Hi!

Ronkad here.
Welcome to the third Welcome, Dear Human newsletter!

Last time, I asked you to fill out a survey, and a lot of you actually did. Thank you so much for that.
We really appreciate everyone who took the time to share their thoughts and tell us what we can improve, as well as what you’d like to see in the future.

In this newsletter, we want to show you one of the monsters you’ll be able to meet in the full game, and share a bit of trivia about the game and its developers (That’s us).
 

New Monster

For those of you who missed it: at the start of the month we released a small April Fools minigame called “Welcome, Dear Human: Friendship Farming”.
Since a lot of the feedback we got was that you “wanted to touch” your sleep paralysis demon more, we turned that idea into a short clicker game.
You can still play the game here.

In this minigame we hid a little secret.
Here is the full image you were able to find:


And yes, this is a glimpse of the next monster you will be able to meet.
Their name is Octo, and they are a shapeshifter hiding in human society.
You may already have seen their human disguise as the hooded figure at the end of the “Welcome, Dear Human” demo on itch.io.

So here are some more sketches of them:



 

"To hurt people is what I'm made for." - Octo

Trivia

  1. There were quite a few different ideas in the running for the game’s title. Working titles and ideas included “Let’s Date (I mean survive)”, “Monster (dating) survival simulator”, “Monsters I met after moving in” as well as “The narrator's favorite human”.
     
  2. As you may know, there are two people working on this game. KikiCan, the creative mind behind all the stories, monsters, art and music. And me, Ronkad, who handles programming, production, and apparently this newsletter too.
    This isn’t exactly our first game. Last year, we participated in the Jamsepticeye, a gamejam hosted by youtuber Jacksepticeye. We made a small narrative focused game-thing together with 4 other amazing people. The game is called “Síofra Sí” and placed #8 in visuals (very good visuals).
    Later we also participated as a duo in Trijam #344, a game jam with the rule, to make a game in under 3 hours. We actually won this one with our entire “Time to Fear”.
         
     
  3. “Welcome, Dear Human” is made with Godot, which is not your usual visual novel game making tool, but it allows us to be more free with interactivity and visual effects. Additionally our game also uses the Dialogic plugin under the hood. I personally think this is currently the best setup you can get for creating more interactive visual novel type games and I hope more games will make use of it in the future.
     
  4. KikiCan made sketches for every asset in WDH and the game was first developed with those sketches in place. Some of our earlier playtesters got to see this version of the game. So in theory - there exists a version of “Welcome, Dear Human” that is just sketches!
       

 

Since you’ve read this far, I will also let you in on a little secret: We will announce the full game with an animated announcement trailer on May 12th on the KikiCan youtube channel.
You will see the designs of most other monsters there. Mark your calendars!
 

And that’s it for now.
Cheers,
Ronkad