Crimson Tears is an upcoming Psychological Horror and Fantasy VN with card gameplay and elements. It revolves around a cast of talented individuals fighting for a greater power to make their furthest wishes come true.
NEWSLETTER #1 - AUG '24
Thank you and welcome to our first Newsletter! After our first year of production began, we are ready to happily inform you about some things in the works and more info of where we’re headed;VA Announcement:We’ve chosen our Lothar VA! We are incredibly thankful for the large amount of submissions we’ve received, it subverted our expectations and took a lot of thinking to decide. With that said, we are still finishing up something special that isn't the teaser before we announce who they are, hopefully that will come very soon.As a result of this, we’ve decided to release Lothar’s concept sheet and his splash first for this. Both as a first look of the style we have decided on moving with and as a way to know more about Lothar until the teaser comes around.Art:Art has been moving at a good pace!As you can see above, we’ve finalized a style for the concept sheets and splashes. Now that one is out, we’ll try to release them in batches moving forward.A lot of the neutral sprites are moving fast! Some characters with alternatives drawn out already. Huge thanks to our sprite artist Kia for working at such a strong pace, it’s helped push this along incredibly. Once all the neutrals are done we’ll put them all together and upload them at once.
Our sprites are highly rendered and in a painterly style due to a few reasons, biggest being to match the aesthetic we’re aiming for.CGs will match the style of the splash art, also in a very painterly way.Character cards are all being sketched out.We have good progress on the main UI and concepts down thanks to Laetuce.We also have finalized background concept art for the demo location thanks to Lewcatt!Originally the plan was to also show off a percentage chart of how much is done versus how much is left, however, that's no longer happening for a reason that'll be stated in the dev vlog along with the game design.Writing:Each character has a completed profile now! At some point we put those up on the server but we’ve taken them down just to put them up with the concept sheets when they’re ready. This is for two reasons; There were some errors that needed to be fixed and also there were some changes.Writing for 2 out of 3 of our teasers are completed! The third is still being worked on alongside progress for the demo script, a section of it has gotten solidified but there is still a lot needed to be done.While there's been good progress on this, both of the writers are going to college for the year and will be progressively busier. To help with that we'd love to have an extra hand or two on board. If you’re a writer and interested we’d love to see you apply!Music:We have a completed track for Lothar’s teaser ready and a different surprise that you can listen to up top that you hopefully pressed.Game Design:I mentioned we’re now also a card game, but what does this mean in terms of gameplay? That's something we'll explain much further in the dev vlog. Our current documents for it are too long to put up here, also it'll be more interesting to just hear the directors ramble with art flashbangs.Closing Thoughts + Extra:Thank you guys so much for your patience! We’re really thankful for the fast support we’ve been able to receive, genuinely so so proud of how much we’ve done. While this project started a year ago the bulk of what we’ve done came from half a year ago (we don’t talk about our fangan days.) Very grateful to have been with this team and everyone who was formerly part of it or has supported us along the way, please look forward to the rest when it’s out!Currently, the plan is only to release three character/storyline teaser videos before the demo. These being;Lothar's
Overseer's
And something else.Lothar's will be the first to come out. There are no current plans to do any more at the moment, if that changes we will include that in the next newsletter or dev vlog. This doesn't mean that these are the only videos to come out in that time, as we have other stuff planned.These newsletters aren't monthly, they release when we feel we have significant enough progress to show. Could be multiple in a month, could be nothing for a while, who knows!You may also see a slight change in the name sometime, for reasons that'll be talked about in the dev vlog but; blame Capcom.
NEWSLETTERS #3 - JAN '25
Happy New Years!
This newsletter will be kept relatively short in writing this time around since it wasn’t pre-planned, moreso just something to kick off the year with! Despite that, December was an incredibly productive month thanks to the new team members we’ve received and having winter break.Redone Bio Sheets:
We’ve developed a new format for bio sheets and also started illustrations for them. Lothar’s bio has been removed both because of this and reach bio has been rewritten more clearly or in the process of it.
Sprites:
Proud to say that each cast member besides 2 has a sketched neutral that accounts for their redesigns now, some of them also have entire sprite sheets sketched out.We removed the old sprites we had out publicly in the server, since posting those we’ve been able to do a lot more with it! Previously we were trying hard to keep things within lines to make things easier, but now after trying many ways to work around it. We found a way to make them as detailed as what they currently are now without it being that time-consuming. Thanks to the huge help of our sprite artist team to make sure that any rendering in these won’t take away much time from new sketches!
UI:
Huge amount of progress has been made in this area, we have a dialogue UI going and also got a lot of updated concepts for the main menu screen and its aspects.
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