RKS Developer Diary #1 - The Title Screen

Hello, everyone!

During the lead-up to the official English release of Rosenkreuzstilette, I figured it'd be a good idea to start a Developer Diary to give everyone a behind-the-scenes look at our work and show off some of the tweaks we've been making under-the-hood to make the game the best it can be.  Every now and again, we'll upload a few screenshots with a bit of background and our rationale for making the decisions that we did.  If we changed anything from the original, rest assured that each change has been made with WOMI's expressed support.  Hell, in some cases, he was the one that asked us to make the change in the first place.

For our first entry, let's have a look at something everyone will encounter within seconds of launching the game:  the Title Screen.  First off, you'll notice that we decided against integrating an English rendition of the title ("Blades of the Rose Cross") into the game's logo.  This is for two reasons.  First, title is already a mouthful, especially for non-German speakers.  Second, given the naming scheme for each game and bonus mode in the series, localizing the main logo would set a messy precedent for every logo in the series to follow.  How would we integrate every word of "Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel ~Blades of the Rose Cross - The Sting of Joy~" into the logo without having the elements of the logo compete for the player's attention?  From a design standpoint, it just wouldn't work to our satisfaction, so we opted to take the purist route and drop the localized subtitles from the game's logos.  The localized renderings will still be present in the finished game (they're the names of the Final Stage of each game mode), so it's not like we're leaving anything untranslated.

Now, you might have noticed a subtle difference in the screenshots above and to your left.  Yes, the order of the menu items has been changed.  This tweak was made in order to address an issue pretty much every player has encountered during their first time playing the game (myself included).  Now, when you launch a game for the first time, it stands to reason that "New Game" or "Game Start" would be the option you'd pick to, y'know, start a new game.  In the original version of RKS, this wasn't actually the case: "Prologue" would start a new game, and "Game Start" would skip the opening stage and take you straight to the Stage Select Screen.  So, we tweaked the Main Menu to be more intuitive.  In addition, it makes more sense to select your game mode before choosing your starting point instead of afterwards, so we reversed the order of these selections accordingly.  It's no surprise that a good chunk of the people who decided to do a blind Let's Play of Rosenkreuzstilette had absolutely no idea that there was an entire stage that they might have missed just because they made the logical choice at the game's Title Screen.  We felt that this was an issue that just had to be addressed in the official English version, so we've done just that.

Also, you might notice that we no longer have a character limit for the flavor text in the bottom right corner.  That's right: the descriptions of each menu item can now accurately describe what each menu item actually does instead of being a truncated mess.

Well, that's it for this first edition of the RKS Developer Diary.  Feel free to comment on our progress, including whether or not you agree with our decisions.  If there's something in the game that you're curious to know about, just drop us a line and we might devote a future Developer Diary to it.

See you later!

Introducing Our English Cast

This post has been a long time coming.  The English voiceover project for Rosenkreuzstilette has been in the works since October of 2011. Hundreds of audition and thousands of hours later, we're finally ready to announce our cast.  I know the anime fans among you will be very pleased with some of our choices; more than a few of these names should ring a bell.

• Spiritia Rosenberg: Emily Koch
• Lilli: Kira Buckland
• Freudia Neuwahl: Sarah Wiedenheft
• Zorne Zeppelin: Amanda Lee
• Trauare Wrede: Britanny Lauda
• Luste Teuber: Kira Buckland
• Grolla Seyfarth: Sarah Blandy
• Sichte Meister: Natalie Van Sistine
• Liebea Palesch: Amanda Lee
• Schwer-Muta Casasola Merkle: Rina Adachi
• Raimund Seyfarth: Lucas Schuneman
• Count Michael Zeppelin: Tristan MacAvery
• Iris Zeppelin: Kira Buckland
• Strudel: Jennifer Alyx
• Doris Warmind: Sarah Wiedenheft
• Pamela Arwig: Skyler Davenport
• Burkhardt Maid: Amanda Berning
• Eifer Skute: Sarah Wiedenheft
• Schirach Fühler: Amber Lee Conners
• Recht Refraktia: Sarah Blandy
• Link Refraktia: Sarah Blandy
• Kahl Palesch: David Hill, Jr.

If you get the chance, please be sure to thank our actors for agreeing to voice some of our favorite characters.  There are six actors who wished to lend their voices to this project, but ultimately could not due to forces outside their control.  To that end, I'd like to extend a very special thank you to Mr. Patrick Seitz, Mr. David Vincent, Ms. Brina Palencia, Ms. Wendee Lee, Ms. Petrea Burchard, and Ms. Cristina Valenzuela.  If circumstances permit, we'd love to have a chance to work with you in the future.

That said, we now have a favor to ask of you, the fans.  We've started a Prefundia page to generate word-of-mouth and help garner support for the official release of Rosenkreuzstilette and RKS Freudenstachel.  Please help us spread the word to as many people as you can, and prove to the video game industry that if they won't support the franchises we grew up loving, we'll just do it ourselves.

We're moving out.

What's this?  A new post?  Yes, indeedy.  And these are going to be getting more and more frequent until we've officially settled in at our new online home.  I won't promise a particular schedule, but I have a very good idea of what I'm going to post (and when) once we get the ball rolling.

These past few months have been incredibly busy for us, and with good reason.  The time isn't right for us to let everything out of the bag just yet, but something so incredibly awesome happened this past weekend that I simply can't keep to myself.

To set the scene, this past weekend was Otakuthon 2015.  This time around, we take full credit for the festivities having a surprise guest.

Now, on a good convention weekend, you might have the chance to meet one of your childhood idols and get a few autographs and/or photo ops.

On a great weekend, you might share a meal with said childhood idol and chat about everything that does on behind the scenes and what they've been doing since the gig that made them famous before moving onto more candid and heartfelt topics that give you a whole new insight into the kind of person that they are.

On a superb weekend, you might get said childhood idol to lend their voice to the pet project you've been trying to get off the ground for the past few years.

This weekend was not a good weekend.  It was not a great weekend.  It wasn't even a superb weekend.  These words are woefully inadequate to describe my version of August 7th through 9th.

How do you describe a weekend in which one of your childhood idols:
- drives all the way from Syracuse, New York, to your place in Canada
- records all of the lines for his character in your home studio, blowing away all expectations and teaching both the producer (you) and director a thing or two in the process
- pulls some strings with the convention staff at the last minute to ensure that you have an official presence at the event
- shares a meal with you not once or twice, but six times over the course of the weekend, with laughs and candor aplenty, plus a few well-deserved jabs
- chills with you on your couch, watching the remake of the title that made him famous (and it's his first time seeing it)
- opens his panel with the full story of the reason why he was a last-minute addition to the con's guest list (i.e.: you)
- follows that up by coming through on a four-year-old promise to publicly pimp your game
- continues the festivities by co-hosting a discussion on the title that made him famous, all the while underscoring your own mastery of the subject matter, putting even the English director of said work to shame
- gives you everything you need to officially close the book on a twenty-year-old mystery
- out-of-the-blue gives you a personalized copy of their (critically well-received) book
- returns home not as an actor or colleague, but as a friend, bear hugs and all
- admits that, from the beginning, he was planning to do all of the above for free, just because you asked.

To call this past weekend fan-fucking-tastic would still be an understatement.  I'm legitimately dumbstruck here.  I've seen actors give back to their fans before, but this?  I really don't know where to begin...

Thank you, Tristan, for going so far out of your way to do so much for us.  It was a pleasure to have you as a guest in our home, and an honor to host a semi-impromptu (if abridged) reprise of Understanding Evangelion with you, and a joy to chill and chat with you, talking about anything and everything for three days straight.  Thank you for making this fanboy's dreams come true.

Yes, this weekend was fucking awesome.  And the takeaway? Aim for the stars; you just might reach them.

Anyway, while I work the giddiness out of my system....

Commence Operation Schwesternschaft.

The curtain has risen.  Who can say what has yet to unfold...?

New Years, New Moves

Hey guys. Letty here.

A lot has changed in the past long while, and this place has been all but abandoned. I've talked about "CHANGES COMING SOON" quite a bit, and while they are coming, life takes precedence right now. That said, I have a time table that I'm going for, so here we go.

On May 1, 2015, the SaSA blog will officially end. The URL will remain, but we will be purging all content from the site and giving you the link to our new home. General Rosenkreuzstilette news will still be offered at the new site, but unfortunately, aside from the future AGM release of RKS, there's not much to say on that front. We'll definitely keep you posted, though, and as far as I'm concerned, RKS will never die. Maybe we can take that somewhere in the future.

It's been an interesting and fun time with SaSA currently in its 7th year of existence, but all good things must come to an end. I do encourage you guys to follow our Facebook page and our Twitter (which generally just mirrors our FB posts), because we do occasionally post updates and fun stuff there. Eventually, those too will be reformed into our new brand.

We hope you will continue to support us as we continue to link the East and West RKS fandoms, as we hope to bring you a promising future for the girls of the Rose Cross. Thanks for playing!

- Letty Whiterock

Good Tidings We Bring To You and Your Kin

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Sorry that we've been silent for so long.  Rest assured that there's damned good reason for it.  A few among you have already figured out what's been going on given a few hints scattered here and there.  In the spirit of the holidays, I figure it's about time for an official announcement.

That's right, it's official:  Active Gaming Media, whose work you may already be familiar with if you're an anime or video game fan (BlazBlue, Catherine, Demon's Souls, Final Fantasy IV, Full Metal Panic, King of Fighters, No More Heroes, Soul Calibur, and Steins;Gate, to name a few), will be releasing an official English version of Rosenkreuzstilette via its Playism portal!

Unfortunately that's about all I can say at the moment.  There are too many questions that we're unable to answer at this time.  Not that we don't want to answer them, but we can't answer them.  Not yet, anyway.  Please keep that in mind and bear with us for the time being.

That said, which of these do you prefer?  This, or this?  Whichever you choose, in the end, it'll sound a lot more like this.

From Darkside Translations and Schwer and Schwer Alike, we wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.