Greetings all! Following an unusually long silence, I have big news to announce today.
You may or may not have seen the previous post about my struggles with inspiration and burnout. I have needed a small reprieve from game development. With personal on-goings plus the ups-and-downs of COVID dangers, there were other things I needed to focus on and explore. And while those explorations may continue, I’m happy to report that my inspiration is returning, along with my creativity. For a few months now, I’ve been working on a “new” project. And as production amps up, I’m excited to announce it to you today.
Woodsy Studio’s next release will be a complete remake of Serafina’s Saga!
I’ve revisited Serafina’s story many times before. Her story began as an animation, then became my very first visual novel. At the time, I was still experimenting and getting accustomed to new narrative formats. Now, 9 years later, I’m excited to remake the saga with new wisdom and skills.
The game will indeed be a complete remake. You can expect the same general storyline, but the script will be heavily edited with lots of new branches and content. Some characters–like Jezu–will be much different than before. Others, like Valerie and Belatrix, will get much more screen time than the original.
The 2D art will all be redone, including some animated motion as seen in the GIF above. The music will be remixed with new tracks added, sometimes using FMOD for dynamic layers. All of this will be combined in UE4 with 3D environments to create a rich and immersive experience.
Old vs. New Nikolaos Perin
New vs. Old Arken Jeridar
This project is still early in development, so I can’t yet estimate a release date. So stay tuned, and I’ll be posting updates as this game progresses!
You can now pursue romance, mystery, and vampires in the cursed town of Bataille on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch! Thanks to EastAsiaSoft, today we release on all major consoles with a new story branch (also available on PC).
The new and final story branch of Crimson Spires unlocks as New Game + after all four major romance paths are completed. It allows you to explore a new version of events in which Bradley Jones survives the Contingency and becomes the town Sheriff. Combine all the clues you have gathered thus far and embrace all the relationships you have nurtured along the way to make a final decision about the town of Bataille.
I wrote the last path of the story while processing my own strong emotions regarding love, heartache, and pandemic stress. I am proud to release it now as the final chapter of the Bataille journey.
Many thanks to everyone who has made today’s release possible: to Joshua French, Nils NGai, and all the folks at EastAsiaSoft for believing in this game and porting it to consoles. Thanks to Christian Allen at UE4 for moral support and initiating UE4 updates that greatly helped our development process. Thanks to every single one of the voice actors in this game; you all helped inspire me to keep going; you are all incredible and I am so honored to have worked with you. Thanks to my wonderful partners, friends, and family members who have supported this creation every step of the way. And finally, thanks to all of you wonderful fans who enjoy my work and enable its creation with your support!
The time has come to drop our big Crimson Spires announcement! We’ve teamed up with EastAsiaSoft to release Crimson Spires on Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, and Xbox One–coming soon!
The new release of the game will feature a whole new fifth story path that unlocks after completing the four main romances, called New Game Plus. This content will also become available on PC at the same time it releases for consoles.
In the New Game Plus, you can experience an alternative version of events in which Erika saves Bradley Jones from death and he becomes the town Sheriff.
Obviously, I don’t want to tell you too much about the new content, so it can be a surprise! But I will say that involves a romance with Jones, polyamory, new revelations about Bataille, and what we feel is a solid ending for the game based on player choice.
Greetings everyone! Now that a few months have passed since the release of Crimson Spires, I thought it was time to let you all know what was going on over at Woodsy Studio.
I still have some big news about Crimson Spires in store, but alas, I can’t share that just yet! All I can say is that some big developments on the game are coming, and I hope you will love them!
What I can offer is a somewhat more personal reflection of what has been going on at Woodsy Studio over the last year and what I have planned going forward.
First of all, you might notice that I’m saying “I” more often than “we.” This is because my co-creator, Malcolm Pierce, has decided to focus on other work outside of Woodsy Studio for the indefinite future. Without a doubt, he will continue to advise on the story and game design, because we are still life partners and love to collaborate. But he will probably not lead the writing of any more Woodsy Studio games as he did with the Echoes of the Fey series and miraclr: Divine Dating Sim. I will miss his brilliant flare for humor and world lore, but I am also excited to see what we each go on to make independently.
Meanwhile in the realm of non-business partnerships, the two of us have also embraced polyamory. It is something we were curious about for a long time, then made a reality over the last couple of years. Through that process, we’ve survived some of the most challenging but also most rewarding moments in our relationship yet. We experienced a harrowing breakup but also found a new partner we want to spend our lives with.
I feel this is important to mention as a writer of romance stories, because it wasn’t until I actually experienced polyamory that I realized how horribly that lifestyle is represented (if at all) across popular media. When my partners and I sit down to watch something together, we wince at the barrage of Hollywood romances that fall apart due to jealousy and cheating. We are constantly hammered by the idea that caring about more than one person romantically is bad. And frankly, it’s painful. It’s offensive. It’s sad.
As a storyteller, I want to continue to explore a wide range of dramatic possibilities, but I especially want to better represent ethical non-monogamy moving forward. My next project will revolve around a quad, a polyamorous relationship between four people. It will also have intrigue, spaceships, betrayal, heists, telepathic aliens… but I get ahead of myself. (The header art of this article is my first pass at the main character. What do you think?)
You may not hear a lot from me over the next few months, but I assure you I’m still working hard to get better at my craft and bring you top-notch romances. Between projects, I’ve been taking some art classes to continue honing my skills. Thanks to all of you for your support, feedback, and for sharing this journey with me. I hope you will love the next story I’m weaving!
This otome-style visual novel blends eeriness and romance into an epic drama. A ring of deadly towers traps you in the small mining town of Bataille, Missouri with extreme conspiracy theorists, a serial killer, and wealthy vampires. Choose your partner wisely.
Will you choose Julian: the older Bataille brother who aims to rule the town with mysterious powers? Maddy: a strong-willed woman eager to overthrow the oppressive authorities? Liam: the adopted, cheerful misfit of the rich Bataille family? Or August: a charming philosophy professor who might also be a serial killer? Each character branch reveals unique secrets about Bataille and a chance to find love.
Features:
Unlock four distinct romances and story paths in an epic script totalling 250,000+ words
Hear select scenes with a rich cast of English voice actors
Embrace your nostalgia for early horror games with an eerie, retro 3D environment
Explore select 3D interiors
Listen to a lengthy, dynamic soundtrack by developer and composer Jenny Gibbons
Greetings everyone! It’s a new year full of fresh hope and inspiration. Last year brought a lot of challenges for our endeavors at Woodsy Studio. But this year we’re determined to release Crimson Spires and are working hard to complete our best visual novel yet.
Crimson Spires is such a big game that it was easy for us to get lost in fine-tuning minor aspects of the game indefinitely. Over the last few months, we realized that we needed to focus on what mattered most: writing. So we have been passionately writing the remaining romance paths for the story, and thus made significant progress towards finishing the script. Once the script is complete, blocking out the remainder of the scenes in the game should go relatively fast.
Unfortunately, switching so much of the focus to writing the main story and the various romantic branches has led us to scope down somewhat on the exploration and side stories. We’re still deciding where we’ll go with them, but for now we know the most important thing is the story between Erika and her chosen partner. One of the reasons we’ve had to shift more of our attention to the script has been that we realized that these individual branches needed to be much longer than we initially anticipated. Developing Erika’s relationship with each character–especially some of the more sinister ones–required more scenes and a slower pace. Since there are four major paths, this dramatically increased the amount of writing and the full script will be by far the longest we’ve ever completed!
Given the nature of writing a large story, it’s challenging to share regular posts and updates about the progress of the script! We’re far enough into the plot that it’s full of spoilers. So even if we’re quiet, rest assured that we’re still working hard and developing this game towards completion.
Meanwhile, we are able to offer a dramatic scene from the game’s main story path, giving you a big preview of what’s to come. This is a major moment in the main story, when Erika first discovers the true nature of the Bataille family. It also introduces the voice talents of Abigail Turner, who we recently brought in as Maddy when the original VA was no longer available.
In that scene you might have also noticed some dynamic music. That’s because we’ve also added FMOD capabilities into the game, allowing us to seamlessly change the flow of music to match specific moments as you play. This is a new feature that should help with one of the major difficulties of scoring a visual novel: everyone reads at their own pace, so accentuating dramatic or light-hearted moments in an individual scene within a song is impossible without some amount of dynamic music control.
As we go along, we also continue to pick out important scenes for full VO and implement them. We’re very happy with all our actors, and we can’t wait until you can hear more of them! And with new highlighted scenes comes new CG art, which unfortunately also happens to be on the spoiler-y side. It’s hard to share progress in such a mysterious game as Crimson Spires!
We’ve also blocked out a number of new environments, including Bataille’s Dollar Store (which has been converted into a general store where the goods from the train are sold), a local bar built into a barn where the survivalist group Freedom’s Dawn meets, more houses, and a super secret area that we can’t even mention without spoiling the fun.
One good side effect of reducing the scope of explorable areas in the game has been how we construct some of our environments. With fewer concerns about whether certain parts of an area are traversable, we’ve been able to create more dramatic backgrounds for some of our most important scenes. We think for a game like Crimson Spires, this may be a trade-off that results in a more stylish and dramatic game.
As for Woodsy Studio’s other projects, they have regrettably had to be put on hold for the moment. We’d still love to bring Echoes of the Fey: The Last Sacrament to consoles, but considering the scale of what we still have ahead of us with Crimson Spires, we’ve decided that we can’t promise that will happen in the near future. We know this may come as a let-down to folks who enjoyed The Fox’s Trail on PS4 or Xbox One, and we’re sorry that we haven’t been able to continue Sofya’s story on those platforms. This is something that we hope to revisit when Crimson Spires is more complete, so we hope you still stay tuned!
We wish we could give a stronger release window for Crimson Spires, but rest assured we’re committed to finishing the game and putting it out as soon as we feel it’s ready. We’re not used to having the script as a production bottleneck, so predicting exactly when that will be has been tricky. We will at least say that we plan to get it out this year!
Made in UE4, Crimson Spires blends horror with otome-style romance. First-person character control allows you to explore the stark town of Bataille, MO–a 3D environment inspired by PS2-era horror games–while experiencing an interactive story.
The small mining town of Bataille, Missouri has been cordoned off from the outside world for six months. The inhabitants have no idea why. All they know is that ever since the so-called “Contingency,” planes no longer fly overhead, strange creatures have been glimpsed beyond the perimeter, and large mechanical towers gun down anyone who tries to escape. As Sheriff Erika Wright searches for the truth, she must listen to the advice of a serial killer, mingle with extreme conspiracy theorists, and negotiate with vampires.
Expected Work and Payment
There are two types of dialogue for each character: expression lines and scene dialogue.
Expression lines are short, expressive lines of dialogue that occasionally play when a character speaks to punctuate their current emotion.
Payment is $0.50 per expression line, including all takes. Each character will probably have between 30-100 expression lines.
Scene dialogue is what you would expect: full lines from the script. Each “line” in this case is what appears on the screen for each dialogue block at a time, typically 1-3 sentences.
Payment is $0.75 per dialogue block, including all takes.
*Gustave: This character has only a few expression lines, and a long scene of scene dialogue.
*Important Note!* Please be aware that development on this project is ongoing and will likely continue into 2020. After initial recordings, we may occasionally need additional recordings until the project releases. We will do our best to work with your schedule accordingly.
Rating/Maturity
This game will contain adult language, violence, and sexual themes. We are not yet rated officially, but we expect to land in the Mature/R rating category. There will be F-bombs. Romance scenes might get a little racy, but not explicit. Please only audition if you are comfortable with that!
Audition Process
Please record the included audition lines for the roles that interest you and send them in either .wav or .mp3 format to jenny (at) woodsy-studio (dot) com. Please include your name and the character name in the files, such as “YourName_CharacterName.mp3”. Multiple takes and styles are highly encouraged so I have a good sense of your range. The last day to audition will be Saturday, Sept 7, 2019.
WHAT I LOOK FOR WHEN CASTING: When I cast voice actors, what I care about most is your ability to act. This is more important to me than vocal range, accent, or other secondary details. Although I generally don’t judge your audition on a resume or past roles, I find that it’s beneficial for voice actors to have theater experience, so feel free to mention that.
As for demonstrating your ability to act, try to fully embody the character your voicing and let their personality shine through every line. Major bonus points if you can somehow help me see the character in a new way I never even thought of before. Err on the side of feeding an audition line too much emotion rather than too little; I always know I can ask you to tone it down, but I don’t always know whether you can kick it up a notch (and do it well).
CHARACTERS!
Gustave
(Male, late 50s) Details on this character are somewhat limited, because they dive strongly into spoiler territory. But we can give you the following info:
Gustave was once a rich and refined man. He was born privileged, worked moderately to gain more wealth, and once in power, he perceived poverty as despicable weakness. He did not hesitate to use and abuse people beneath him to gain more power. He represents the worst of capitalist America.
In present day of the game, Gustave has since fallen into a mentally unhinged state. He has fits of uncanny rage in which he acts more like a beast than a man. Sometimes he has moments of clarity, enough to assume the shadow of his old self. He can even appear elegant and refined again. But in such times, he is still a monster in terms of greed, conceit, and trickery.
OVERALL PERSONALITY: Fakes civility and elegance to manipulate others, but he hides a raging beast within, hungry to escape. AGE: late 50s ACCENT: American
***********Audition Lines************ Line 1: (Smug, boastful) “I never actually went in the mines. Why would I? I could pay people to do that for me.” Line 2: (annoyed) “Quite frankly, I’m glad you were raised by the help. If I had done it myself, I’d be disappointed in myself.” Line 3: (beastly, angry) *Roar of hunger and rage*
Instructions (Refrain)
Once again, please record the included audition lines and send them in either .wav or .mp3 format to jenny (at) woodsy-studio (dot) com. Multiple takes and styles are highly encouraged so I have a good sense of your range. Please don’t just send an empty email with attachments; at least introduce yourself! The last day to audition will be Saturday, Sept 7, 2019.
Hey everyone! It’s been a while since we updated y’all on Crimson Spires and other Woodsy Studio goings-on, so we thought we’d put out a post on how summer has been going for us. First off, it has been very hot and very humid. There’s a lot of great things about living and working in St. Louis, but the summer is definitely not one of them. Not for us, and not for our studio’s dog, a husky who dramatically changes her opinion on walks for three+ months out of the year.
Mira in the summer sun
Other than that, summer has marked a slow down for us, which brings me to leading with our biggest piece of bad news. Crimson Spires has been delayed until 2020, likely closer to the middle of the year than the beginning of the year.
This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone following the project, as this is very clearly our most ambitious game. When we set out with this project, we thought that we would end up expanding the gameplay scope (to include 3D exploration) but have a similar-sized script to our Echoes of the Fey titles. We were incredibly wrong. Currently, the Crimson Spires script is approximately as long as Echoes of the Fey: The Last Sacrament and we haven’t even written 2/4 paths. The paths in this game are considerably more unique than anything we’ve done before, so we’re probably looking at a script close to twice the size of Last Sacrament.
We’ve also hit other difficulties. In the past, we released an average of a game a year and now we’re at slightly over the one year mark for Crimson Spires. Our quick turnaround wasn’t just about getting money from releases (although that was a necessary factor), but also our own fickleness with projects. We work hard and then we burn out–typically after about a year. That happened, and it sucks.
Finally, we both found that we needed to find other financial support for our studio beyond game sales. A few things happened. First, we didn’t release a game this year (duh, that’s a problem). Second, changes were made late last year to the Steam algorithm for recommending games to users. This has caused a rather dramatic reduction in views and wishlists for indie developers across the board. Naturally, it hit us hard as a studio that really relied on Steam sales of back catalog titles.
The growing 3D landscape of Crimson Spires in UE4
Here’s the good news: we’re not done. You’ll notice we’re not cancelling anything, just pushing it back. And we hope that it will be even better for the delay. To help support us, Malcolm has been teaching game design at a local university and Jenny has begun a full-time job in web development. This is going to slow us down, but it’s also going to give us the resources to make Crimson Spires even better. We’ll be able to ship with more voice acting, for one thing. And we’re not too proud to admit that we’ll use some of the extra money on assets that can improve the world of Bataille, Missouri. We always tweak any assets we buy to fit our game, but it’s especially easy with a game set in (relatively) modern day in a (relatively) realistic style to find useful ways to speed up environmental development.
So, what have we done recently? The 3D world of Bataille is considerably more built-out and explorable. Julian’s path has been almost entirely added into the game project. Maddy’s path is halfway written. New art for new characters has been deployed on the project, some of which we’ve scattered throughout this post.
And we’ve also made sure to start taking better care of ourselves. Jenny’s new job allows her to treat working on Crimson Spires as more of a passion project and less of a piece of work she has to finish to keep the lights on. Malcolm took a quick breather this week to participate in the UE4jam, a four-day long game jam put on by Epic Games. You can see his game here. Both of us know that if we stay burnt out, we won’t be able to provide the story and experiences we want to.
We pride ourselves at Woodsy Studio on finishing games. We don’t start something and just let it wither and die. Crimson Spires is coming, we just ask for a little patience while we make it the best vampire/serial killer romance about late capitalism in the Midwest that it can be.
As we forge ahead with our next project, Crimson Spires, we’re looking for new ways to fund development, so we’ve started a Patreon! Any funds we collect will not only help to feed and house us as we work, but will also support costly features like voice acting.
As a patron, you’ll get to see screenshots and artwork from our next game before they’re publicly released. You’ll also get weekly posts about our behind-the-scenes development process. And finally, we’ll create custom content such as bonus CGs and short stories every month for patrons! Below is a sneak peak at our first bonus content, an image of Michael and Lucifer doing… I wonder what exactly? 😉
The small town of Bataille, Missouri has been through a lot. First the lead mine closed. The owners of the mine moved their money elsewhere. Everything fell into sharp decline.
And then the towers rose.
Bataille had always been a bit isolated, but now… Now they are truly trapped. No way in. No way out. No idea what is happening on the other side. Planes don’t fly over Bataille any more. The radio is nothing but fuzz; the television is nothing but static. The Bataille family–the former owners of the mine and the namesakes of the town-say the towers are there to protect the people. They don’t say from what. And what on the other side could possibly be worse than the Bataille family themselves?
Very little. Because the Bataille family are vampires.
We at Woodsy Studio are very excited to announce our next project, Crimson Spires, which we hope to release for PC in 2019. Crimson Spires is a mix between an otome-style visual novel and an adventure horror game, developed in a style intended to evoke the eerie simplicity of early 3D games. That’s a lot to try and reconcile, so it’s probably better to introduce the game through its story.
Six months after the rise of the Contingency Towers, the town of Bataille is broken. Dozens have died trying to escape and it is clear there is no way out. The town’s sheriff, Erika Wright, may be the most broken of them all. A former FBI agent from the city, she was trapped in Bataille after chasing a serial killer across its border moments before the rise of the towers. Now she spends her days patrolling the border, looking for any new corpses of townspeople who tried to cross.
When two people go missing–legitimately missing–from a town with no escape, Erika Wright will have to team up with one of four potential love interests to investigate, find the truth, and confront (or join) the vampire family that controls the town. As for what happens along the way, well, one of the themes we’re looking to explore is the inevitability of mystery. Things have changed in Bataille. Maybe things have changed even more outside of Bataille. You won’t be able to solve every mystery of the strange new world, but maybe you can find a place in it.
Crimson Spires will play differently from our earlier visual novels. First off, after our good experience with miraclr: Divine Dating Sim, we’re structuring our story in a style similar to many Otome games. Rather than a single storyline with small-to-medium branches based on several choices, Crimson Spires will feature a separate storyline for each potential romance/investigation partners. Each story branch will cover (approximately) the final third of the game and will be entirely distinct from all the others.
Exploration will be different, too. Instead of a side-scrolling approximation of the environment, Crimson Spires will feature a fully-explorable 3d world. Small side quests and details about the entrapped town will be sprinkled around Bataille. There will also be a handful of interiors to explore, as well.
If you’re interested in checking out a (very early) demo of Crimson Spires, we plan on showing it off publicly for the first time at PixelPop here in St. Louis THIS WEEKEND. We’ll also have The Last Sacrament there as well, so if you’re in the area you should definitely check it out. If you’re not, make sure to follow us on twitter for updates about Crimson Spires.
