Devlog 5. Partnership with Scarlet Moon

A choir director in a small town conducts the same hymn every Sunday for forty years. The congregation assumes he loves it. In truth he has hated it since the first week and stayed only to see how long a person can perform devotion to something he despises.

I have signed a contract with a cool voice agency!

Good Children Say Grace Partners with Scarlet Moon

Good Children Say Grace is now working with Jayson Napolitano and Scarlet Moon, a game music label and artist agency.

Through Scarlet Moon, I can now announce that Nami Nakagawa (Demon Slayer / NIER) and Norihiko Hibino (Metal Gear / Bayonetta / Yu-Gi-Oh) are joining the audio team of the project.

Steam post imageSteam post image

Localization

Full Japanese and English localization has been integrated into the Unreal Engine pipeline. I can now deploy narratives and mechanics into the game in both languages.

The demo ships with finished sound design, Japanese voice over for the main narrator, and both Japanese and English subtitles.

As the project grows, the plan is to bring Nakagawa-san back for more songs, and to add voice actors for characters beyond the narrator, fully integrated with lipsync via MetaHumans. Japanese will be fully supported. English will be fully supported aside from the voice overs.

You Made It Happen

The trailer numbers are still climbing since I last wrote about them. Over 1,500,000 views now, 16,700 likes, 2,000 reposts. I am not going to pretend the Asano repost stopped feeling unreal, but I have at least stopped refreshing the page every ten minutes.

Development Update

Branching

As you know, this game is all about choice. Not clicking "DO THAT" like in a visual novel. It is a mix of hundreds of small things you can actually do. Right now even the opening level has three completely different resolutions that send the story in completely different directions.

I am working to make it feel natural. The goal is to create the feeling of exploration, not just have people click on things.

Also, because there are so many paths, I am building a simple tracker inside the game that helps players see how many routes they have experienced.

Dark Romance

One of the bigger additions is distinctive romance, written by Milha Vek. This is not going to be "compliment a character to unlock a relationship." There will be many relationships you build through the story, and the types of relationships those become will depend on a lot of variables.

I will be honest, we are mid-work here. But I really hope to give you something real and unusual. How things actually are in isolated communities of Eastern Europe, that Milha and I have personally experienced.

Design Improvements

I have been working with my artist on animating our 2D characters inside the 3D world. The short GIF here is our very first concept for how those characters should sit in the environment.

We are also replacing all black-and-white placeholder assets with beautifully hand-drawn visuals across the game. The visual direction has been finalized.

Lastly, this might not mean much to people who don't make games, but thanks to a lot of technical QA from my friends in the industry, I have managed to systematize most of my features. What this means is that I've built a robust pipeline where I can quickly deploy new unique mechanics to create interesting gameplay elements. It matters more than it sounds.

Wishlist and follow if you want to see where this goes.

Denis Morozov（デニス・モロゾフ）