June 2025 Devlog - Shelter Build v45 status and the growth of KnotSoft

Awoo!

How are you doing? I thought I'd let you know about the current progress on Shelter stuff, since I haven't posted for a while despite constantly working in the background.

The first draft of the script for Shelter build v45 is finished, sitting at around 14000 words. I want to dedicate one day this week to review and polish it before I put it into the code. It concludes Alon's storytime in the baths and brings us back into the present, progressing the night and finishing at a super exciting moment that I've been looking forward to reaching for a long time.

As soon as I'm done writing devlogs, I'll get to drawing a CG and a new character sprite set. I hope the CG will do justice to the absolutely amazing new music piece Hughhhh made for us! It's a four-minute-long composition, and we're nearly done polishing it. Check out the smol sample I attached to this post, and I wonder if you can guess what kind of context it's prepared for!

From other Shelter news, my friend Vigil found me a background artist who fits Shelter's tricky sci-fi setting very well. We finished a test background today, and we decided to continue working together more long-term. His name is Jasper, and you can follow him on:
https://bsky.app/profile/jaspersartvault.bsky.social
KnotSoft grows bigger!

We plan to have two or more new pictures made byJasper every month, prioritizing the more important scenes in new builds' content, and at the same time replacing placeholders I had in the old content. I'll still be using new ones on less important assets if that can help release builds faster, but the idea is to eventually have everything in Shelter custom-crafted by hand. I'm happy we can start on that already.

In other news, my SheltRPG coder set me up on Unity on my PC, so I can start playing around with the game's assets, UI, and other audiovisual stuff in the project itself. I'll wait with that until I release Shelter's new build, though, because right now it takes the top priority. I want you to see how Alon's and Zerek's night in the Grove ends!

And I guess the last thing to remind you of is that I already have a nice chunky extra content of something special ready to be released any time, and we're going to announce it probably within this week. Look forward to that!

Awoo,

Raus Vuffski