It's so odd to think that this all started in 2022. It got messed up slightly by my life imploding in 2023, but I'm glad to say that we're slowly making progress.
As kind of a round up for our new people (as I know we have quite a few), this journey all started in Winter Jam 2023, with the release of Sacrarium Gelus. That was the game that started it all, introducing Heimos, the Living Gods/Wardens, and the world of Sacrarium to everyone.
Happy and delighted by the success, I began to work on Sacrarium Pario and The Woeful Rose & The Bitter Crow, continuing to work with some of the volunteers for Gelus and meeting some lovely new people along the way.
Sadly, my life went ass over tea kettle for about a year (life shattering leg injury, weeks of PT, lost my job abroad, dealing with the financial and life stress tied to the previous issues), and that severely delayed all progress. I did work on Pario and WRBC, but most of that work had to be scrapped. All of the stress I was under led to that work being utterly unusable. Not listening to my body and just resting ended up making more work for myself, and in hindsight, it was really stupid of me.
That's why no one is happier than me to be at the point where I can say "Pario is around 80% done and WRBC is at around 50% done".
That being said remember this: Sacrarium is made by volunteers to be released for free. Thus, patience is required. We're not a AAA giant with dozens of workers. We're not even equal to indie teams receiving patreon or kickstarter funding. Everyone working on this series has an IRL job and/or IRL responsibilities, so progress does move at an admittedly glacial pace. It is moving though!
Sacrarium Pario still has 5 CGs to finish, but I've received a lovely beautiful snapshot of one of them. Here's a small teaser for that:
The minute the last CGs hit my hands (as I've said before), I plan to tweak the endings one last time and then release the patch with the endings + the various fixes needed for Week 2 (namely that coughing loop bug and the gallery bug).
As for WRBC, I've completed the major instances of recruitment (I've got 5 lovely CG artists and a character concept artist! Some of whom are artists you might recognize from the fandom!). Work has slowly been trickling in while I've been wanting to strangle google doc for breaking my indents.
I've successfully transferred through Scene 12 and hope to get through Scene 14 fully transferred over by the end of the week. I intend to then pause to give my lovely editor a bit more time to be able to look over part 3 in peace. The way I will do this is by going back and adding in the finer code for Scenes 1-14 (SFX, sprite adjustments, hashtags to mark where to add Lysandre and Dante sprites in the future, double checking for bugs). If she still needs more time, I plan to just continue rough outlining Contego.
In the future, I hope to do a proper series of teasers for WRBC, but for now, I'm just going to focus on making it playable.
So, yeah! Lots of slow progress, but progress is progress! I'm happy with it at least. Moving forward, I do hope to do monthly updates (if my own IRL problems allow it).
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Hey! Just wanted to say that it's totally okay – we all understand that you have your own lives and responsibilities. Please take your time; we'll be here patiently waiting for this amazing visual novel to update whenever it's ready. The work you all put into Sacrarium is truly appreciated, and we're so grateful for everything you do. Thank you so much to everyone involved – you're doing an incredible job!
im gonna be so real right now, sacrarium gelus is one of my favourite visual novels ever. and ive played a LOT of them. keep up the good work and looking forward to all your future projects.!
Thank you so much for letting us know, the teaser looks fantastic and I hope you and your team are also doing fantastic, take whatever time you need, go at your own pace, one that doesn't disturb you and the teams mental health, also make sure to take breaks, thank you!
ahhhhh that teaser is so beautiful, i'll wait as long as it takes for pario, it's so beautiful from the writing, the art, the world, the characters.
I hope things are easier for you 2025, make sure to take care of yourself with everything else you have going on