Greetings everyone! It’s a new year full of fresh hope and inspiration. Last year brought a lot of challenges for our endeavors at Woodsy Studio. But this year we’re determined to release Crimson Spires and are working hard to complete our best visual novel yet.

Crimson Spires is such a big game that it was easy for us to get lost in fine-tuning minor aspects of the game indefinitely. Over the last few months, we realized that we needed to focus on what mattered most: writing. So we have been passionately writing the remaining romance paths for the story, and thus made significant progress towards finishing the script. Once the script is complete, blocking out the remainder of the scenes in the game should go relatively fast.

Unfortunately, switching so much of the focus to writing the main story and the various romantic branches has led us to scope down somewhat on the exploration and side stories. We’re still deciding where we’ll go with them, but for now we know the most important thing is the story between Erika and her chosen partner. One of the reasons we’ve had to shift more of our attention to the script has been that we realized that these individual branches needed to be much longer than we initially anticipated. Developing Erika’s relationship with each character–especially some of the more sinister ones–required more scenes and a slower pace. Since there are four major paths, this dramatically increased the amount of writing and the full script will be by far the longest we’ve ever completed!

Given the nature of writing a large story, it’s challenging to share regular posts and updates about the progress of the script! We’re far enough into the plot that it’s full of spoilers. So even if we’re quiet, rest assured that we’re still working hard and developing this game towards completion.

Meanwhile, we are able to offer a dramatic scene from the game’s main story path, giving you a big preview of what’s to come. This is a major moment in the main story, when Erika first discovers the true nature of the Bataille family. It also introduces the voice talents of Abigail Turner, who we recently brought in as Maddy when the original VA was no longer available.

As we go along, we also continue to pick out important scenes for full VO and implement them. We’re very happy with all our actors, and we can’t wait until you can hear more of them! And with new highlighted scenes comes new CG art, which unfortunately also happens to be on the spoiler-y side. It’s hard to share progress in such a mysterious game as Crimson Spires!

We’ve also blocked out a number of new environments, including Bataille’s Dollar Store (which has been converted into a general store where the goods from the train are sold), a local bar built into a barn where the survivalist group Freedom’s Dawn meets, more houses, and a super secret area that we can’t even mention without spoiling the fun.

In that scene you might have also noticed some dynamic music. That’s because we’ve added FMOD capabilities into the game, allowing us to seamlessly change the flow of music to match specific moments as you play. This is a new feature that should help with one of the major difficulties of scoring a visual novel: everyone reads at their own pace, so accentuating dramatic or light-hearted moments in an individual scene within a song is impossible without some amount of dynamic music control.

As we go along, we also continue to pick out important scenes for full VO and implement them. We’re very happy with all our actors, and we can’t wait until you can hear more of them! And with new highlighted scenes comes new CG art, which unfortunately also happens to be on the spoiler-y side. It’s hard to share progress in such a mysterious game as Crimson Spires!

We’ve also blocked out a number of new environments, including Bataille’s Dollar Store (which has been converted into a general store where the goods from the train are sold), a local bar built into a barn where the survivalist group Freedom’s Dawn meets, more houses, and a super secret area that we can’t even mention without spoiling the fun.

One good side effect of reducing the scope of explorable areas in the game has been how we construct some of our environments. With fewer concerns about whether certain parts of an area are traversable, we’ve been able to create more dramatic backgrounds for some of our most important scenes. We think for a game like Crimson Spires, this may be a trade-off that results in a more stylish and dramatic game.

As for Woodsy Studio’s other projects, they have regrettably had to be put on hold for the moment. We’d still love to bring Echoes of the Fey: The Last Sacrament to consoles, but considering the scale of what we still have ahead of us with Crimson Spires, we’ve decided that we can’t promise that will happen in the near future. We know this may come as a let-down to folks who enjoyed The Fox’s Trail on PS4 or Xbox One, and we’re sorry that we haven’t been able to continue Sofya’s story on those platforms. This is something that we hope to revisit when Crimson Spires is more complete, so we hope you still stay tuned!

We wish we could give a stronger release window for Crimson Spires, but rest assured we’re committed to finishing the game and putting it out as soon as we feel it’s ready. We’re not used to having the script as a production bottleneck, so predicting exactly when that will be has been tricky. We will at least say that we plan to get it out this year!