Hello everyone! Dia here, sorry for the long wait, we haven't been posting as much as we should have lately on the blog, though there were many more minor updates on our twitter.

We are approaching the release date, and I have a lot of things to share with you! But first, let's get rid of the bad news : despite having said that the demo release would be scheduled sometime  during mid-January, it is very likely that the release date will be scheduled for the end of January instead. That's unfortunate, I know, and the worst is that I can't guarantee at 100% that we won't have to delay the release even further. But I promise we are doing our best to keep things within the planned schedule!

On a brighter note, I have a lot of content to share with you!
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First of all, the first episode of the Lucid9 podcast!

Cover art : Dizzyworld2,
OST : Hustle & Bustle by Jason Walsh
Participants : AnotherPlayer, Mac
(Do actually watch the video, you won't be disappointed! )

Secondly, a background speedpainting from our BG artist, Yuuko!

And finally, here is the main menu theme for Lucid9, called Urban Disturbance, and composed by UltraKitsune!

Okay, with all of this, I hope you're all satisfied! (Actually, I'm not giving you the choice)
Kinda smells like christmas with all the stuff shared that we shared with you isn't it? (On second thoughts maybe I should have kept this stuff for the christmas update...) Anyway, hope you've enjoyed it!

​Finally, I wanted to ask a question to the people reading this post. Since I don't have a very good idea about the website and blog reach, I'd be really grateful if you could take the time to answer this little survey (You owe me at least that that after all the awesome stuff I've showed you above! :p).
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Thanks for taking your time replying!
That's all for the moment folks, hopefully I will come back to you later in the month with even more juicy news for you all! Stay well!

​Diamonit

Hello everyone! Dia here, long time no see!
You might have noticed that we moved our previous tumblr posts to the old blog, in fact we decided to use again good ol' weebly blog, since it's somehow more convenient than tumblr. So now you can all comment again on our articles (or insult the writers), yay!

I guess you could say that there was a lack of big update since the previous demo release in April, and I apologize about that, things have been quite hectic during summer, but now everything is progressing smoothly once again. So let's summarize all the things that happened since April :

1. About the team :
The FSS team got quite a lot of change among it members, many people left (or were purged after inactivity), and many new people joined. First of all, I need to talk about Cloudnovel, since it is the engine we've been using to create demo 2.0, and since it is also the website where the demo is currently hosted (and that you can still play even now). It is unfortunate, but we had to split up in our partnership with Cloudnovel, and as a result we decided to discontinue development of Lucid9 on Cloudnovel. At the end of the day, we chose to go with the more traditional engine ren'py for our future demos.
​Member wise, I have the regret to inform you all of the departure of Lizts (programmer for cloudnovel and composer), Sony (programmer for cloudnovel), Jaytea (composer), Bluehour (composer). But all those departures are balanced by new fresh blood joining the team since the end of August :
- Zuka as a GUI ren'py programmer
- Bonesy as a ren'py Narrative scripting programmer
- Suna as a route writer
- Breeze as a composer
- Ziassan as a composer
- UltraKitsune as a composer / SFX creator
- Yunyunsae as a composer
- Zander as a SFX creator
A warm welcome to them! 

2. The Lucid9 trailer

As people might have noticed, it still has names of people who left in the credits, also the music is not of the best quality. It is very likely that we will redo this trailer in the future


3. Next demo release : Full common route in January 2016
It's finally here! Our next milestone! I'm sure you're all pretty excited about this, so let me give some details :

• First of all, we decided to release a new demo for January 2016. I can't give a precise day yet, not can I guarantee that it won't be delayed by several weeks, but we'll try our best to respect this deadline.
• This demo will include the entirety of common route. As a reminder, Common route spans over 13 days, and should pretty much last you for something between 5 hours (for the fastest readers) and 7-8 hours.
• Despite what you could have believed from our previous demo, the pace is not going to be a 13-days slice of life comedy without any plot progression. First 5 days are pretty much exposition, character introductions and comedy, days 5 to 8 get into the heart of the mystery and has a much more tensed ambiance, while days 9 to 13 will be the climax of common route.
• Interestingly enough, common route can be seen pretty much as a standalone story/arc in the greater scheme of the Lucid9 universe. Several reasons to that, mainly, it will allow us to release a demo that has a complete development story-wise, and give some sort of satisfaction to the reader. Kinda comparable to a reader finishing the first tome of a book series (not exactly the same, but you get my idea). Some people will like it and ask for more, some others won't and will question our choices, we're aware that we can't please everyone, but nevertheless this will be the story we wanted to tell.
• The days 1 to 4 of this demo have been reworked a bit, so there will be new and changed content compared to the previous demo (the most noteworthy being a rework on Misaki's personality).
• As already mentioned previously, the demo will be released on ren'py as a downloadable. For those who were wondering, the current demo you can find on cloudnovel won't be worked on anymore and will be discontinued in favor of the ren'py version. We're already working on implementing the script on ren'py, and most of the GUI has already been created and implemented (the first screencapture posted on this article will be the next main menu screen for the next demo).

4. Social medias, forums, blog posts
Since the next release is getting closer and closer, we decided to become more active on the PR side, and you'll probably see more and more content getting published through the different networks, for example : Speedpainting videos from our artists on youtube, a podcast involving FSS team members, polls, quizz, contests, and much more! We'll also try to write blog articles more frequently. We have one thing though that is already ready for you to use, it's our new Trello forums, give it a try! You'll be able to discuss with us members directly, and maybe you'll be able to get exclusive information, assets preview and the likes! You can also ask us questions about the project!
You can find it here, or by clicking on our "forums" tab in the navigation menu! while you can still see the content of the forums, just create a trello account if you want to comment on the different threads!


That was about all I wanted to say for today! Stay tuned, we are currently preparing the podcast, and we should be able to release it soon!

(PS : If you still haven't played demo 2.0, give it a try here)

​Diamonit

How’s it going, my peeps?

You’ve probably noticed it’s been a long ass time since we’ve wrote anything here. In our defence, riting blogz iz hard, man. I wonder how the hell people do it for a living. 

Anyway, as an apology for keeping you guys in the dark I’m going to write one long update today.


A few days ago, one of our PR guys, Sean, attended the Gaming Convention GenCon and handed out 100 fliers advertising Lucid9. So if you’re one of those 100 people, thanks for checking out our website! 

Here’s Sean handing out the fliers along with the complimentary kittens. (I’m just kitten around. We can’t afford 100 cats, the colored ink was expensive enough.) 

In other news, we’ve been making a reasonable amount of progress with development. Here’s a general rundown of what’s going on in each department. 
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Music:
I’m excited to say we have a few new tracks made by our composer 13lueH0ur. (Seems like I can’t directly embed audio into this post, so I’ll have to settle for a link to our Soundcloud.) So please click here to feel like a badass. 

Art:

A lot of things have been happening in the art department, so I’m not sure where to start first… Let’s see…

Yuuko’s holding his own with the BGs, as you can see in the test scene above featuring Misaki in downtown Isamu. I still wonder how he manages to get the BGS to look so damn pretty. Sorry, Yu. I meant “handsome”. 

If you’ve played the demo, some of you probably noticed we have a few easter eggs scattered around in the backgrounds. Do they mean something important? You’ll have to wait until Lucid9 is released to find out. For now, we’ll let you all speculate. And then we’ll laugh at how far off your guesses are. (Evil, I know.)

Recently, Dizzy began sketching drafts of the CGs for Common Route. Sadly I can’t share them right now because that will ruin the experience for you guys seeing them in-game. So I’ll leave you with, “they look fantabulous.”

Elphaze is working on matching the male characters art style to the females, and she’s doing a pretty damn good job, if you ask me. Here’s a draft of Yahiko she sketched up the other day. (Sexy, I know.)

Also, after a brief discussion a few weeks ago we’ve decided not to have chibi art in Lucid9, so we currently only have an opening for another background artist. If you’re interested, be sure to drop by our Apply page at our website. 

Writing:
- Common Route

Writing has been going well. Luna Chai is handling some of the revisions and foreshadowing in Common Route. Immediately after that business is settled, the editors should be doin’ they thang and sprucing up the drafts. The release date for the Common Route demo is still undetermined right now, but I’ll let you all know as soon as that changes.

- Heroine Routes

Clestae and Player have started drafting the first few days of their routes, and I should be writing soon as well once I sort out a few more things. At some point, we’ll need to schedule a Writer’s Meeting to discuss ironing out the links between all of the routes. That should be fun. 


Aaaaand looks like that’s all. To sum it up, we be doin’ da workz. If you have any questions about anything feel free to write us here or at our forums or through carrier pigeon. As always, thanks for reading and I’ll see you in the next post. 




~ David