March 2024 Progress Report (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Today I’m doing the first “progress report” update since our Patreon model change earlier this year. Before I continue I really have to say...thank you guys so much for giving me the breathing room to do this. I haven’t felt this creatively liberated in a long time! I’ve been able to dedicate time to projects I’ve been mulling about in my head for years now, with one of them I’m going to share some details on later in this post.

For now, though, we’re all still interested in what’s going on with Santa Lucia, so I’ll start there. I’ve taken advantage of this extra time to work on merging the gallery into the public build, while also giving it and chapter select a much needed quality update. Because of the breakneck pace at which we’ve had to put out updates, these two areas of the game suffered greatly from neglect. For chapter select, I decided that the old idea I had for it was going to be more trouble than it was worth to maintain, so I have revamped it into a more coherent and simple system, as illustrated by the included screenshot. As for the gallery, I’m working on simplifying it and removing redundant categories. I’ve merged the Playlists page into the music room and updated the buttons, moved the NSFW event replays over to the chapter select screen, and am currently working on the image room to get it up to date with all the latest CGs. I expect the next build of Santa Lucia to be released on April 1st to patrons with all these changes and a continuation of Carlos’s route.

As for what else I’ve been working on this month, well...I’m just gonna jump right into it. I may have gotten a little carried away, but I’m proud to say that I’ve started working on not one, not two, but three additional projects, all of which have been in various states of concepting throughout the past few years. Now that I’ve had time to truly sit down and work on them, I’m super excited for what’s in store for the future! That being said, I’m not planning to work on all this simultaneously, obviously. I want to push these projects forward enough to know which one is going to take the “main project” slot once Santa Lucia reaches its quickly approaching conclusion.

The first project I want to introduce is going to be the most relevant to Santa Lucia fans. As you may have noticed, we’re pushing the newly introduced character Kai pretty heavily, seeing as we just dropped his short story today, too, after including him in our most recent SL updates. The reason for this is because he’s going to be one of the main characters in Santa Lucia’s new sister project “Last Sorrow”!

I’m not going to go into too much detail about the plot concept right now, but I want to give you an idea of what I plan the game to be. Last Sorrow is going to be a turn-based RPG set in the Santa Lucia setting, mainly focused on the larger story that’s happening in the background of Ben’s misadventures. If you haven’t picked up on this detail by now, I’ll go ahead and let the cat out of the bag: Superpowers are a thing in the Santa Lucia universe. If you were paying attention and reading between the lines, you may have noticed certain characters exhibiting...unusual talents. Last Sorrow is going to explore that side of the setting in more detail while also providing another perspective on the story’s central conflict. Along with this post, I’m including a piece of concept art for Kai’s design, as well as one of the CG stills from his short story. Dev’s super proud of his work on Kai and he spent a lot of extra time getting the details just right for this announcement.

I’m also including a smattering of music tracks I’ve composed for the Last Sorrow project. I’ve got the main theme (in an abridged format), Kai’s character theme, a couple battle themes, an example dungeon theme, and the theme that plays while you wander around the school. I know it’s a bit redundant to say, but I’m also extremely proud of my work here. I think these songs are the best work I’ve ever put out, and I can’t wait to see them in the proper context. In a way, it’s like my artistic journey is coming full circle. I started out with making games in RPG Maker as a kid, and now I’m going back to make one in my adulthood carrying all the things I’ve learned with me.

As for the other two projects, I’m going to keep those under wraps for now. I can’t go spilling the beans all in one run, after all!

Anyway, I hope this post gives you some reassurance that your patronage is going to good use. We wouldn’t be able to allocate our time towards creative projects without the cushion room you all provide us, and for that we are eternally grateful!

Cheers, and see you all next month!

~Dzahn