First off, we’d like to announce that our search for artists has yielded good fruit: in the past few months we’ve recruited LordFryingPan as a background artist and Urn as a sprite and event artist! This brings our artist count up to a healthy five, and now we’re beginning to create some of the in-game assets we’ve been needing for some time. Both Fry and Urn have been a joy to work with, and we’re thrilled to have them aboard. Urn will be working primarily on art for Morial’s route, while Sam’s route has been entrusted to Chocojax.
Some early WIPs for Morial's sprites, and a piece that was part of Urn's audition.
While we’re on the subject of staffing changes however, there’s another announcement that needs to be made. I regret to inform anyone reading this that Kenji will no longer be a writer for the project and has departed the team. Unfortunately, because he designed Sheena almost entirely on his own from the ground up, it wouldn’t be right to hand her off to someone else, and as a result we must also say goodbye to one of our heroines.
Everyone on the team believed in the potential of Sheena’s route, and this means shelving a good bit of already completed artwork, so please believe me when I say this decision wasn’t made lightly. However it’s in the best interests of both the team and the project as a whole that we go our separate ways, and so we wish Kenji all the best in his future endeavors.
This may make our roster seem like a bit of a revolving door these days, but actually most of these things happened months ago, we just don’t feel it’s worth it to post constant but brief updates. That brings our current route count to three, which is something that we’re okay with for the moment. We may decide to undertake a new fourth route in the future, and if we do, things will be laid out better to avoid having to start over from scratch again.
Our current lineup of main heroines, plus Gavin who is a pretty space princess. Artwork by Chocojax.
We do have one more thing to announce today though: we’re currently working on a short demo that we hope to have out by the fall. It will comprise the first three scenes of the game, and is intended both as a proof of concept and to solicit as much feedback as possible so we can know what we’re doing right and what still needs fine-tuning. The writing for these scenes is complete and has been for quite some time, now we’re just making the slow grind of completing and polishing art assets and making sure it doesn’t explode if someone clicks in the wrong place.
As we continue to work towards releasing this short demo and, further on down the road, a longer and more substantial one, is there anything you’d like to see from us? Anything you’d like to know about our development process or the world of Fam? If so don’t hesitate to ask, whether it’s here in the comments or in our public IRC channel. Thanks for checking in.
