Winter 2022 update!

Hello everyone! Grayest here with another update for A Whole Lot to Love! It's been awhile since our last blogpost, and ideally, we'd like to do blogs a little more often than we have been, but better late than never right?

During the last blogpost, a sample of Mitsuru's theme was included, which people seemed to like. Since then, we have recruited four more music composers on the team. (now seven in total) I'd like to kick off by introducing the newest set of composers! Luttii, Jamie, Kade, and last but not least, RougeKenshi/Lupen.

I'll also link another sample music track here for your listening pleasure! (Courtesy of Kade) Our team has a pretty wide range of composers, and therefore, a wider range of styles and emotion can be covered. Initially we'd planned to use some royalty free tracks from bensound like in the demo from Feb 2021, but it seems we'll be able to have the soundtrack be entirely original!
(Speaking of the current demo, expect a slight overall soon :)

Moving on to the next topic; Art! You've seen our three love interests, but we'll finally be able to show off the other three characters! We showed off concept art of their facial appearances via our Twitter page ages ago, but now we have full body sketches to show everyone. As well as names, and extra juicy information. (Courtesy of Clancey)

Sam Jenkins, the protagonist

19 years old, still deciding on a major. Will the love interests help him find his passion in life?
We also made the creative decision to have Sam deal with some weight-related issues himself like the heroines (although not to the same degree) this was done to give him more depth, and possibly help more people relate to him! This will be better illustrated in the finalized character sprite for Sam, and by extension the game's marketing, CGs, etc.

Vedette Morris, guidance counselor

Guidance counselor at the college, Sam's advisor, and family friend of Arabella's.
Not much to be said without spoiling anything, hoping that everyone will be fond of her kind nature, and overall as a character!

Joshua Moore, roommate.

Sam's roommate, and frenemie. Always advising Sam to stay away from the love interests...
Serving as the comedic relief, and source of tension for the story, we hope Josh will be a good addition to the cast! Although admittedly, some may end up not liking him, or find him completely rude at times.

Since we're on the topic of art, it may be worth giving a shout to our two new artists on the team! Gutsy, and Pastel. Sprites for the three heroines are currently being re-worked, and we'll hopefully see sprites for Morris and Josh finished this year too!

We also had a new ren'py coder and PR person join the team! While we're on the topic of PR, we've launched a Tumblr account for the project! Which you can find here. Hopefully we'll be able to reach more people aside from just itch.io and Twitter!

You're probably wondering how we got a good handful of new people so quickly, and the reason is because we recently had a casting call via CastingCallClub, which was for a PR person, ren'py person, art, music, and... Voice acting! Although don't let that mislead you, the final game unfortunately won't have voice acting due to the amount of time and resources that would take, we recruited voice actors for the Visual Novel's trailers. Casting announcements will be made whenever those trailers begin to go up.

That said, we could still use some more artists on the team, and another playtester or ren'py coder probably wouldn't hurt. So if you're interested, don't hesitate to give us a shout!

The final announcement I'll be making here is that the team is going to try to do an Act 1 demo. If we think it's possible, we'll announce a date by New Years. Speaking of Act 1, it's already been about 20% finished! (Well, writing that is) The main concern is art, we may have enough artists to hit the 2024 release date, but an Act 1 demo early next year is still up in the air. Keep your fingers crossed, though!

That'll do it for this update, thanks for reading, and make sure to keep following us for updates!