next »

[Ramos]

Glad to hear you are close to publishing your coming soon page on Steam.

And good choice to use steam/steam keys for testing.
After that Splattercat scandal, most content creators only accept steam keys, good old days with presskit dropbox link downloads are almost gone.

I am also curious about how will your Steam Capsule look like, many consider that to be the main Pitch element when it comes to Steam.

 

[oldblood]

DEVLOG XXX - TEASER TRAILER & OPEN CASTING CALL

Thirty devlogs, wow. Bit of a milestone! My goodness, April has been a bit of a whirlwind. Which I knew it would be. The sort of month where you're not making a ton of progress on the game itself but you're buried in the weeds of a lot of other things. I'm currently working towards a deadline of launching the first publicly playable demo for 'Moonbriar' on Steam for their inaugural "Visual Novel Festival" which kicks off in early August. The plan is to have a fully voice-acted demo of the first of four acts in the game (approximately 60-70 minutes of game). Which means I will need to fully cast all the characters in the demo, get them all recorded, implemented, polish the demo, test the hell out of it, etc. over the next 90 days. August seems a long way off, but it'll be here quickly.

NARRATIVE TEASER

Finally got around to getting the first narrative teaser for Moonbriar up. This is primarily focused on just setting a tone for the narrative. It also includes the first glimpse of some of the music by Corey Farr. The teaser is narrated by Ralph Ineson, and it does a lot of the heavy lifting for the teaser. Trailers for Visual Novels are VERY hard, as there is no traditional gameplay hook to show and "gameplay" isn't very exciting. A lot of traditional dating-sim trailers tend to focus on just introducing characters, etc. but I wanted to lean more into just trying to set the mood.

Is it the best? No. I learned I'm going to need to probably create some unique assets and set pieces for the final trailer, and that just showcasing some of the existing gameplay pieces won't do the trick. But for now, it will be a start and it allows me to get the Steam page live with a teaser. Ideally, the final trailer will be more polished.

Narrative Teaser: Featuring narration by Ralph Ineson.

Unfortunately, hit a very odd snag where the Steam page did not publish after getting the Steam approval for the page to go live. It is currently prompting an unknown error and I have a ticket in to Steam to review the issue. So, I have a teaser trailer live without a Steam page to direct anyone to, which isn't ideal. Hoping the error will be quickly resolved but I know Valve isn't know for moving at high speeds so fingers crossed the page will soon be live.

CASTING ANNOUNCEMENT & OPEN CASTING

I'm pleased to announce that two-time BAFTA nominated Simon Callow (A Room with a View, Four Weddings and a Funeral, etc.) will be playing the role of the villain, Nightshade. I'm excited for you all to hear Simon's take on this despotic, authoritarian orator. He brings a lifetime of stage, film, and television acting to the role that is immediately clear.

Simon Callow as Nightshade.

I've also initiated an open casting call to voice 14 characters who make appearances in the demo. This open casting call is running between April 17th and May 1st, 2023. Thus far, the casting call has gone incredibly well and gotten a lot of interest over the first week. Over the first week, I've listened to 500+ character auditions for the 14 roles. To say its been overwhelming would be an understatement. I expect that number to slow down pretty dramatically since I assume most people who wanted to audition have auditioned at this point. But with 10 days left, I imagine there will be a few more auditions to go. The quality of the auditions has been very good, so I'm very confident we'll be able to cast a lot of the core characters.

Deliberation will go until May 12th, but I hope to have it all finalized ahead of then. From there, we will coordinate recording all the characters for the demo between May 15th - June 9th. Which will give me about a month and a half to get it all cleaned up, balanced, implemented and tested ahead of the Visual Novel Festival.

Overall, it has been very eye opening, especially when I consider that we will eventually need to record 3-4x as much as the demo for recording the remainder of the game beyond Act 1. However, its nice to know that beyond the demo there is only another 8-10 characters to cast and the vast majority of the characters will already be cast and just need to coordinate on additional recording sessions. This is the first game I've done with voice acting, and I think I've already learned a lot about how much effort and work has to go into prepping, leading, and implementing all this. TLDR: Do not underestimate the level of effort that goes into deciding to voice your game.

IN OTHER NEWS

Got a lot of other small things going on around the periphery still:

• Still working through some updates to the overall story flow.
• Alternate time-of-day shots for various environments.
• Alternate environments based on story changes.
• Additional new environment art for locations outside Act 1.
• Slowly but surely getting some music done and implemented into the demo.
• Hoping to kick-off getting a lot of these additional environments animated soon.

Time of Day Shots.

As always, thanks for reading.

***

Awesome, this is some great progress! I am excited for the Steam page to launch and see your artwork for it, I'm sure it is going to be great

Glad to hear you are close to publishing your coming soon page on Steam. And good choice to use steam/steam keys for testing.
After that Splattercat scandal, most content creators only accept steam keys, good old days with presskit dropbox link downloads are almost gone.  I am also curious about how will your Steam Capsule look like, many consider that to be the main Pitch element when it comes to Steam.

Thank you both! Yeah, as mentioned above, aside from the random Steam error it'll be great to get this live. For the Capsule, I'm planning to eventually get some custom artwork done, but for now it will just be using existing assets. I think it will look okay since I'm still a ways out from launch but definitely want to improve the capsule and trailer in the months leading up to launch.

[Ramos]

Just saw the teaser, the voice actor is fantastic, a truly perfect fit with your creation

[oldblood]

Just saw the teaser, the voice actor is fantastic, a truly perfect fit with your creation

Thanks Ramos! Yes, Ralph has a distinctive voice but was a great fit for the overall mood.

We've officially got the Steam page live yesterday, Valve was able to solve the permissions bug.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2106280/Moonbriar/

[Ramos]

Congratulations!


This is a big step 

[Alain]

We've officially got the Steam page live yesterday, Valve was able to solve the permissions bug.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2106280/Moonbriar/

So great, congratulations! Wishlisted!

[nathy after dark]

This looks awesome! Forwarded the casting call to my actor friends. I wanted to audition myself, but alas I cannae spaek en an English accent.

I agree making trailers for visual novels is the worst!

[oldblood]

WARNING: This will be boring unless you're interested in the Voice Over process...

DEVLOG XXXI - CASTING & RECORDING VO

Apologies, this will be a boring devlog but Voice Over has been my life the last two months and it will continue to be for at least one more. It's all been a bit of a blur. The amount of time it has taken to run open casting, the amount of hours spent sorting, organizing, choosing, and responding to emails. Then recording the live sessions, organizing recordings, audio cleanup, and implementation is immense. I completely underestimated the level-of-effort needed to do this for the Demo. It's a testament to how much MORE work recording the remainder of the game will be when the demo alone is such a huge time-sink.

"Are you saying you wouldn't do VO again?"

No, its been a great learning experience and I've been overwhelmed with the positive feedback and quality we're getting, but I definitely didn't know it would be this huge to coordinate. I say all this for other devs to be aware who may be considering it for their own projects. Granted, Moonbriar has a large cast and is dialogue heavy, so you're mileage may vary but it's worth noting it will take more time than you think it will.

The Open Casting Data

We did an open-casting call for 14 roles. During the two-week session of open casting, we received over 1,600+ auditions from 370 Voice Actors. This was an average of almost 115 auditions per role to listen, rank, and decide on. And just to give you a hint of the time needed to process the auditions, to just listen to all the auditions ONE time (and you'd need to listen to them more than that) would take you 25 hours. For context, you could read Moby Dick cover-to-cover at least 2 or 3 times in that same span.

In the end, after much deliberation, we cast all 14 roles and are lucky that many of them have years of experience in gamedev voice acting which has been a big boon for the recording process to go smoothly and professionally. The list of credits the cast has been involve with is gigantic: Dark Souls 2, Warhammer 40k, Diablo: Immortal, Total War - Warhammer 3, Life is Strange, Warframe, Return of the Obra Dinn, World of Tanks, PayDay 2, and many, many more. At some point soon I will likely do a casting announcement on Twitter.

Recording Sessions

Currently, we've scheduled out about 16 hours of recording for the demo (the demo wont have 16 hours of voice of course, just the hours needed to record enough takes for all the characters). And we're about half-way through all those sessions, with the remainder slated through the end of May. So the hope is to have about 90% of all the voice recording we need completed by June. I will end up spending pretty much all of June working through the cleanup and implementation process for all of the final takes into the demo. That is going to be many hours of work.

The only voice over not recording in May, is for the main protagonist, Fern, who is slated to be played by Savannah Steyn (most notable for her role in the new House of the Dragon TV show on HBO). Savannah is slated to begin recording early in June, after she returns from filming elsewhere. Doing the voice over for the main character in a Visual Novel is a very large undertaking, since the main character is a part of 90% of all the conversations that happen in the game. So, I'm expecting multiple hours of recording sessions just for the demo + many additional hours later when we return for the remainder of the game.

Long-term: We'll need to cast around 8-10 other characters for the remainder of the game + recording will be 3+ times as large so that is going to be a huge effort that I cannot even fully begin to fathom. My guess is we'll end up spending somewhere around 25 hours to record the demo, which means the full game may be something in the range of 90-100+ hours of live recording sessions, which is a little mind-numbing if I'm honest.

Savannah Steyn as Fern

Public Demo & Festival Plans

So, at this point, you may be wondering what the plan is for the demo? I'm working towards trying to have a fully voice-acted public demo ready for August. Moonbriar will be participating in its first Steam festival in August (more details to come) and I am hoping to have a public demo ready by then for the first act of the game.

Essentially, that means I have approximately 60 days to get all the voice acting pulled together and implemented, plus testing the hell out of (and fixing) issues I find in the demo. A public demo is always nerve-wracking, especially since this game has only ever really been played by a limited audience so I'd be lying if I said I wasn't scared to death of the prospect, but I realize these sorts of things are a large part of trying to drive Wishlists and traffic on your Steam page. So that's the plan. Hoping it doesn't backfire!

***

This looks awesome! Forwarded the casting call to my actor friends. I wanted to audition myself, but alas I cannae spaek en an English accent. I agree making trailers for visual novels is the worst!

Thanks so much nathy after dark! Appreciate you forwarding the casting and the kind words about the teaser! I also cannot fake an English accent haha. Ended up that about 90% of the cast is British, but there are a couple Americans who did a good enough job faking it to pull through.

So great, congratulations! Wishlisted!

Thanks for the WL Alain!

Congratulations! This is a big step 

Haha, thank you Ramos. It was definitely good to finally get that off the plate. The page, teaser, capsules etc. all eventually need to get replaced but they will do the trick for now so I at least have something live.

[Alain]

Wow, I would not have imagined that it would be THAT much material to go through! This must have been quite a grind. As you say, the full recording process might be intimidating regarding the scope, but I am sure you will handle it. Keep up the great work!

[oahda]

Love reading about this stuff, definitely not boring!

Teaser was nice too But yes, definitely some gameplay one way or another would be great to see if you make a trailer too.

Cool to see even more recognisable faces/voices/franchises cropping up. I knew Simon from Doctor Who but Savannah was new to me (I've heard of House of the Dragon but not watched) so I looked at IMDb and that's when it hit me that I guess all these people will have listings for Moonbriar voice work on there eventually? A fun thought.

Also good luck with the demo! Really neat to see the game on the Steam Deck.

[oldblood]

DEVLOG XXXII - DEMO IS LIVE

It's been a hot minute since I posted any updates to this devlog. The last two months have been intensive to say the least, trying to get prepared for it's first festival. The Visual Novel Fest hosted by Steam which runs from August 7th - 14th. This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, a festival geared around narrative focused games. And most importantly: YOU CAN PLAY THE DEMO NOW!

Play the first hour of Moonbriar via Steam or Itch.io.

It's been a bit of a journey the last two months to get here. There are a lot of items and improvements I wanted to get in place for the alpha demo, but unfortunately, I just ran out of time. I'd previously stated I estimated I would need 90-100+ hours of live recording sessions for the full game, but I wildly underestimated the amount of time it was going to take for: recording voice over, making line selections, chopping it all up, cleaning and balancing the voice over, implementing it all, etc. In short, it will take some multiple of recording sessions to do everything else. In the range of hundreds and hundreds of hours.

TLDR: As a small, part-time dev, it will be a lot to handle. Perhaps too much.

But, for now, at least this one small milestone has been hit. I don't know what to expect in terms of any kind of visibility, downloads, feedback, etc. will be gained by participating in the Visual Novel Festival, but I'm glad to finally be getting something out there.

[nathy after dark]

I’d been wondering how the voice recording and editing was going for you! Because I’m doing the same thing but on a much smaller scale, and it’s still hard.

I’ve made some automated scripts for transcribing, cutting, and choosing between voice takes. I would gladly show you my scripts, and if you have anything in the budget, I would also offer my labor in doing some of that work 

[Ramos]

Participating in the Visual Novel Fest is a good move. It is a medium size festival. Dont forget about Steam next Fest, that`s the big one.


 

[Alain]

The Visual Novel fest is a perfect fit for Moonbriar! I would love to hear if it gave you some visibility, if you are willing to share!

[oldblood]

I’ve made some automated scripts for transcribing, cutting, and choosing between voice takes. I would gladly show you my scripts, and if you have anything in the budget, I would also offer my labor in doing some of that work  

Haha, I may need to take you up on that offer next year when I'm digging into chopping it all up.

Participating in the Visual Novel Fest is a good move. It is a medium size festival. Dont forget about Steam next Fest, that`s the big one.

Yeah, since I only get to participate in that one once, I'm waiting until I know a firm launch date and then choosing whatever NextFest will happen before then. Still a ways to go so don't think I have to worry about NextFest too soon.

The Visual Novel fest is a perfect fit for Moonbriar! I would love to hear if it gave you some visibility, if you are willing to share!

Well... speaking of...

DEVLOG XXXIII - VN FESTIVAL DATA + SXSW

So, I participated in the Steam Visual Novel Festival earlier this month and wanted to share a glimpse of the data and some general thoughts I have about the festival for any other developers who are considering participating in it in the future. First, lets look at the data from participating in the event, which ran from August 7th-14th:

• Impressions: 94,887
• Free Licenses: 2,552
• Lifetime Players: 105
• Median Playtime: 46 Minutes
• Wishlists Gained: 169

Since it's a demo app, Steamworks doesn't translate the "Click through rate" of impressions to visits on the Demo app, since it was instead going to a different app (main) so its a little unclear what the true CTR is. The majority of impressions (76k) were from the Demo Hub of the festival which isn't too surprising. The "Free Licenses" is a little confusing but from what I can tell, this is people who added the demo to their library but did not necessarily install or play the demo. Apparently it is fairly common for people to add a demo to their library and never get around to installing or playing the demo--from what I see from other developers that is very normal. So don't get too discouraged if you post a demo and there is a large gap between people adding it to their library and actually playing it.

2,500+ people adding it to their library that week I took as a decent sign that some folks thought the demo or steam page was interesting enough to add. As you can see, only a little over a hundred people ended up actually playing the demo but the average play time was 1 hour and 34 minutes and the median playtime was 46 minutes. Its a small sample size, so hard to draw any real conclusions from it, but I will definitely say I was probably most happy with this part of the data. As it points towards if folks start playing the demo, a decent number continue to play the demo. Below is a breakdown of playtime and where falloff occurs:

Playtime Breakdown

I actually had some players reach out to say they had spent several hours replaying the demo and exploring other paths, which was encouraging to hear. The fact that almost 20% of players hit the 2-hour threshold in the demo was nice to see.

I would say the most disappointing part of the Festival was the low Wishlist gain. I don't know what I expected, but I suppose I hoped for 500+. That being said, I can't complain about any gain of Wishlists or exposure for the project. So I'm certainly not going to complain about almost 200 new WL's in a week, but I did hope it would be higher. You might be able to argue that having a demo may actually lower wishlists, as players that might have accessed the page during the event that think the game looks interesting and would traditionally Wishlist would instead just add the demo to their library to see if they liked it.

I've also seen a small spike of Wishlist deletions over the week. Small, but still a small spike--which I attribute to some folks playing the demo and realizing it may not be something they actually want to play. I'm okay with this, as I think one of the goals of the demo is that upon release ideally folks that do have the game on their wishlist already have a sense of how the game plays and that it will (hopefully) minimize negative reviews about the game not meeting expectations if the player already has a sense of how the game is before purchasing it. We'll just have to see.

Final Thoughts on Visual Novel Festival:

• Steam prioritizes released games/sales in the event and promotes accordingly.
• You have to search to find unreleased games or demos.
• As such, unreleased games/demo's will not get as much traffic as you'd expect.
• There is a large fall-off between users adding to Library and playing.
• Really no downside to not participating. Just keep expectations low for non-released games.

***

In other event news, I'm happy to announce that Moonbriar was selected to participate in the inaugural SXSW Sydney event in October of this year. This is the first time the iconic SXSW has held an event outside Austin. A convergence of tech, film, music, and games--I am genuinely surprised that the Moonbriar demo made the cut.

Unfortunately, I will not be making the flight out to Sydney for the event (as much as I would like to) so that means the demo will be playable but I really have no understanding, at this point at least, about how much traffic/interest that it will possibly get. As such, I really have almost zero expectations about the events ability to drum up Wishlists or traffic for the game, but again--I think I should participate in as many things as I possibly can. There is very little downside to attending or participating in events.

Official Selection for the inaugural SXSW Sydney

Will you be attending SXSW Sydney by chance? I'd love to hear if so. Thanks for reading.

[nathy after dark]

Haha, I may need to take you up on that offer next year when I'm digging into chopping it all up.

Cool cool! At some point I'll be dev logging about the system and you can look at how it helps.

[Ramos]

Thank you for sharing that data with us Oldblood!

 

[marcgfx]

Missed all these updates, but had an entertaining morning. I went to download the demo, but it seems my macbook is too new ?

Notice: This product is not compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina or above. Click here for more information.

I've never played a visual novel in my life, so this will be a first. Guess I will have to try on my PC though, not quite as relaxed.

[oldblood]

Missed all these updates, but had an entertaining morning. I went to download the demo, but it seems my macbook is too new ?

I've never played a visual novel in my life, so this will be a first. Guess I will have to try on my PC though, not quite as relaxed.

First off, thanks for reading and grabbing the demo! That means a lot. I'm honored this will be the first VN you've played, though not sure it will be too representative of the broader market haha.

In my limited experience testing this on different Macs, I've seen it sometimes prompt 32 bit vs 64 bit warnings but still play but this is the first I've heard of this particular message, but it was tested on other Macs including on Ventura 13.1 so it should work on newer Macs. It may be tied to settings on the computer itself? But generally speaking, everyone who has tested it on a Mac has said it played but prompted some sort of vague warning.

[marcgfx]

might be some kind of compatibility flag you have to set... let me see.

Starting October 14th, 2019 Steam will require all new macOS Applications to be 64-bit and notarized by Apple. If your Mac application already supports 64-bit, please login to Steamworks and select the "macOS -> 64 Bit Binaries Included" checkbox in the "Supported Operating Systems" section for your application. This will ensure that your macOS app will appear as compatible for users who are running Steam on macOS 10.15.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/platforms

edit: just started playing the demo, I like it! Works fine, but as stated lots of nasty looking warnings on Steam.