#sacrariumdevlog

Rather short because while I started the month with a ton of energy, work sapped me of that quickly. I spent a solid two weeks either sick or stressed relentlessly by my job. Not much got done during this time sadly.

Still, as I shared earlier this month:

Contego's second challenge main line is almost done. I just need to wrap up one or two more smaller scenes in it and then tackle the tasks before that is finished. Much progress compared to what I had originally.

Resisco has had me restructure it once or twice, fiddling with how I am going to handle certain variables. I am also debating adding a "difficulty" option where one option gives warnings and notifs of affection changes, but I haven't fully committed yet. Still have a few things to tackle with the personality system, but I am learning a lot while working on it.

I am exploring other engines outside of Ren'py. Currently I am trying to figure out Twine. We shall see how successful I am. Right now I am trying to figure out how to organize a Twine file and get the mechanics I need done.

Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening Everyone! Time to do a round-up of May. Pretty calm month, so this will probably be short.

The most recent thing I did was clear out a good chunk of old asks to get the inbox cleaned up. I still have a few more to go through, but I'm making room for some future inbox plans. You can find most of the old asks under #old ask shindig. I deleted some that were repetitive, made me uncomfortable, or just felt kind of meandering.

Let's get onto the game news!

The Woeful Rose & The Bitter Crow

Has seen it's 1.1 release! All of the remaining common route CGs have been added including the combat CGs. With this, WRBC has finally been officially completed. All CGs are attainable, and all endings are attainable as well.

Sacrarium Contego

Alas, both of the artists for Contego have been having a rough time with their health lately. I'm mostly focused on them getting better than anything else, so I don't have too much to share at this time. I am debating potentially putting up something for SunNoFes 2026, but I haven't decided yet. We shall see. I make no promises. I've started writing the second section in earnest (Contego is a special kind of hell with its scheduling stuff in game, so it's a lot harder to sit down and just write compared to the others in this series).

Sacrarium Resisco

I have attained an artist for our dear Amare! Their sprites should hopefully begin production in June, but not right now as their artist is wrapping up some real life things (and real life always comes first!). I'm very excited to see what's going to come of that in the future.

I also got briefly possessed and began fidgeting with the opening of Resisco and actually got a visual thing going! Ended up staying up until almost midnight because of how possessed by creativity it got. Still needs further refinement, but I'm excited.

I have also finally figured out what I'm going to do with Amare's system. I'm calling it the Locked Meandering system personally, and I'm going to start outlining in earnest with that in mind. I have many scrapped outlines at this point. I've also consolidated all Fatebringer personality types down to 9 and determined how to condense them into more manageable things to work with.

The Grinning Spider & The Lone Hound

I keep going back and forth on whether or not I want to practice with the Interactive Fiction format. I'm tempted because it'd be a new style to try out, but I also worry that switching the format for the final game might impact it negatively. The big thing that using an IF format would allow is that I could include more characters and locations compared to doing a VN format (where those often come with expensive assets). I've gotta determine how I want it to go. Currently leaning towards making it a tight VN story rather than the larger world romp one outline suggests. Still determining things.

Conclusion

So all-in-all, a silently productive month! Thank you all so much for your continued interest and support in the series!

It's been a minute, hasn't it?

Here is the big news for the Sacrarium series.

Sacrarium Pario

A patch fixing the lovers/friends bug has been released. With it, errors with the Affection & Attention routes should no longer be happening. If it keeps happening though, please let me know!

The Woeful Rose & The Bitter Crow

9 out of the 19 CGs are fully completed and implemented into the game! Now that might not seem like a lot of them at a glance, but one of these actually had six variants. Thus, it was worth more. As it stands:

Zahir's route has all CGs necessary.

Yukimura's route has 1 CG completed with one on linework and two more to go.

The Poly Route has 2 CGs completed with sketches for the two remaining solidified.

Common Route 1 has two CGs completed with only one left. Though it is by far the most intensive one of that set (it has a lot of moving parts).

Common Route 2 has 1 CG at the flats + small adjustments stage. Three more remain, but they're a lot less complicated than this first one is (namely because they don't have a big prop that can mess with proportions like the first).

Here are some sneak peaks!

(Snippet of Yukimura's first CG!)

(I love how happy Zahir gets to be. It's so lovely. No spoilers on when this CG comes into play though!)

I've gotten to experiment with camera angles a bit more as well, which has been a blast. Though I did make sure that the camera moved slow enough to not make anyone sick.

Sacrarium Contego

Since I have decided to not burn everything, right now I'm still fiddling with all of the buttons and double checking my notes for tie ins to the next bit.

The first Challenge is around 30k words total. I expect the second to easily be that amount if not double. It's the meatiest part of the game in a sense (which follows Sacrarium's usual pattern. Introductory time to let the LIs get a feel for your MC that play through > meat of the character development and lore > finale), so I imagine it's going to take me some time to parse through.

BUT

...we might have a character concept page in a few months ;3 courtesy of one of our WRBC CG artists (once they finish their remaining CG lol).

I make no promises on a timeline. Though it has been fun digging around fashion to find what Necare would reasonably wear.

And that's it for now!

I wish I had more to show off, but that'd be spoilers.

Hello everyone!

I just wanted to draft up a more official devlog for the progress on the Sacrarium series since my last one in January!

Pario News:

Assets are still being made. What I have seen thus far looks absolutely stunning.

WRBC News:

I have programmed the first 2/3s of the game entirely (minus Dante & Lysandres sprites). It has also gone through a small round of playtesting, where a handful of major bugs were identified and ironed out. The current programming includes all of the sprite programming, CG programming, shaders, music, SFX, the codex, and in-dialogue hyperlinks to codex pop-ups! So a lot of prograss has been made.

I've also started to get back some drafts, W.I.Ps, and mostly finished CGs from the first rounds of CGs for WRBC. It's been a delight to watch things develop so far!

I do have WRBC on a slight programming pause. Our dear editor has around 80k words to finish editing, and I don't want her to stress out about too much. So, I'm holding off for a bit to give her time to edit in peace.

Which means, Ihave had time for....

Sacrarium Contego News:

I have fully made the scapple outline.

But I wouldn't be here if I've just done that. No.

I have actually transitioned from the scapple outline to the ROUGH Partially Coded Outline!

I have taken all of the 'post it notes' and mechanics from the scapple outline and turned them into a fully functional skeleton (MINUS the dynamic affection system. That will be added into the Detailed Outline). I have then made sure to test and make sure that all of the scenes flow correctly.

Why is that important?

Well Sacrarium Contego will include some LIGHT schedule management elements. You have challenges to pass, and you need to do your research and experiments to pass said tests. Thus, your time must be managed wisely.

Which means I had to make sure that there wasn't an infinite loop pf doom.

It would be so embarrassing to make an infinite loop in such a simple system...which makes it even more embarrassing I did it twice.

Make sure you finish your $ commands! Otherwise, you get to be like me! Staring at the screen (and the problem code) for 10 minutes, going "WTF??" until your brain goes "Oh there should a = True there."

Luckily, current light testing shows that is functional from start to finish without looping infinitely.

My Current Focus

So while our lovely WRBC editor works on the last 1/3 of that game, I am going to make more awful bashed together BGs (Pario's only look decent because Rian painted over them thank goodness) and start making the detailed outline for Contego.

Once there is enough progress on WRBC's editing, I will get back to programming it. I just don't want to rush my editor. After all, the plus side to working on a series is that if one game has to pause, I have three others I can work on.