Snowbound Blood Devpost: Volume 10

Thought we'd forgotten about our game huh.

Whew, been a minute since we had any SBB related content in here. Like I said before, I prefer to make these posts in shorter bursts than Austin because huge backlogs scare me. Therefore, I figured I'd break this bad boy down into individual volumes, just so it's easier for me to handle, and also because Volume 11 is kinda huge on its own. But hey, this means you guys will have even more SBB content to look forward to in the near future!

Also, check out that fancy new banner. Cool, right? (I made it)

So, without further ado, let's get into it!

CRYTUM'S ROUTE:

Co-written by Leon, Neptune, Ciro and Charlie, this route went through some pretty big script changes throughout the development process. Initially, the idea was to have it take place in a single room inside Crytum's apartment, which Neptune sketched:

Later on, we decided we would actually need two different places: Crytum's living room and his bedroom. Charlie ended up taking the living room while Neptune kept the bedroom.

This route used to be much more lighthearted in tone, but as we got closer to development and took stock of everything that had happened up to that point, we figured, yeah, things wouldn't actually go very well between Secily and the Boys (tm) probably.

But! Here's an initial sketch of the end card that might've been, drawn by Ciro:

Alas.

We also intended for this to be a more traditionally structured route, with Secily acting as our POV character like usual. Olschu was going to be Crytum's sprite artist and he made some sketches before we floated the idea of doing a little switcheroo and having him as our narrator.

Good thing we still got to see his portrait through the call in Volume 11!

Now, the main reason for these changes is that the subject matter we wanted to explore through this route... didn't feel natural at all once we realized Secily would not end this on good terms with The Boys. But Crytum is a part of this group, so on top of affording us a pretty interesting look at Secily from an outside perspective and continuing to mess with multiple POVs as a Thematic Thing, this afforded us the opportunity to have Crytum directly inform the player of background information in a way that felt a lot more organic. Also, it's fun to subvert player expectations! We love to keep you guys guessing.

Anyway! On to the thousands and thousands of sketches Ciro made for those fancy little illustrations of the whole gang together.

Here's a protip: if you're making a visual novel, don't write a scene where five characters are all together and talking to each other at the same time. Rookie mistake.

Luckily, with the power of Art and Ciro being a fucking trooper, I think everything worked out in the end.

Xam unfortunately couldn't find any of their sketches for the new Secily sprites, so we will just have to imagine what they looked like in all their work-in-progress glory.

To close this route off, here's the progress of the end card, also made by Ciro! He really went crazy for this volume.

HAYYAN'S ROUTE:

This one was written by Veri with input from Xam and Nepture, and thank fuck we managed to keep it relatively light on assets compared to Crytum's. Let's kick it off with the Gunhildr background, a joint effort between me and Lupa! I really fucking hate drawing guns, so she kindly offered to step in and fill out all of those shelves for me like a saint. Note my helpful addition in the picture below.

During the concept stage, we looked up the very fun-looking guns from the Borderlands franchise as a design reference point for Hayyan's stock. Like come on they look sick and also are a perfect midpoint between regular guns and sci-fi blasters, which is just what we were looking for to represent Repiton's wacky twenty minutes in the future cyberpunk-ish aesthetic leanings.

And here's the star of the show, Mr. Refero himself! Being another one of Neptune's characters, he took charge of drawing his sprites and the end card for his route.

Some earlier style tests, a bit before the route was de facto in production.

And to close this off...

Yeshin jumpscare.

And that's a wrap on Volume 10 and all we had left for this month! Be sure to check out all of the contributing artists' socials, give them a pat on the back for me. I'm not certain when I'm going to publish the Volume 11 devpost, as next month we're going to be feeling out the new Patreon reward system, but you better believe it's coming. When you least expect it.

Keep it unreal and seeya in July!

- Eddie