In February, we had to split our attention between development for POOMP as well as planning for NaNoRenO 2024, where we plan to wrap up POOMP’s spin-off series featuring warlock hunter Emma Schmidt.

Next month, there will not be a devlog, since we fully expect to be busy with the jam.

Art

It’s always great when we can combine POOMP art with jam planning. In this case, we made a rough design of Artur’s second-in-command, Nina. She didn’t end up making the cut for the game, but it’s great to finally put a face to the name. On top of this, we’re still hard at work creating new CGs, complete with complementary trips to cafés to scout locations.

Audio

We’ve been working on a leitmotif for Rose, based on CC’s theme from POOMP spin-off “Aftermath Crumble”.

Scripting

We decided to fix our image tinting code since it didn’t work on composite sprites. While the game no longer crashes when our artist tries to insert them, we also no longer have tinting. We’ll have to figure out what went wrong there since we’ve been doing this for other games before.

Writing

Editing has been going especially slow this month with the team being busy outlining our NaNo game, but we still made some headway. And re-reading a scene where poor Julian gets destroyed in chess by Artur is always a blast.

Miscellaneous

We’ve also created a new concept for our main menu, after having upgraded the game’s resolution. It’s still a work in progress, though.

Release

However, we spontaneously decided to take part in a game jam. The theme was Andy Warhol/Campbell’s tomato soup and naturally, we wrote a visual novel. The art had to be done using MS Paint and our actual artist wasn’t involved, which explains, well, a lot.

The final product turned out… weird.

After viewing Andy Warhol’s painting, Valerie has a mental breakdown. She meets two eccentric creatures and learns about the dirty secrets of the tomato soup business. Join her as she struggles to function as a regular human being and help navigate her through these trying times.