing…

We want you!
Before major releases we’ve invited players to help us beta-test the game to ensure it’s bug-free, as well as keeping typos to a minimum and ensuring our accessibility tools are working as intended. While we aren’t quite ready to invite players into the testing phase yet, we wanted to offer you a head’s up that all beta-testing will be done through our Discord. It’s open to all 18+ players (and if you’re playing Obscura you’re definitely at least 18), and while we’ll share announcements on our social media pages when we begin the beta-test process, the best way to stay informed about the beta-test is to be on our Discord.

And that’s all we have for you this month! June is promising to be a month where a lot happens, both in general and here in the raccoon den, and we’re excited to experience it all! You’ll hear from us again soon, so talk to you all later!

Love,
The Rotten Raccoons Team 💙🦝