Hello, folks. Normally I write something incredibly witting and charming up here, but not today. Today was supposed to be the release date for Rising Angels: Fates and as you can see, the game has not made it out. This is a personal failure upon my part. So instead of my usual song and dance on the stage, we are going to give a full report on the status of everything.

Writing:

-Core writing: The core writing for the game is in the editing stage and has been completely finished in terms of story. The core of the story is the entire voiced section that is common amongst all routes.

-Investigative writing: As much as I mentioned how much I love this part of the game, there is a lot of writing that is needed for it. Every item that can be presented needs text for it and most of them have small scenes that go along with them. It was far more writing than I originally intended and I am ashamed to say that it is the most behind. As a rough estimate, I have to say we are maybe a quarter of the way through all of the scenes. I’m considering cutting down on the number of events and recycling dialog, but I would rather add as much content as possible to the game.

-Character writing: Most of the character scenes for everyone in the first act have been completed. About twenty percent of the other acts have been finished up and a fair bit of work is still required in this section. Zuri and Kika have the most work done so far on their routes with Yoi taking the lead for the Name side of the house.

Art:

-Background art: We are almost done with the background art. Out of the 50 backgrounds for Fates, 45 of them are completely done and the last five are sketches. We should hopefully have those done soon. 4 planets and two spaceships ended up with a lot of backgrounds.

-Character art: All 21 of 21 characters have been completed! We ended up going a bit beyond what our original estimates called for. Natalie got a sprite and an extra outfit; Kika, Name, Zuri, and Yoi all got extra outfits as well. The cast list is a bit excessive, but I must admit that I quite enjoy large casts and there are a lot of different teams and players in Fates.

-Illustration art: One of our other areas that is a bit behind as well. Right now we are 28 (73 with variations) out of… we don’t really have a set number on this one. Probably going to keep at it as long as the CG artist is willing and I still have my day job paycheck to add more art.

Audio:

-Music: All of 15 of the tracks for the soundtrack have been completed. There are a couple extra tracks in the works that may bring that number further up.

-Voices: All voices except for the final act have been completed. Since we are still finishing up the editing on the final act, things are a bit delayed there. Hopefully, we should have it finished up very soon and we can close out this section.

-SFX: Since the lack of SFX was lacking in RA: Reborn, getting plenty of sound effects for Fates was a high priority. We are still coordinating all of the scenes that require SFX, so our numbers aren’t accurate at the moment. We are investing heavily into acquiring good ambient sound effects and action effects.

GUI:

-Art: All of the art for the GUI has been completed except for the icons for the investigation section. This is the one area that is quite behind. We had a lot of problems securing an icon artist and we are back in the neighborhood of finding one.

-Coding: This is a mixed bag of goods. While the engine for the investigative section has been finished for a very long time, we are still behind on the much larger task of coding in all the sprites, voices, and effects. This is a section I am dreading, to be honest. It is a colossal amount of work and I may be hiring assistants to help out with it.

Kickstarter related:

-Merchandise: All the wallscrolls and dakimakura have been made and sent out. We’ve considered making a couple other ones, but we are waiting to get things caught back up before we design any more.

-Codex: We are about two thirds completed with the codex. Turns out there are a lot of different things in this universe and I’ve got a bad tendency to ramble when I talk about the past.

-Book of short stories/ Collector/Faye side stories: Since work on the main writing has been slowed, efforts have been shifted away from here to help bolster the main. Most of the short stories are slowly progressing when I get some down time after long days at my day job when I just don’t have the mental acuity to wrap my head around the thousands of options and possible factors in the investigative sections. They’re progressing, but slowly.

In short, we still have a fair amount of work to do and most of it depends on the writing. I can give excuses about how many hours I work at my day job, but those are just that. Excuses. We’re fully committed to making this the best game possible and worth every penny that has been invested into it. Though I know delays are painful, I once again humbly ask for your understanding. Next week we will be back to our regular updates. Until then, happy Halloween. Chief out.

And something that spooked me out as a kid for this video o’ the post Halloween edition.