Hey folks, Whale here,

It's been almost two months since we released the first build of Anamnesis, and so we'd like to give an update on how development on the next build is going.

The bottom line is that August/September was not a great time for team Cobalt. All three of us work full-time on top of doing this, so some delays are inevitable. We're doing our best to spread out things out as much as possible to keep to a two month cycle.

Follow-on Work from Year's Turn

Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback on the first build. Most of the response was positive, which is great; however, there's plenty of room for improvement. In Strokkur we experimented with a dialog format more akin to closed captioning, which I had hoped to carry over to Anamnesis. Unfortunately, this experiment didn't really pan out, and so build one shipped with a placeholder GUI. This placeholder GUI also caused some problems with the Android build.

Danero and I are still discussing what the GUI update will look like, but it doesn't seem very likely that this will happen in time for build two. It seems pretty common for VNs to update their GUI in the middle of their run, so I'm not too concerned about it. Thanks for putting up with our clutter in the meantime. ^_^;

Build Two: The Hanging Gardens

The rough draft of the script for build two is about two-thirds of the way done. Roughly speaking, Anamnesis takes place over the course of a year of in-world time, from Year's Turn to Year's Turn. Build Two will end the day before Beltane, which in Aurelia is roughly equivalent to our May 1st*. That's a lot of time to cover in ~15k words of text, so I've narrowed the scope to a couple slice-of-life-ish vignettes, all taking place on Thatcher's farm in the mountains. (This isn't to say the plot is one-eighth over! Haha.)

There will be ample opportunity to advance either (or both, or neither) romance option, with accordingly more explicit content.

Originally we had a bit of old-school text adventure exploration planned, but the first draft felt like the plot crawled to a halt. I'm reworking the old material into a more traditional VN format.

Dan's been working on sprites for Silas, Thatcher's adopted son—you might remember some mention of him in the butcher scene, as the cheeky weasel and Tan are rather close. In the interim, I retconned Silas' age for plot reasons, which caused some rework to his design. (Sorry Dan!)

Since we knew in advance that this would be a rough month for his schedule, there are no CGs planned for this build. We've talked about adding some to prior content in the future as time permits, possibly as soon as build three.

Release Date

If everything goes well, Build Two will be uploaded on October 15.

Thanks for following us! See you in a couple weeks!

*The traditional Ungulate calendar divides the solar year into twelve months with twenty-eight days each. Year's Turn is March 15 in this system, so Beltane is May 1.