Camera Anima News

Heyo~

First update of 2025! Lots of parts are moving, lots of assets getting pushed to completion.

Editing:

Big update on the editing front: we've finished editing Act 2 and Act 3!

Some levels will need minor changes to match (add a QTE; add or remove a cursor) but the core narrative experience is nailed down. Next up, all the edited text needs to be added to the build, played through, and reviewed. Once we've gone over the feedback and made any necessary changes, we can start prepping the text for lockdown so we can start copyediting (which is both amazing and makes the content feel concrete!)

There's still some writing left to do, mostly with the codex entries. However, they won't require the same level of work or focus.

Art:
Speaking of Act 3, background and CG work now into Act 3! All act 3's backgrounds have been inked, and we're now in the process of colouring them. Meanwhile, our CGs are now focused on depicting the big, climatic moments of the finale.

To help us finish, we've brought onboard a colourist! The work so far has been excellent, and we're really excited to be able to show more teases soon (save the most spoilery bits).


This year, we'll be focusing on getting levels towards "finished", which involves a lot of assembly work. It also puts things like release dates closer in the mirror.

We have a rough timeline for the remaining work, and we'll be keeping an eye on it to decide when we're ready to commit to release.

Looking forward to sharing more in the coming year. Thanks so much for reading, and have a good day.

Steam is being silly, so to see some really cool art, check out our KS update~ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/expressomutt/camera-anima/posts/4347945

(Sorry for the delay posting this here!)
HAPPY 2025!~

Happy Holidays, from Santa Cleaner and us!


We’re winding down for the year to take some deserved rest before we hit the project again in the new year. A lot of our focus these last few months has been on “How many assets can we get ready before the end of the year?” And while we didn’t get everything we wanted, we got a lot of what we wanted. In narrative, in art, in audio, and more, to the point it made it difficult to decide which highlights to share this update.

UI:
One of the biggest updates we’ve done to the game is updating our UI with the help of Sasquatchii’s Designs! While there were things we really liked about our previous UI, we wanted a more overall cohesive experience. As such, we decided to give the whole UI an overhaul, and the results are gorgeous!




There’s still work being done, but we’ve been in love with the progress so far.

Editing:
We’ve also completed most of Act 2’s editing! Act 2 is the largest act in the game, with some of the stickier puzzles, but it’s also been more fun t work with. In addition to editing our exploration content, we’ve been able to drill down on the granular levels. Some lines we edited to better match our polished assets, some were to support gameplay changes, and others were in response to questions like, “Does the information feel repetitive?”, “How does the flow feel between levels?”, or “Can we give this moment more narrative oomph?”



Act 2 also introduces one of our favorite characters, and working on their interactions with Essie has been one of the highlights of editing.

Art:
Art-wise, we’re continuing to plug away at zoom-in images! We’ve gone through Act 1 to update all our flyers, papers, and cryptic images, and are currently working on Act 2’s in tandem with editing. A lot of zoom-in images are used for puzzles, so there’s been a lot of back-and-forth to make sure they give you the information you need while also interesting to look at.



Audio:
Excitingly, we now have sound effects for all three acts of our game! Putting in SFX is a huge part of assembling and polishing, and it’s one of the moments where levels start feeling “finished”. We’ll start implementing them in earnest in the new year, but here are a few sounds you can expect:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1scgdwrblelaISw8KTEvD-5zTDz691-CU/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f4PpTf_CpikvoREa2si6wXksudRML0t2/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QW7QWkyFcfWP1FFVFvdjYoVL8ySJnkx1/view?usp=sharing

There's one particular sound effect that was a standout for us, intended at a key narrative moment. We can't share it because of spoilers, but we think it'll hit players just as hard as it hit us the first time we heard it.

Thanks for reading, and have a happy rest of the year!

Heyo~

It's autumn and the spooky season again.

First off, we wanted to address how our current progress is looking against our previous goal of releasing in 2024.

Unfortunately, while we really wanted to hit 2024, it's become clear to us we can't physically can't hit that while maintaining quality. We're very sorry to push the game back again, but will keep you updated on our release plans.

A bright spot, though, is we're increasingly confident in saying we can see a finish line and we do feel confident that we can finish the game. A lot of our focus lately has been on polish and finishing assets rather than huge structural changes or additions, and we have some really pretty things to share in the next update or two. The biggest challenges, though, have come from balancing the progress we want to make versus our time and capacity.

Editing:
We finished editing Act 1 and have imported it into the game! The next steps include looking at the text in-game to see how well it plays, if there are any pacing or cohesion issues, and if we need to make tweaks to match its timing with sprites/CGs/gameplay/etc. Ideally, changes are minor so we can hand it off for a final edit pass.

Meanwhile, we're continuing right into Act 2 edits. Fortunately, we already did a pass on most of Act 2's story scenes and have imported them into the build, meaning edits to those scenes will more likely be very targeted. However, we still need to go over the exploration scenes and do rewrites to reflect gameplay changes that happened while building out the levels.

Art Things:
Progress on art assets continues at a steady pace. RL obligations slowed things down a bit since the last update, but we're happy to say we've finished art for all items and that they've been added to the game! The next step will be to finish puzzle art and zoom-in images (i.e.: newspaper clippings; pages; formula sheets; et.).


We're also working on the final Act 2 background arts, and we're continuing to chip through CGs. Here's a tiny peak from one of our recent WIPs:


Thank you for reading, and thank you, sincerely, for support.

Heyo~ We're part of Women Led Games Steam event with our horror point-and-click visual novel!

⚙️Save your twin from a soul-stealing serial killer
⚙️Remember what happened 5 years ago
⚙️Beware the Artisan

Add us to your wishlist!

Oh! One last thing, we are excited to announce that we will also be attending Game Con Canada!

Where:
June 14th - 16th
Edmonton Expo Centre
We're at booth 443 in Hall F

Come say hi!

Heyo~

First update of 2024!
Starting off our year, we participated in February Steam Next Fest 2024. It was a really great experience with lots of new players checking out our game, posting their impressions, and giving us lots of feedback. Among the people playing our game includes GlitchKat, who created a pre-recorded video of their playthrough for our Steam page! It's only available until the end of April, so if you'd like to check it out you can watch their playthrough here.
We've also been looking over the game script for editing. Tentatively, the script looks approximately 50-55k words before editing/rewrites, codex entries, and item text, but that number is expected to shift around.


Sprite Work
As a small but big milestone for us, all the game's sprite work has been completed! Every major character has a sprite or is represented in some way.

This allows us to focus on completing CGs and backer death photos.


Gameplay and Polish
We've also shifted focus into looking into our mechanics and finding places where we can improve the overall experience. One of our first big pushes has been to look over quick-time events and how they're currently working.

Among the pieces of feedback we've received have included that it can be difficult sometimes to tell if you're meant to wait or do anything during scenes, which can be confusing. We've considered using different coloured timed bars to help better signal that to players. Likewise, we're looking into carrying over your remaining time between interactions where possible.

Thank you for reading, and have a good day!