June was a long and busy month!

I want to do a few formal posts about the Kickstarter, how I put it together/executed it, what went well, what I could do better, and talk about some of the upcoming rewards I'm going to be developing but time has bee super short this month so I'm going to put that off for a week or two to get into some of the upgrades coming as a direct result of community support through things like Kickstarter and Patreon.

UI/GUI

If you haven't seen yet, TCM is getting a total UI overhaul, most of the graphics at this stage are completed and I'm about to begin the process of implementation.  Its gonna look REAL good.

Soundtrack

Melomelonine is still hard at work composing custom tracks for the game.  Many of the tracks already in use will make returning appearances in the prologue and branching stories, but custom music will really elevate the vibes of the games and giving each character their own theme will feel REALLY good.

MORE Artwork

With the Kickstarter funding, secondary character sprites have been unlocked meaning that Kazu, Raath, and Marcel can now fully interact with the story and have high quality visuals to go with it.  Cat Mori, Enforcers, and Tor will also help round that out!

Atlas is also working right now on a custom splash screen/box art style visual to not only be used as a background for the game's main menu, but will serve as a great poster-style key visual for game materials down the line.  If merch becomes a permanent offering later on, I'd like to offer it as a print!

A Committed Plan

One of the most important things the Kickstarter and Patreon have accomplished with their support this year is that- with current resources- I've been able to make a solid plan that I'll be able to commit to re: development that will carry me for quite some time.  With the resources available, I'm now securely committed to developing and releasing the tcm prologue by early 2024 + write and develop 3 full character routes all the way to their finales.  

I will probably always have feelers out for side projects like special DLC tales/episodes and stuff like that but securing the funding I have makes it much MUCH easier to focus on the core game with a strong development plan that will see content released on a regular schedule.

I used this graphic in the KS story block but I'll post it here as I think it helps explain how the process is going to look pretty well.

Anyway.  Today that's most of what I've got.  The kickstarter officially wraps up in just a couple hours and after that I'm going to take a well deserved nap.  KS Post Mortem thoughts will be coming soon as well as preliminary sketches for the splash screen.  As always, thank you so much for your support and I know I say this all the time but TCM literally would not exist without your help and enthusiasm and I'm very grateful to be able to make something like this for you to enjoy!

Cloud