Usual June News

[p]Lately, the Usual June team has been focusing a lot on building Fen Harbor, the fictional town where the game takes place. Fen Harbor is heavily inspired by the midwest, so we asked Finji Co-founders Bekah and Adam Saltsman to tell us why they wanted to place Usual June in a midwest town. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Bekah: I wanted to tell a story about my home and the people who live here. So many of the movies and books in the US take place on the coasts, in cities like Los Angeles or New York, and the culture and stories of the flyover states is largely unrepresented. Our towns, though, have layered histories that were (and still are) colored by hundreds of years of government intervention, capitalist oligarchs, industrialization, and the migration waves of both large international immigrant populations and the resettlement of the freed slaves post-civil war. The midwest is fascinating! Why did they change the flow direction of the Chicago river? Why was Chicago raised 8 feet? How many shipwrecks are on the Great Lakes? Did you know that in 1940 November 50 hunters in the midwest froze to death when the temps dropped too fast in an extreme type winter storm that generally happens every few years? Why are the thunderstorms so violent and the tornadoes so common and huge? What about these midwest cities makes you stay? I wanted to tell a ghost story and what better way to tell that story than to write about our ghosts: both human ghosts and the ghosts of the city which is told through known and forgotten histories.[/p][p][/p][p]A sneak peek at a museum the team has been making! [/p][p][/p][p]Adam: The short answer is I wanted to place Usual June in the midwest because that's where I grew up and that's where I am raising my own kids.[/p][p]The slightly longer answer is because the midwest is a really weird rich place to tell stories, especially mystery stories. Time and memory work weird here. Less than a century ago, Detroit and Cleveland were among the most important cities in the world. Growing up in the 1980s, Detroit was mainly known for Robocop, who is not even real (probably). The "now" of cities here can feel like "always", but it isn't... the way the past can disappear here, the way it can be rewritten by barons like Henry Ford, makes it the perfect place to tell a ghost story.[/p][p]And cities here are kind of architecturally fantastic, like in the sense that they seem like something from an urban fantasy story... did you know Detroit has a massive salt mine under it? Not nearby, not adjacent, like directly underneath it? Don't worry, it's way down there. But that's wild to me. The bedrock below Grand Rapids, where I live, is riddled with gypsum mine tunnels. Tunnels is almost misleading, some of these spaces are subterranean quarries. And every business here is the third or seventh or eleventh thing occupying the same building, like the rings in the trunk of a tree. Level design is easy here.[/p][p][/p][p]💜 Thanks for following along with Usual June's development. We've got more to show off, so be sure to wishlist and follow the Usual June page! [/p]

[p]Now that we've shown off our newest ghost character, Frankie, let’s dive into one of the most striking features of ghosts in Usual June: their hair plumes! That means it’s time to talk about the work of our talented VFX Artist, Eduardo Noé.[/p][p][/p][p]When crafting effects for various ghost characters, Eduardo faces the challenge of making them look cohesive, yet distinct from other effects in the game. For example, the team largely avoids using transparent effects in Usual June, so it is ghost characters alone that utilize a low-opacity material to achieve an ominous and smooth appearance. [/p][p][/p][p]“For the hair plumes,” Eduardo says, “we aimed for a blend of smoky and fiery look. We wanted to make it look volumetric, with some sort of ‘flowing’ movement.”[/p][p][/p][p]Fun fact: these ghost plumes are basically cylinders and math![/p][p][/p][p]Eduardo and the rest of the team have been hard at work bringing Usual June to life, and we can’t wait to keep showing you what they’ve been up to![/p][p][/p][p]If there’s anything you want to see in future updates, let us know by joining the Finji Discord and posting in the Usual June channel.[/p][p][/p][p]Thanks for coming with us on this development journey! We're so thankful for your support every single day! 👻💜[/p]

[p]We recently introduced a new Usual June character in our newsletter and our socials! Frankie is a ghost, and she’s an important part of June’s adventures. Read on to learn more about her design![/p][p][/p][p]Now that you’ve met Frankie, we can finally talk a bit about how we’ve been making ghosts for Usual June! Without saying too much, ghosts in Usual June serve as key historical resources, so making Frankie appear believably from another time was very important to us! We also wanted her to look really really cool.[/p][p]Art Director Amelia Herman did a lot of research to make Frankie’s design historically accurate: “Design-wise, the goal was to tease apart the greaser stereotype and find the actual people and cultural groups behind it, not just designing around the decades-old 1980s rehash of a 1950s stereotype. So this led to a bit of a dive on fashion and the pre-Chicano movements of the 1940s– Frankie’s bouffant became a lot more intentionally referential, her pants baggier (a la zoot suit) and a rose bolo places her more specifically in a time and culture and offers a tie (ha) to her family/surname.”[/p][p][/p][p]3D Character Artist Laura Beach had to solve a number of challenges to bring Frankie to life in-game, and her bouffant hair was one of the first: “My earliest version of it was a rough high poly sculpted block out of the overall form that I then created strips of polys that conformed to the overall shape and flow. I made a simple glowing shader with a gradient that colored these hair strips based on their UV maps. But of course, static hair on a ghost is going to look strange, and when we decided we wanted it to move, it became clear these hair strips weren’t up to the task.” After some trial and error, Laura came up with Frankie’s current look: “I decided to break down the hair into chunks that were solid pieces at the top but separated out towards the ends. The current version has much more definition to the hairstyle and has a subtle floaty movement which adds to the ghost feeling.”[/p][p][/p][p]Since Frankie was one of the first ghosts the team worked on, she became a test case for designing ghosts in general. Amelia recalls the process of “working from riffs on thermal imaging/film negatives, to spectral flames and see-through skeletons, to the more final phantom smoke look” to determine how our cast of ghosts would appear. For Laura, this meant work on shaders: “One of the main aspects of the way our ghosts look is that they have their own built in lighting. This lighting is directional and colorful often having one color lighting the mesh from above and one from below. This not only adds to the idea that they are otherworldly but it helps to add form whilst allowing the ghost to be overall quite dark and almost blend in with the background. At some point we decided that the ghosts should look less corporeal, and as they were already supposed to float, it made sense for their lower bodies to fade into nothing. Don’t need feet if you aren’t walking after all! My solution was to remove the feet, cap the ankles and add alpha to the shader that flickers and ripples like flames up and down the legs. There’s also an effect that sort of resembles an aurora borealis movement across the legs which adds to the sense of something otherworldly.”[/p][p][/p][p]There’s a lot more to say on this topic, so stay tuned for more details in future updates! [/p]

[p]Steam Scream Fest is upon us once again and so is the Usual June demo! Now is the perfect time to be talking to ghosts and June knows it! You can try out our Usual June demo now through November 3rd. [/p][p][/p][p]Don't forget to try out some of the other scary games in this year's fest. They're all bound to get you in the Halloween Spirit! 👻[/p][p]If you like what you see, wishlist Usual June today! We're so thankful to everyone who has done it already. 💜 You're helping our small team tremendously. We're working on some creepy cool stuff and we can't wait to show you more! [/p][p][/p][h2]LOOKING FOR CREEPY ACCESSORIES?[/h2][p]Check out our Limited Edition Usual June Pin! This little guy 🌟glows in the dark🌟! He was designed by Usual June's Art Director Amelia Herman for PAX! [/p][p][/p]

[p]We've been designing all of the more "advanced" creatures that you'll encounter and fight as you progress further in Usual June. The design process has been challenging but fun, since we are trying to balance and include a lot of different considerations.[/p][p][/p][p]First, the way these creatures have evolved has to make sense in the story and the background lore, and they need to fit into the game environments. We also wanted to find a balance between them looking new and exciting to the player, but also reminiscent of the more "basic" early-game creature from which they evolved. Finally, we wanted them to start creating a visual path toward the boss designs!  [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]We have been working with contract artist Audre Schutte, who created the thumbnails above early in the process to help us navigate this tricky balance. [/p][p][/p][p]🤔 Which of these approaches do you think best meets all these different needs?[/p][p][/p][p]We include developer updates for Usual June in our monthly newsletter! If you're interested in hearing these updates before they hit Steam, sign up today! [/p]