What a summer it has been! I'm still reeling to an extent, but with so much to do, there's hardly time to un-reel! 

Since the past two months have been inundated with campaign-specific updates, here's a more official dev update for July and August. By now I'm sure I've been loud enough about the Kickstarter that you all know about it, but if you'll permit me to talk about a little more...

If you or anyone you know missed the campaign, we have a Backerkit Pre-order store open until the end of September! Some tiers from the campaign itself are up for grabs there, but our Kickstarter exclusive rewards will be gone forever after next month.

For a more personal reflection on the events of July and August (and even further back than that) look no further than the OSAS KS Post-Mortem on my own blog. It's a bit of a long one, so grab a nice beverage and get cosy before you dive in.

Join our Newsletter and our Discord to get the latest updates first and chat with us! We'd love to hear from you 💖 

In a Nutshell 🌰

(A very big nutshell, this time!)

Ask us (almost) anything! 💌

Some of you may already be aware, but we've been pumping up our presence on Tumblr as of late, where you can follow us at forsythiaproductions. 

It's much more fun than our other platforms, and we'd love to interact with more of you and get to know what you'd like to see out of OSAS! We put up polls, screenshots, WIPs, and all matter of content...perhaps even more blog post style insights, at some point?

If you have questions about development, queries about the characters, or any commentary for us at all, feel free to send us an ask or two there!

Production Updates 🛠️

We've of course continued making the game over the past two months and the duration of the campaign, and are doing so as we wait for the Kickstarter payout.

Writing has been going quite smoothly, with two new chapters drafted and a third partially drafted. According to our story spreadsheet, the story has reached over 50,000 words in length—that's roughly half of the game!

Act 1 of the game (chapters 1-4 of both routes) is near fully written, with exception of chapters not featured in the Extended Demo which require some additional fleshing out. Editing is yet to be completed on the newly drafted content, but it's exciting to see a significant chunk of the writing now completed!

The fun of having two routes which mirror each other is the direct comparison we can make between chapters of Hugo and Seamus' plot lines—namely, just how much more brooding happens in Seamus' route. He goes through a roller-coaster of emotions in Act 2 and it is shaping up to be quite the ride!

Alongside writing, a little bit of art is on the way! Most of my time has been focused on admin and planning work recently, including planning the rest of the game's backgrounds so we can commission them. However, in preparation for the casting call coming soon, I've been doing some coloured portraits to have something for the role descriptions as well as to set up the designs for their respective characters. 

Shown here are two characters for later in Seamus' route, Miss Hawthorne (Seamus' ex-fiancée) and Sadie (Seamus' sister):

That just about does it for this dev update. I'll soon be adjusting back to our less frenetic posting schedule, so future updates will be monthly as before—but thank you for being along with us for this wild ride!

Until next time,

Ingrid