Good day/night ROTDORE fans and anyone who's curious about the project, The Local Rag would like to welcome you to our devlog! We will post our announcements and game updates here in the next coming weeks! This will be updated biweekly, so there will be a post next week, and the next devlog will be posted on March 3!

With that being said, what's ROTDORE about?

Report on the Death of Robert Evergreen is a mixed-media narrative game where the player is a newly-hired editor in chief working for a newspaper called The Local Rag in the early 1990s. Your goal is to increase the Local Rag’s ratings and popularity, while juggling the other moral and social implications of your paper.

There are two versions of the game: 

The Digital Version: The player listens to audio and fills out the character panels on the computer.

The Hybrid (AKA mixed media) version: The player listens to the audio via a cassette player while they fill out the character panels on a computer. 

With that out of the way, we have three updates to share from our Programming, Narrative, and Visual/UI/UX teams!

Programming:

The programmers have implemented an audience feedback feature. This feature allows the player to see how entertaining, credible, and unbiased the paper is to readers.

Why did we add this?

We wanted to add something that could influence the player's decisions on how to report the story. With that being said, we introduce this feature in Story 2 since we don't want this feature to drive the player's decisions. The game's focus is about how reporting a story can impact the people involved with the event and the world around them, not about what happens if the numbers are too high or low.

The next goal for the programmers is implementing a settings menu for accessibility purposes.

Narrative:

The narrative team has been rewriting the scripts for Story 1 & 2, so the characters can sound more like real people than actors reading of a script. Almost all of the scripts in the story have been edited and revised. Once finished, the Audio team will get the recordings from the voice actors (VAs).

Visual/UI/UX:

The visual designer has created the art for the audience feedback system and our title screen! They are currently prototyping new windows for a multi-window feature since players wanted to fill out the character panels as they listened to the audio. 

IMPORTANT NOTE:

We are still brainstorming names for the project, We understand that the current title doesn't reflect the other stories we'll have in the game! Keep that in mind since the title will change soon!

Thank you for reading, and see you soon!

Sincerely,

The Local Rag