#studiodmm786

On the day of her 18th birthday, Eira receives a mysterious VHS tape. What she hears on it pulls her into a collapsing world of family secrets, buried memories, and a truth her parents never meant her to uncover.

Eira’s life spirals out of control as she comes to learn how her family’s story ties to a serial killer who once terrorised her hometown

Deeper she listens, the more reality fractures...

Spent today looking more into my Kickstarter promotion strategies, particularly about how to be more successful, which I can learn from looking into successful projects.

I also looked to Project We Love, Kickstarter's way of featuring projects that they find exceptional and gets showcased on their homepage and newsletters. I'm hoping to receive that treatment so I've been making notes on those projects as well as Kickstarter's blog on how to get that label.

And lastly, there's my promotional strategy. One key thing that I'm thinking of adding is using a raffle for free rewards to get more followers and thus convert them into backers. If I do this across all my socials, it should be even more effective

Today is the full render of Solomon's character profile pic, posed like a fashion model. Solomon is pretty built, a nice piece on his wrist, and a successful fashion designer. I had to nerf him by making him bald and have poor eyesight, after all, one man cannot have it all. I'm not a fashion designer but I did what I thought would make him seem like one: male designers often have white shirts, like Karl Lagerfeld, plus the tight jeans and the loafer styled shoes.

What do you think of the first version versus the final character design for Eira?

Today, I'm presenting the final version of Elsie's character profile image. As you can tell, she's got a very distinct look to her from her outfit to her glasses to her hair colour/style. I threw in the Baki pose since I'm a big fan and the fact that she would mimic this pose is a testament to what she is like. To experience more Elsie henceforth, make sure to follow + check out the Kickstarter (coming soon) + consider supporting the visual novel once the Kickstarter is live

Here's one of the proof-of-concepts I was working on for the character profiles. As you can see, I was mainly thinking about showing their age, height, birthday, likes, dislikes, as well as some of their character traits. Other aspects I was debating were a single line as a narrative hook e.g., a young woman, caught between love and betrayal at the hands of her family, a single truth unravelling her world; their occupation e.g., student/fashion designer/first year business student in university.

I'm still trying to make the analog tech theme stick by having the profile on a background of static scanlines. I'm gonna keep playing with it until I land on an idea that's much less amateur-ish. Let me know if you have any suggestions of your own

Alongside Eira, I thought I cooked with the original concept art of Lucille between the braid and the outfit. But yet again, the character artist had blown me away, and I realised there truly are levels to this. The inspiration was another anime mom clasping her hands together but I found this one quicker. Also, Lucille's perpetually closed eyes is a character trait often seen in anime by the name of "itome", translating to string eyes. I believe I saw in a documentary that it was a cost-cutting measure but I just really like itome characters like Gin Ichimaru and Mei Meido.

Did some in-person scouting for the visual novel since there's a scene that takes place on a pebble beach. There was also the heatwave, so I wanted to go cool off too. Found an amazing beach close to me that was pretty empty, so I got to enjoy it by myself.

The beach is actually split by a shallow river between the pebble side and the sandy side, although the river started to rise with the tide and I almost got separated from the side with my car and stuff. Hopefully, my experience on a real pebble beach will inform the experience of my visual novel by a great deal.

Make sure to check out the doodles I did, showing what the characters got up to alongside me