ROT Behind the Scenes!

Hello, judicial Patrons!

Now that our first test run of ROT is complete, we can start learning from it to adjust some things for our next case! It's already written/planned, but we're going to take a couple weeks off for Whiskered's storyboards, which you'll get to see soon, and some other time-sensitive things. The ROT pace of weekly reactive episodes is very fun, but pretty rigorous, so there will likely be breaks between any given case. That being said, here's a couple fun results from this first series:

• Behind the Scenes: Please enjoy the attached video! It shows the iterations of the 3D work from our collaborating modeler, set to the rousing sound of Elias True. There were some scripted lines we had recorded that, during editing, seemed redundant enough not to be worth the extra time animating them. So it'll be nothing that would have affected the case, but it is more smarmy goodness from our talented VA.

• Feedback: We're taking feedback on how the first case was conducted! If you have any thoughts on how to improve the experience, let us know. We already plan to 1) give more diverse options for how questions are selected so it's not limited to people who got into the youtube comment section early, 2) If there are going to be any amendments to the Release option, let them be known out the gate (should there be? Should Release just be full innocence?) and 3) we're considering raising the Patron weight in voting from 1.5x a normal vote to 2x. Not a dramatic difference, but there are many more non-patron voters so it could be fun to see the patron portion of voting be beefed up.

This was a very fun interaction-based experience and we were thrilled with the amount of discussion and votes that came from it. Audience participation was going to make or break this series, and you all really let it thrive.

But enough about ROT! Next up is:

• Whiskered: The proof of concept music video is our next big priority as we try to wrap up the boards and get helping hands on the project.

• Utah documentary: has a fast-approaching deadline, and we need to find out whether or not the scenes we produce are things that can be shown to you all before the full documentary production is done, so we'll probably not mention it again until that's known.

• Kind World Game: The design doc is being worked on to hand off to developers, and you'll get to see the doc at least in part once it's done.

• NATS: Anyone remember NATS? Cause we never forgot it but we're excited to re-enter its pre-production to see if we can finally iron out those narrative wrinkles for a Fall release. For those who don't know, NATS is a mystery/suspense mini-series involving an untrusting ensemble cast. More details as Whiskered wraps and we have more time to spend on it.

Thank you all so much for hanging around for our diverse content! ROT was a lot of fun for us visually and narratively, and we learned some new animation tricks while we were at it. Trying new things has been an exciting way for us to grow, both our own skillset and our network of collaborators, and it wouldn't be possible without your support so thank you again!

Till next time!
- The East Patch Team