It's been a while.
Hello everyone, Austin here. I wanted to formally apologize for the lack of updates over the past few months and offer an explanation, as well as bring you all up to speed on the current events of Havoc Studios. Updates have been slow for a number of reasons, the largest being that we simply don't want to spoil too much of Havoc Fox before its release (though we still have tons of stuff that we will be sharing all the way through its development). The first few stages have been in the public eye for a few years now and we have decided that we'd like for it to remain that way. Rest assured that development is (and has been) going strong! We simply aren't sharing everything so that Havoc Fox has plenty of secrets for you to discover.
Furthermore, life has played a role in the slowing of updates as well. I recently dropped out of college and have been searching for a job which has taken up much of my free time. Dusky has been busy juggling college with work on Havoc Fox and Freedom Planet 2, leaving little time to drop an update. Even then, we cannot say that we would have more frequent updates without these hurdles for the reasons mentioned in the first paragraph.
As a solution, we are temporarily moving from a monthly newsletter to a quarterly newsletter. For the remainder of Havoc Fox's development, you can expect to see newsletters on the last day of March, June, September, and December. These quarterly newsletters will be similar in scope to the monthly model, but with extra time in-between posts, we should have more stuff to share!
In terms of the immediate future, we will be returning to SAGE this year. Havoc Fox will return with the first couple of stages for both Grey and Venice, similar to last year's demo. While there are a few changes here and there, much of the demo is unchanged as the first few stages are mostly finalized at this point in development, and as such, 2022 may be Havoc Fox's final appearance at SAGE. Joining Havoc Fox at SAGE this year is our first taste of Pulseman: AMABILIS, a fan project based on Pulseman. This project has helped us to mitigate development burnout on Havoc Fox and has not had any negative impact on its development (if anything, the change of scenery has only made the development of Havoc Fox more frequent). If you attend SAGE this year, be sure to check out both of our digital booths!
Finally, we want to inform you that our final casting call for Havoc Fox will take place from September 15th to October 15th. These auditions will be held on CastingCallClub and will bring the rest of the cast onboard. Major, supporting, and extra characters will all be showing up, so we encourage everyone regardless of experience or talent level to audition for a role! Further details will be shared once the page is live.
We hope that you understand the reasoning behind our infrequent updates and that you'll continue to follow along as we move into the future. Development has been going strong and will continue to do so until the day of release. As always, our Discord Server is the best way to get in contact with us as we are both usually active (and it's a relaxed, casual environment and we're both pretty chatty), so feel free to bring up any questions you may have to us personally! Thank you so much for your continued support, and we hope to see you again at SAGE, our next quarterly newsletter, or even just around the community somewhere!
-Austin