Hello, hello, my beautiful raccoon friends! I’ve said it for three July round-ups before \[note: but this is the first time on Steam!], and I’ll say it a fourth time: July is typically the month when Swedes take their summer vacations! But despite us getting chances for rest and relaxation, we’ve also gotten a lot done this month. So let’s go over what’s been happening.

Thank you for 200k downloads!

The wildest thing on our list of happenings was definitely doing the math and realising that between Obscura and its demo, if you add up the downloads on Steam and http://itch.io we have hit over 200k downloads! In our first July round-up we were absolutely blown away by getting 7000 downloads, so as you might imagine we’re pretty tickled by this new milestone. Thank you, everyone who has supported us this far. We literally could not have reached 200k downloads without you.

Oleander Chapter Two

You may have possibly heard about this already, but Oleander’s second chapter came out on the 7th of July! We have been thrilled by the positive feedback we’ve gotten from you about how his story has progressed, and Violet is rubbing her little paws together with evil glee over everyone’s reactions to the chapter’s end. Getting this chapter out has been so satisfying, and we’re so happy to hear you all enjoying it, too!

There’s merch now!

Appropriately for the update for our own merchant gadfly, we’ve also opened up our own little merch shop for business[www.kaguyaproject.com]! (Don’t worry about the Kaguya Project name, that’s us when we’re wearing our publisher hat.) We’ve kept the number of items there small for now, but we expect to keep adding items and designs as time goes on, hopefully with some input from the folks on our Discord! Right now you can get stickers of the love interests, the gorgeous Chapter Two announcement art featuring Keir and Cirrus on a poster, or a t-shirt or tote bag with a new piece of Cirrus art from Mugi.

OST Updates

Cajsa has gone ahead and updated the Obscura soundtrack to include the music that’s been added to Chapter Two so far! As always, her work has been amazing. I’ve been blasting the tunes for the entirety of this round-up!

She has a full array of links here[album.link] to the first chapter, but if you’re looking to stream the new tunes on Spotify you can find them here[open.spotify.com], and the album is also available to purchase on Bandcamp[cajsalarsson.bandcamp.com] and Steam! We’ve also set up a Steam bundle for the game and album together, in case anyone could use it.

Payment processor hullabaloo

So this was not my favourite thing to happen during my vacation >:| We’ve put out a full statement a week ago about what’s been happening, you can find it on our Discord or Tumblr. The short version is this: payment processors have pressured Steam and Itchio to remove games containing explicit content or else lose the ability to buy and sell games. There has been an immediate and very loud backlash to this, and we encourage folks who disagree with the financial censorship at play to make their voices heard.

Ultimately, we’ve been very lucky, given the dark and mature content at play in Obscura. So far we’ve avoided having our game delisted, shadowbanned, or removed in any capacity, and while we’re keeping our eye on the situation it looks like we’re in the clear for now. Obviously we’ll update you if that changes. Not exactly the note we wanted to exit July on, but we’re hoping this ends the way it should: with payment processors backing off, and mature games remaining on both platforms.

Art Progress

In much more cheerful news! Now that Oleander’s chapter is in the books, we have turned our focus over to getting Francesco’s second chapter ready! For Mugi, that means getting visual assets locked and loaded, and let me just say that she’s really been putting the work in. Here’s a little look at a new asset she’s just added to the game which we are very excited to play with!

Writing

While I certainly didn’t plan for it to work out this way, turns out that pretty soon after Oleander’s second chapter went out I went on vacation! So there is nothing meaningful to report from me. 

That’s alright, though, because Tobi has been plugging away on Francesco’s second chapter and absolutely killing it. Every time she pushes new text I’m always excited to check it out. And since it’s Francesco’s time to shine, here’s a snippet of the script that may give a clue to part of the Chapter Two adventures.

And that’s the end of the news from the raccoon den for this month! It’s been a very active July on a bunch of different axes, and we’re already moving forward into more new and exciting things! We’ll try and keep this momentum going forward and get Francesco’s second chapter closer and closer to release!

Love,

The Rotten Raccoons Team 💙🦝

Thanks to the amazing work of Cajsa Larsson, the composer for OBSCURA, the game's soundtrack is now available to purchase here on Steam! It currently has 30 minutes of original music, arranged for the album format. Cajsa's work on OBSCURA has been invaluable for creating the world of the marketplace, both with immersive ambiances and with mood-setting music. If you've enjoyed her music in the game, we encourage you to show her some love!

Love,

The Rotten Raccoons Team 💙🦝