Tag Archives: VN

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Announcing Our Next Game — Crimson Spires

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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.

PRESS KIT

 

 

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Echoes of the Fey: The Last Sacrament OUT NOW!

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Hey folks! It has been a long time coming, but we’re happy to announce that Echoes of the Fey: The Last Sacrament is out now on Steam and itch.io! Join Sofya as she is recruited to protect the Emperor’s daughter, Katerina Lapidus, in Vodotsk…all while she’s being blackmailed into investigating the mysterious Krovakyn Church by one of Katerina’s political rivals.

The Last Sacrament is our longest and most ambitious game to date. We have worked hard to give you all a game with lots of drama, romance, and high quality storytelling. Thanks to the power of the UE4 engine, we’ve added 3D camera views and other cinematic effects to the traditional visual novel elements. You can also play the mini-game, RiftRealms, to get new insights on the world and its characters. We sincerely hope you enjoy this game, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts!

itch.io

 

miraclr: A New Visual Novel Project

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Hello Woodsy Studio fans! Today, we’re announcing miraclr, a new, small scope visual novel project that we hope to release for Android phones in early September with a (possible) iOS and Steam release later down the line.

What is miraclr?

miraclr is a comedic workplace romance starring the biblical (and apocryphal) archangels, told  in a mobile office collaboration app.

In miraclr you play as an unnamed human recruited to assist the archangels of heaven with the creation and implementation of the first true miracle in over 400 years. Because you can’t visit them in their office, you are  given access to miraclr, an app used by the Archangels for intra-office messaging. It looks a little like Slack, with similarly structured channels and PMs. (Very early screenshot below)

When you first start up miraclr, you will decide on a time zone and a scheduled time for daily morning meetings. From then on, miraclr will unfold (mostly) in real-time, whether or not you have the game open. Your co-workers (the Archangels) will talk among themselves, ask for your input, and private message you for both work and personal reasons. Your timely responses–or lack thereof–will affect how the story unfolds and romantic relationships.

Why a new game now?

Woodsy Studio is currently in the middle of developing Echoes of the Fey: The Last Sacrament, the next episode of Echoes of the Fey and the follow up to The Fox’s Trail, which just released two weeks ago on Playstation 4. So why divert our attention and resources away from that?

First off, The Last Sacrament is going to be a big game. Easily the largest and most complex we’ve ever done. We’ve made lots of progress–all but a few environments are done, half the game is playable and the RiftRealms mini-game is getting close to its final form. We still believe we’re on track to release in 2018.

But right now we need a break from it. We want to get something new out for people to play. We’d like to expand our presence on mobile, something the scale of The Last Sacrament just doesn’t allow with a two person team. And finally, we want to explore other methods of storytelling and experiment a little with what our audience wants from a visual novel style game.

With Echoes of the Fey, Woodsy Studio largely moved away from the traditional visual novel format and dating sim conventions. We’re bringing those back with miraclr, which will feature multiple romance paths and more focus on character/dialog than the mystery stories of EotF. It will also be a bit of a return to an older style for me (Malcolm), since most of my writing experience is in comedy. This will largely be a return to my writing style in The Closer: Game of the Year Edition, though with fewer baseball and philosophy jokes for a different audience.

When will it be done?

miraclr is a unique project for us, in that we’re hoping for a very quick turnaround. The format (a slack-like messenger app) limits the scope of the project, especially in regards to artwork. There will be CGs, emojis, and “photos” shared by the angels in the channel, but we intend for the main draw of miraclr to be the writing and unique time-based format. It won’t be a terribly long game–a visual novella if you will–but there will be seven days of content and multiple branches.

We’ve already proto-typed a version of the app that can display the story in real-time and have most of the first day written, which along with some initial art only took a few days. We also know that Echoes of the Fey is the main focus for our studio, and we can’t let a new project take too much of our focus away from that.

With all that in mind, we’re targeting an early September release date for miraclr. Hopefully you’ll be playing it soon!

*UPDATE*: As of September 20, we are finished with “miraclr” and in the testing/porting phase! We’re now hoping to release on Google Play and the App Store for iPhone and iPad September 26. Stay tuned!

For updates (as well as Echoes of the Fey info) follow us on twitter at @WoodsyStudio.

Echoes of the Fey: The Fox’s Trail Out NOW On Steam

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The day is here, friends! You can now get Echoes of the Fey: The Fox’s Trail on everyone’s favorite PC gaming platform, the launcher we all know and love, Steam.

We’ve got achievements! We’ve got trading cards! At some point in the near future, we’ll have a demo and soundtrack DLC! Go check it out!

Echoes of the Fey – Vocal Theme

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Yesterday, we debuted the vocal theme for Echoes of the Fey: The Fox’s Trail. Check it out!

This is the first time I’ve ever (co)written a song for a game, so I thought I’d write a bit about the thought process that went into it. It all starts way back at the beginning of development, when we were brainstorming about the aesthetic of the project. For some important story reasons (specifically the motivation behind the Human/Leshin war) there was always going to be a light steampunk element to the world. Traditional steampunk is a little played out/a bit of a cliche, so we aimed for a variation on the idea.

The fledgling machinery of our world isn’t powered by coal or literal steam, but magic drawn from Fey rifts. It’s clean energy. The world isn’t (visibly) polluted by its use. So I guess our aesthetic is Clean Steampunk? I don’t know, that sounds like a bad Skyrim mod so maybe I just need to come up with a new term.

ANYWAY, we aimed for a musical style that would reflect fantasy with an ethereal sci-fi touch. And we immediately seized upon Tangerine Dream’s soundtrack for Legend as an inspiration. Now, I realize this is a somewhat controversial work to cite. Legend was originally scored by Jerry Goldsmith, who was replaced by the studio near the very end of production on the film. Tangerine Dream was chosen to (bizarrely) appeal to a more youthful audience, because apparently the kids were way into new age electronica in 1986. A lot of people prefer the Jerry Goldsmith score and think the TD score (completed in only a few weeks to meet the deadline) is dissonant with the visuals of the film. Jenny (my co-writer, artist, and composer on this project) think those people are crazy.

A few months into production, we watched Legend again and I was struck by the over-the-top cheesy ballad that closes out the film.

Is it a good song? I’m not even sure. But it evokes a certain time in fantasy/action film making that is incredibly distinct. Legend wasn’t the first film or the last to end on a dreamy ballad that casually drops the title throughout. The Neverending Story and The Last Unicorn, for example. And if you widen the definition of the credit song ballad to take out the requirement of naming the title, you draw in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Princess Bride, and a ton of other films made from the mid 80s through the 90s.

Video games have their own version of this phenomenon. Final Fantasy games starting with VIII have prominently featured jpop ballads, and the Kingdom Hearts spinoffs have followed suit. Final Fantasy IX is probably the best one.

Final Fantasy XV is going to have a cover of Stand By Me by Florence and the Machine instead, if you want to know how bizarre things have gotten over at Square-Enix.

Thinking about these traditions gave me an idea: why couldn’t we do something like this for Echoes of the Fey? We were already shooting for a sound that invoked the fantasy films of the mid-80s. Why shouldn’t we have a vocal theme song.

This should have been a hell of an undertaking, since neither of us can sing. But we were lucky. The voice actress who plays Sofya in Echoes of the Fey, Amber Leigh, is also a singer. Once she said she was down to record the song, we knew we had to do it. Jenny wrote the composition and a version of the lyrics that, unfortunately, could have been seen as a spoiler for some of the events of The Fox’s Trail. That was fine for a song that played over the credits, but we decided that we wanted to use it as a promotional tool as well.

So I took a crack at songwriting. Let me tell you, it is not as easy as my previous experiences with penning lyrics: swapping words around in popular songs to make twitter jokes.

My first pass had the correct number of syllables on each line, but apparently it matters where you put the vowels (especially in a slow paced song) because I was trying to force Amber to hold some really terrible sounds.

So I did a second pass, and with Jenny’s help (and patience) we arrived on the lyrics we are using today. And we’re really happy with it! Our final product feels like a mix between the cheesy fantasy ballads that inspired us and the eerie Julee Cruise/Angelo Badalementi collaborations of the same era. Which is a fantastic result for me, since this project is all about mashing together fantasy and noire and making them kiss.

Hopefully you enjoy the song and I look forward to everyone playing the game that inspired it in (hopefully) a month!