Sanguine Rose Tavern Scene

The Tavern Scene from Day 2 is now up on Newgrounds! Click the here to play.

Crow art!

Burt!!!!!! (Join our discord for burt shitposting, link below~) The uncensored version of this is available to our patrons!

Join our discord and say hello

This is a paintover of the first ever art that I drew of crow, it's pretty interesting to see her character development and my artistic improvement over a year.

Here's the old one:

Hallows recently published a large gallery of the most interesting bits of art from Day 1 of the game, check it out HERE!

Have an excellent friday <3

 -Duski

Sanguine Rose Discord Server

Hey everybody! We've just launched a discord server for Sanguine Rose, you can join it by clicking right here. Drop in and say hi!

Sanguine Rose 1.0.2 Public Release on Newgrounds

Hello Everybody! Click here to play Sanguine Rose 1.0.2 on Newgrounds!

Broken Download Links

Hello everybody, Hallows here. Just a quick heads up that since dropbox has removed public folders our download links (and by extension the demos on our blog) are currently down. Our Newgrounds demo is still up and running though, if you have just arrived and haven't played that yet.


We're currently reuploading our files to an alternative host and will have everything up and running within a few hours. We'll keep you posted on any developments. We apologise for the inconvenience. - Hallows

Edit:
Links should be working again

Sanguine Rose Alpha 1.0.0 is now Public!

Click here to play Alpha 1.0.0

Or play on our blog here.

Hey everyone, Hallows here! With the Alpha going public we're hosting it on Newgrounds as well as our Blog so that we can start reaching a wider audience. I've made a few tweaks to the engine and fixed a whole host of bugs while prepping for this release so check it out even if you've played versions with more content. Does this mean that 1.0.1 is less stable than this public release? Technically yes, which is why within the next two hours we'll be rereleasing 1.0.1 with the more stable engine to all of our patrons. This wasn't how I really planned this release to go but I got swept up smashing bugs for 1.0.2 and decided to test out the fixes by including them with 1.0.0 (so I guess that makes this version 1.0.0mk2?)


Anyway, as per usual, if you have anything you'd like to say we always love to hear from you. Enjoy the game! - Hallows

PreAlpha 0.41 Now available to the public!

Click here to play PreAlpha 0.41

It's a little early but there's no harm in posting ahead of schedule! We hope you enjoy, and if you can't wait for the latest builds you can download the Alpha by joining our Patreon. - Hallows

PreAlpha 0.2 now public

Just a quick post to say that the PreAlpha is available to play, click the link below or click the tab in the blog menu!

Play Now

Sanguine Rose Alpha - art stuff

Duski here. I've finally finished all of the art for day 1, and it has been such a huge learning experience as an artist. For perspective, the deviantart page I've been updating with most of my drawings for ~8 years only has about 100 drawings, and I've done somewhere around 45 or so separate pieces of art for day 1 of SR. I've been holding off talking at length about the art until I could collect all of my thoughts candidly and coherently, so I'll go into detail with a few lessons I've learned now.

First and foremost trying to balance time and detail has been a struggle. One thing I have to be wary of, and that I've ominously been warned about by a number of people is that you can easily spend too long putting in too much of detail, and pouring effort into something that someone will look at for a few seconds. It seems to be a recipe for disaster and frustration, and as a perfectionist it's not a nice feeling knowing that you could do more, but that taking more time will only draw the process out longer and delay updates! We had the best intentions, to constantly illustrate the story, to increase immersion, essentially to create a graphic novel type game. Comic artists experience the same problem, in which they can waste too much time detailing and burn out, not making enough pages to sustain readers. I'm currently exploring quicker processes, taking what used to be a tedious 8 hour process to create something like this:

And stripping back detail to speed up my process, which results in something with this kind of level of detail:

Obviously one is more important story wise because it's a sex scene, and I intend to always keep those as the highest priority art. As it is, I have to modify the way I draw most things for the game, to make it faster and retain detail and style. One thing I didn't predict was that the past few months working on the game art, I wouldn't have time for freelance. I suppose with Sanguine Rose we are currently in the 'grind' period, where there's lots of work and not very much reward. It's easy to lose track of your original passion for the game and slip into a negative mindset at this point of game development. Though as always, I am happy to make personal sacrifices of not being able to freelance right now, because we get to share our own characters and story with people.

Another thing I've learned, and been reminded of on a few occasions is that a lack of updates = failure. We try to update regularly, Hallows works full time so it has been hard on him to fit in coding around his day job. Personally I'm quite introverted and have never been the type to always be posting things online and fiddling with social media. I'm getting the hang of it though, and I'm planning to start posting all of my art, instead of working privately like I'm used to.

As for progressing the art, less detail isn't the end of the world. It might sound a little bad at first, but putting less detail and time into less important art means I can make more content, and put more time into the important shots. I've been experimenting with animating things, as I don't want to just make a 'slideshow' of images game. So far this has included using an imitation parallax type effect, where I separated the visual depth of field into elements, and by moving the mouse the user can move the "camera" as it were.

(from a previous post)

A while ago I was watching LoL login screens, animated in Adobe After Effects, and I was struck with the idea that I could use it to add small animations to features in our game. I'm a complete noob when it comes to animating, and learning After Effects from scratch made me want to smash my head onto the keyboard.. repeatedly. But I've started to get the hang of it now, and I created a small idle animation of Carmen to test things out. (It's available on our patreon for $3+ supporters) Hopefully I can wrangle it into working for me, and integrate it into my workflow. If anyone is experienced in character rigging in AE let me know.

Lastly, I'll post a few WIPs that I thought were pretty interesting.

This was Roman's sprite, before I rendered his clothes.

Flat colours stage

The Watchhouse background before rendering. In retrospect, it was a stupid decision to figure out all of the perspective by myself. Art friends I showed it to had no pity, as I could have done the same thing so much faster with 3D, lol.

Super sketchy things that I had saved!

This and the picture below are the veeery first rough drafts of the features. Sadly none of the art starts off as a lovely looking thing.

Glasha being awesome as always

One thing I just remembered- Someone asked about a HD version of the game. As much as that would be cool (and possible), right now the game needs to play in people's browsers, and not be an absolute behemoth file size. Down the line, when we create versions for people to download and play we'll consider creating a remaster, but sadly it isn't as easy as releasing a larger size game.

All in all, I'm still learning and changing. I've always expected my style or attitude to be in flux, so I don't mind. I'm happy to be doing a project that I love, with characters that I find cool to draw. This post has taken me a long ass time to publish, so now I've actually started the art for day 2. There's lots of juicy stuff being planned, and also stay tuned for the Alpha, which will be out once Hallows finishes writing it!

Sketches.

Playing around with a design for crow's hairstyle. I'm imagining in the Orcish society it's fashionable to have patterns shaved into their hair.

Someone mentioned a vampire Carmen and I had to doodle it. 

Have a chilled thursday.

-Duski

Update - Alpha

Hello, Duski here! I'm not usually the one doing the writing but here we go.

We've had a very busy month doing Sanguine Rose, mostly grinding at tasks behind the scenes that need to be done. I've done heaps of art, managed to get a new desk chair so I'm not as desk-crippled as usual and also managed to get ill. (annoyingly)

I want to give a huge thanks to 44KPanda for writing an awesome article about us on Lewdgamer! Little mentions and advertising give us a huge boost, and we're very thankful for it.

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The next playable content we release for the game will be an Alpha that includes the bulk of the storylines from day 1 (The story is only 3 days long). We set our hopes high, wrote a lot of different paths and now we are chugging away filling them in. It'll be much more like an actual game, with a menu and introduction, but of course it's not the final product. I'm sure Hallows will have more to say when we are close to finishing it. I've learned a lot about my own workflow creating the game, and realised that my standards for the art I made are catastrophically high sometimes. I'm making an effort to create simpler art where it's needed, so that I have time to make more art as a whole.

Now for some of the recent art. We're always deliberating on what to post, and what to keep a secret. If you'd like to see as much content as you can before it's posted, or if you'd like it to be kept a surprise- I'd like to know!

This is from a corruption scene, in which Crow becomes led astray by a mixture of Carmen's depraved encouragement and seeing filthy acts in public. It has themes of voyeurism and exhibitionism, which I'm excited about.

This is an example of the new type of animations that we will be utilising. It's a parallax scrolling of different elements to create the feeling of 3 dimensions. I think it brings a lot more life to the art. The in game art won't be as choppy as this, don't worry.

I thought I'd post some of the small animated frames (from the second demo) that I've had hidden away on the patreon for a long time.

Lastly, here is a preview of a piece of saucy art available currently to our $10 patrons. To look at our Patreon, click here, or you can always click the button in the sidebar! I won't give too many spoilers about this scene quite yet.

 There is also more NSFW content available to patrons-

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We are tantalisingly close to our $250/month goal on Patreon. It's nerve wracking! We'll be doing a special post for every patron when we hit $250~ As always, thank you for reading and supporting us.

-Duski ♥

The Cast and World of Sanguine Rose.

As our patrons will already know, the sprites for Sanguine Rose's main cast are now complete:

Please leave the order you would 'tap that' in the comments below.

'Complete' here being a word which means 'ready for implementation'. This means the next demo will feature all four mercenaries as well as the provocative Carmen Valentine. Those of you with keen eyes will also notice Roman and Carmen are looking a little sexier. Duski is always looking for ways to perfect the visual side of Sanguine Rose and she's really outdone herself this time.

As we've said before, the next demo we plan to release is going to be a big one, tying together both scenes we've shown so far as well as adding some entirely new ones in, so be sure to keep an eye out for it. We'll be announcing it on all our platforms once it's complete, but it will only be available to our Patrons initially. So if you're following this project but not currently a patron, consider supporting us once the demo is released. Just $1 grants early access to the next demo. That said, the demo will be released to the public for free at a later date, likely a month or so after the patreon release, so don't feel pressured. Not all support is financial, and we appreciate the feedback we receive from everyone watching this project.

Now here's a question, where does this game even take place?

Whitewood is the tiny little place between Skagen and West Skagen

Here we have the working map of important locations within the story.

Carmen is High General to the Sanguine Rose army, which after a recent military takeover has rebuilt the Amarinthian Empire (the orange bit). The empire is ruled by Queen Anastasia of House Sanguine Rose, from the capital city Amarinth. Anastasia and Carmen are both originally from a region called The Gardens . The most skilled Sanguine Rose soldiers are trained there.

Roman, Crow, Markus, and Glasha all live within Greater Hirane (the green bit on the left).

To the south we have a large and freezing cold island (the yellow bit at the bottom), birthplace and home to the orcs. Most orcs keep to small tribes, so no central government exists here. Some pure orcs are even feral, and cannot be reasoned with. Orcs like Crow and Glasha are actually part human, and are very common in the southern regions such as Skagen. While little research has been done on the matter, orc-humans tend to have increased sexual appetites.

The Amarinthian Empire is currently at peace with their neighbours to the east (the purple area) but that might change in the future.

As always if you have any comments or thoughts regarding this post, please let us know in the comments below.


-Hallows