It's been long enough without any news regarding THE WHITE TIGERS, the larger visual novel project set to follow THE OTHER ISLAND. I intended to have this little update and the character reveals up earlier, but that was delayed for various reasons, so now there's a whole lot of other stuff to talk about as well. Without further ado:

MAY WOLF 2024

The MAY WOLF furry visual novel game jam happened again this year; I submitted an entry, My Municipality – Oi kuntani mun. If you're hearing about this thing for the first time, I really recommend browsing through the submissions – there are a lot of nice games in there! My reviews and personal recommendations are up on my website, if you have no idea where to start.

Character Reveals

It's happening! The core cast of the VN will be revealed on our dedicated webpage; check it out here (or here in Finnish). We're starting off with the fox from THE OTHER ISLAND, the four route characters dropping from next week onwards. The easiest way to follow along is through our social medias (Bluesky, Twitter).

There's some early concept art by triviaboy94, short bios for the new guys, and a five-song playlist for everyone. The page itself might just be my most twisted creation yet as a web designer – I wanted to make something that would really reflect the tone and the personality of the project.

Anyway, when they're revealed, let us know if you have any thoughts about the characters! The art style isn't intended to reflect what the sprites will look like, and the designs aren't finalized yet, but we will be using these sketches as a baseline.

Engine Progress

As you might know, the VN is intended to use a Godot-based engine I'm currently in the process of making. A lot has happened since THE OTHER ISLAND – I ported the whole thing to Godot 4, which was almost the equivalent of rewriting it from scratch, and have been adding features and improving the design since then.

You can go look at my MAY WOLF submission if you want an idea of what the engine is capable of now. The essential features are more or less in place; the only really, really big missing thing is making a Godot extension with a bunch of visual interfaces instead of everything having to be done in code. That's a key thing before it will be user-friendly enough for anyone but me to use. Good enough for this project, though!

Writing Progress

The draft of the prologue (the pre-route split portion, which will be released in one chunk) has been done for a while now, and there's some very early work on one of the routes. I'm just waiting for feedback from a couple of beta readers and will then move on to editing and translation.

Don't really want to say anything more concrete yet! There are some surprises coming up, and I'd rather not spoil them, especially since the reader response to THE OTHER ISLAND was mostly different flavors of people being perplexed about how it will lead into the larger narrative. You'll find out...

UI Design Progress

For some hot low-spoiler content, have a look at a bunch of UI stuff I've been doing instead.

After improving the engine's features for styling the main in-game UI, I did a fresh iteration, which looks so much better... honestly, I'm kind of embarrassed of what it was like in THE OTHER ISLAND now. It's taking all of my willpower to not just go delete it and erase the evidence of my crimes against graphic design.

Speaking of: THE OTHER ISLAND will be available as a side story to read in the Extras menu. There will be others, too, and I already have drafts for a couple, which you'll unlock a little later in the story.

As for the new button there in the corner, it'll open an in-story dictionary. I was kind of hesitant about implementing something like this at first – I don't want to rely on it as what makes the narrative comprehensible on a basic level. I think the benefits ultimately outweigh the drawbacks, though, as the game will be pretty dense and take a while to come out. Good to have something you can use to remind yourself what any of this bullshit is supposed to mean. I'm also using the entries as a good opportunity to add fun worldbuilding details and little jokes; my shoutouts to NeveN, which does similar stuff.

Anyway, let's take a look at the map. (Note: all details are non-representative, it's just a tech demo right now)

I tried to make it as performant and as smooth to use as possible. The areas are all vector graphics and look crisp even when you zoom in.

There are also these lore tidbits you can read after unlocking them in-game.

As the story uses a fair amount of space geopolitics to contextualize the places the characters visit, I thought having an actual map you can browse was crucial to making sure it's all easy to visualize.

Team News

At the moment, it's me and triviaboy94, who will be doing background art and various other stuff. We'd still like to add another artist for sprites & illustrations; despite the project being fairly ambitious and large in its scope, I think we can make it work with three people. I have done a lot of grinding to learn all the miscellaneous skills making a game requires and get my prose to the point that an external translator/editor isn't necessary for us to make a polished product.

The thing I'm most concerned about here is financial sustainability. If we keep the team small enough, I think it will be possible to give everyone something resembling a fair compensation by splitting what we get from Patreon/etc between us. Feel free to reach out if this project seems like something you'd be interested in, but I'm not actively hunting for a third member yet, because…

Secret Project

... there's an unrelated, smaller one-off game I've been quietly making with a different team just to get some more experience in VN production. I'm going to finish the script before jumping back to this project properly; it'll most likely come out before THE WHITE TIGERS. Don't really want to reveal anything else yet, but stay tuned!

In Conclusion

There's been some progress, but a release isn't imminent or anything. I'm more excited about people getting to read the story than anyone else, but I also want to make we have a solid production pipeline in place and financial prospects to ensure we can see this enormous thing to completion.

Anyway, character reveals will continue to happen in the coming weeks. I won't make separate devlogs for them to avoid spamming Itch too much, but as a reminder, here are our social medias:

Bluesky

Twitter