ALIENPROTEIN

Also, as a fun fact—I wanted Ejdo's features to be inspired by Spanish actress Rossy de Palma, a Spanish icon and legend! Especially her nose—because when I was little, seeing her act so confident and proud of her nose (even if she was struggling on the inside) helped me handle my insecurities about my own. She's talked plenty about how people called her ugly because of her nose, and I want to share a quote of hers from a kind of recent interview (2024)!

“It's true that some people were bothered by my nose, but that was their problem. I used to say I wasn't going to change something that bothered others but not me. They blamed me for something I hadn't chosen. That opened up a very interesting world for me, both psychologically and sociologically, because while they couldn't see past my nose, I was trying to figure out what kind of person they were.”

 Starting July, and given she has some days off her job, Raquel will put the pedal to the metal and work on Amon's first CG. I've already delivered the moodboard and now it's just a matter of time!

After stepping away from this background for a few days, Airyn is finally done with the main street you'll visit in the Mitari district during Amon's route! This one still needs a bit of post production, as Raquel and I like shoving our glittery effects here and there.

To take a break from the madness that is the background you see above, Airyn has been tackling the backgrounds that will serve as transitions between the different times of day (or between days!)—basically to show the passage of time! We have day, night, dawn and dusk! Airyn has done a delicious job (these clouds look yummy...) and I've worked on the post-production (adding silly effects and whatnot), and all four of them are done!

Besides that, Airyn has also sketched what will be the Main Character's room in Dagalis! Now it's Astro's time to model it, using the many furniture sheets Airyn made back in the day! As she won't be getting back to the MC's room until Astro is done with the 3D model, Airyn has also tackled another background: an alley! Yup, mandatory sinister alley you encounter in every dark / horror game. She's currently done with lineart and she's doing a fantastic job!

Our Patreon members and our Kickstarter backers have already seen these!

June has been a month dedicated to Amon's CH 1, and I'm proud to say that thanks to Allie's hard work, the script of the first chapter is corrected. Done. Terminado. Acabao'. Allie's feedback has been nothing short of excellent, and I've been tweaking a few scenes as per their suggestion! I'm so happy with how chapter 1 has turned out, and how chapter 2 is going. Because yes! I've also been writing chapter two. I'm sitting at 35 pages (for reference, chapter 1 has 110), and I'm having so much fun seeing the plot unfold and having characters I've had stuck in the backrooms for a long time finally make an appearance.

I've also been working on a NSFW ask for you Patreon folks, and three of our main LIs already have their scenario written and ready to be........read :^).

During June, I've started coding the first scene of Amon's first chapter, and as the script is 99% corrected, that's what I'll be focusing on starting July. Folks at Patreon with the Certified Limber tier and above had the pleasure to watch a clip of the first minutes of gameplay, and I hope I can soon deliver a playable build to our beta testers over there. I also polished the chapter screens—a.k.a the transition happening at the start of every chapter!

So, as you may know, I've been moving! June has been all about packing, panicking, packing and panicking, making sure the cats are as comfy as possible in the new house (they are! they love it), scheduling things like internet services, a new lock, an alarm, furniture...I've also been attending a congress this week as a speaker with one of my papers. I also have a very important deadline on the 15th, so until then I'll be more or less focusing on polishing another paper. Most of the heavylifting of the move is done, but there are still some things to take care of and they don't seem to end! T_T

Raquel has been doing well! She has two weeks of vacation right now, so I hope she can rest and decompress. She also attended the same congress as me, and I watched her presentation yesterday!

Astro has been struggling a bit with his health lately, but he's doing better. He just left to walk the Camino de Santiago with his father, so until next week he'll be walking endlessly. Wish him luck!

Kayden is doing well!

We've finally changed consultants and our yearly taxes seem to have been sent without issues. A nice surprise was to know that June still counted as a month with our reducted freelance tax, so that was a relief! Another month of life insuflated in Ravenstar Games' lungs /j.

This month has been specially hectic for me with the moving and all it entailed, but my mental health has surprisingly benefited from it all. I haven't been able to work on LiL as much as every other month, but I'm pumped up and ready to get back to my routine! But first I'll see if I can recharge a little.

See you soon!

With love,

We also worked along with Nanda (@/TioTitulo on Twitter and Instagram!) in our last Patreon exclusive illustration until further notice. It's sad to know it will be a while until we can afford to work with fellow artists to offer you Patreon folks some high quality goodies, but we hope things go well for us so we can bring the special illustrations back. For now, we say goodbye with a beautiful piece!

This month, Airyn finished the Golden Palace's main hallway background and started working on the main street of the Mitari district! Most likely, she'll switch gears and work on some minor backgrounds or an entirely new one, as she has found herself a bit burnt out with this one background in particular. Sometimes you need to move on to something else and then go back to the previous one to see it with fresh eyes and tackle it with a different mindset, so for now this background will stay like this until Airyn finds the strenght to finish it completely. Don't worry, there are many backgrounds to work on still!

Also, Raquel and I finished polishing Amon's carriage, and this is the complete version our folks at Certified Limbanian and above can see in our Chapter 1 sneak peek! Raquel will also take a look at the hallway background to give it the finishing touches, so we hope we can share the final version with y'all soon!

The writing department is going full speed! I've been extremely inspired and in the zone lately, so I have been able to consistently write almost every day. Amon's chapter 2 is sitting at 35 pages now (almost 10k words), which is a third of chapter 1 (30k words), so I think I'm doing quite well! Allie, our all-mighty editor, has already tackled 92 pages of 111 when it comes to editing chapter 1. That means we'll have a perfectly editing script soon! Therefore, I'll be able to code chapter 1 knowing everything has been proof-read and approved by Allie. During May I have also answered a Patreon exclusive ask and a bunch of simpler asks on Tumblr!

During May I have been one busy bee, if you allow me to say!! I've programmed our route selection screen, which will allow folks to jump right into the fray at any time. I've also programmed the "chapter introduction screen", which Patreon folks have been able to see in the sneak peek playthrough.

Not only animating everything made me cry twice, but I also stumbled upon things that required more thought, more reading, more learning, and implementing. For example, if a player starts a route via route selection instead of organically reaching that screen while playing the prologue, we want them to choose their name and pronouns anyway. After that, another need came up—I want players to be able to decide their starting personality if they access a route via route selection. Our personality system works with points, and when you start a new game, the amount of points for each three personalities is 0. While you play the prologue, you start building up your Main Character's personality. However, if you don't play the prologue, you can't make choices previous to the first chapter of your selected route. So a personality selection screen was necessarily, but it had to appear only if the player was accessing a route via route selection. Ah, booleans, my beloveds!

I have also started coding Amon's chapter 1, coded Valor's expressions, and started playing around with animating certain effects for the sprites, like the sweat droplet actually sliding down when it appears. I have been having equals amount of fun and dread programming everything during May. Below you have a sneak peek of fan favorite's route selection screen, with some content warnings. I'll have to work into these (or add a TBA sticker, we'll see) before this build can see the light of the day, but we're slowly making progress :^)

What to say! This month has been quite a ride. During May, we sat down to talk about Ravenstar Games' present and future, and I was in charge of writing the not-so-gleefull post that eventually went live on May 22nd. This post was as hard to write as it was to post, but it's something that needed to be done. In a sense, I think facing the demons of our missteps has given us extra fuel to burn when it comes to working on the game. Not to dwell on something that has a quite lengthy post, we want to once again thank y'all for your support and your kindness.

During May we've also been formalizing our change of financial advisor / consultant and that meant a lot of documents, calls, emails, and more boring stuff on our end. Things are now in a kind of Limbo (pun intended) as our old advisor has been informed of our leave but is still working on our annual tax return thingy. We'll see how it all wraps up.

I've also worked on our voiced name token system for Patreon, the form, and the Patreon product page! We hope voiced names become a thing that slowly and surely helps us stay afloat!

As for our lives, I've been buried in PhD work (papers, preparing congresses, my annual evaluation); me and my family are officially moving out on June 17th, so I've been packing all my stuff, helping my parents pack, and obviously doing some clean-up. On top of that, we've welcomed a kitten to our family—our stinky boy, Yuni, who was found abandoned on a beach when he was merely days old along with his littermates. Sadly, one of the four kittens died, and while Yuni's sisters were adopted, people didn't seem interested in him as he was very young (six weeks) and a single kitten. We adopted him on May 27th, and he loves playing with Riki, even if he's still learning the ropes on how to Cat™. Riki is being the most patient, sweet teacher, as I expected from my precious hairball.

I've been managing my OCD quite well lately! I have been able to have my therapy appointments separated by two weeks, which is a huge milestone. I'm also trying to meditate again to bring some moments of peace to my very chaotic present, but I'm excited to move to our new home. The whole process will surely slow me down when it comes to working on both LiL and my PhD, but I hope things go as smoothly as possible. I'll do my best!

Astro begun his internship and is having a really good time. People are nice to him, he shines in his department, and the schedule is much better than the hell he has had to live through this academic year.

Raquel is working! We'll hopefully see each other soon to celebrate both her and Astro's birthday, but with me moving and all that, maybe we have to postpone things. She's so busy we can hardly get a hold on her (spelling???), but she's doing well!

Kayden is there!! He's going to be an uncle really soon (and I'm going to be an aunt, but that's a matter for another devlog when my sister actually gets pregnant).

I have the nastiest migaine ever as I write this, so I'm headed to the pharmacy and then I'll lay down a bit. I'm very happy with our progress this month (even if we've had our drawbacks), and I can only hope the arrival of summer gives us a bit more time to work on the project and also rest. The horrors persist, and by that, I mean our patreon / kickstarter / tumblr / itchio updates!

Catch y'all in the next one!

With love,

The difference between my Xal drawing and my Envy drawing is crazy LMAOOO

sneaking the separate shots down here