June 2026 Update
Hey, patrons!
We hope everyone’s been having a sunny summer and Pride month so far 🥳 Our team’s been real hard at work on more TOUCHSTARVED progress, and we’ve got an extra treat in store for today’s update (more on that down below 🤭)!
There’s lots of fun stuff to cover in this one, so let’s kick it off with our birthday boy before diving into the dev snapshot and other updates! We've also got a special behind-the-scenes section on Lore writing in games for all the writers out there 👀 Read on below!
🎂 Happy Birthday, Leander
On June 21st, we celebrated Leander’s birthday! How silly is it that his birthday also happened to land on Father’s Day this year? LOL 😏
However, despite lots of the fandom calling Leander “daddy”, he’s actually the youngest love interest from the main cast! I guess his ✨ aura ✨ makes him appear older, but I always feel extra fond of him when I remember he’s the baby of the bunch 😭
I’d imagine he felt a lot of weight on his shoulders from having to mature so fast with leading the Adderstone, so I’m sure all your sweet and thirsty birthday comments made him feel lighter and younger on his special day ☺️ Thank you for the S tier birthday fanart and silly greetings, we appreciate all the Leander love! ❤️
Now that we’ve given the birthday boy his flowers, let’s dive into our June dev snapshot 🫡 We’ve made a few tweaks to the format to better reflect our progress, and we’re so hyped about some of the milestones we hit this month!
🛠️ June 2026 Dev Snapshot
Narrative
Full Game – Writing | ⚒️ 100% Drafted, 90% final pass, 75% editor pass
Full Game – VO Prep | ⚒️ Remaining characters scheduled for recording, line selects underway!
Voice Acting
Full Game – VO Recording | VO recorded for 3 characters
Art
Full Game – CGs & BGs | ⚒️ ~75% Complete
Systems & Testing
Full Game – Systems/Code | ⚒️ 84% Complete
Full Game – QA & Bug Fixes | ⚒️ Revamped UI going through QA sprint, Unity upgrade bug fixes underway
Localization Planning | ⚒️ In Progress - 2nd round for Chinese localization
Release Plan
Full Game – Public Release | ⏳ Targeting 2026 (exact quarter TBD)
We’ve been making great progress with the full game’s development and this month we wanted to put the spotlight on our writing! We’ve seen some comments express interest in having other members of the dev team discuss their work in these updates, so here’s that extra treat today! Read on to find a blurb from one of our talented writers, Lynne 🥳
Outside of TOUCHSTARVED, Lynne is a narrative designer with experience on titles like Arcana and Destiny 2, and our resident world-building expert. They were kind enough to write an explanation of their process, so enjoy their big brain insights on the art of lore writing below!
✍️ Behind-the-Scenes: Writing Lore ft. Lynne
Writing interesting and revealing lore is a lot harder than it might look! There’s a number of key restrictions to keep in mind about these sorts of posts:
They must do as much as possible, in as few words as possible.
They are supplemental material. They should never be required to understand the main story; instead, they enhance it, rewarding curiosity. They provide a great avenue to explore tangents that would bloat the main story, or to show events happening elsewhere, or to prepare readers thematically and emotionally for the next beat.
They are stories in their own right. Facts about a fictional world don’t happen in isolation—they affect and are affected by characters, whose perspective tells us something about them. Rather than present a dry list of trivia, I always try to ground knowledge in characters.
So with that in mind, here’s how I approach writing lore posts!
First I start with the core idea:
What is the subject or fact? What do we want to explore or show? What questions do we want to ask or answer? For example:
I want to show a key moment that shaped this character’s worldview.
I want to explore the origin of a common ritual in the setting.
I want to show how ordinary people react to a major story event.
I want to flesh out a character only briefly encountered in the main story.
Why are we covering this subject? Does it tell us something new about the characters? The world? The themes of the work? For example:
I want to show the progressive breakdown of civilization around the characters to build suspense.
I want to show the character’s growing desperation.
I want to set up that the character will drop out of school and start a band.
I want to explore how hard it is to re-establish connection between estranged family members.
Who has an interesting perspective on this subject? The choice of POV character is often a way to pack more story into this limited space. For example:
A new arrival to a city would have a different perspective from a native resident.
An argument between brother and sister would be perceived differently by each arguing party, the nosy neighbor listening over the fence, and the friend each sibling vents to afterwards.
A controversial new school of thought would be received differently by philosophers, scientists, religious figures, and laypeople.
What is the key moment of the tab? What is the line, or feeling, that I want to hit the reader like a sack of bricks? Since lore posts are short, there’s no time to meander around that moment—the rest of the tab must be built around it. For example:
The moment a character realizes they’re in love.
A single heartfelt line: “I’m still here.”
The feeling of grief and disorientation when someone returns to their childhood home, and finds it has changed over the years.
Let’s say I want to reveal that two characters are eloping. I decide to do this by showing one of the characters lying to their parents about it. I want to show that the liar feels conflicted and uncomfortable, maybe because of their parents’ expectations of them or because of their partner’s standing in society, so I decide to write in first person from the liar’s POV to explore those issues and their feelings around them. I decide that the key moment of the lore post is that when the liar gets away with it, they know that once the truth comes out, their relationship with their parents will never be the same again.
By using this framing, I can reveal the elopement, while doing it in a way that also tells the reader something about the characters and world involved. I could approach this a number of different ways, too—maybe showing the same conversation from the parents’ perspective, with the omniscient narrator ominously pointing out clues that they’re missing; maybe instead showing the partners-to-be whispering about their plans through a fence; maybe having a stranger, the taxi driver taking them to the judge for the ceremony, observe them from outside. All of these will tell the reader something different about the characters, the world they live in, and the themes.
In the end, of course I could just have a bullet point with ‘These characters eloped’. But a miniature story, by and about and around them, is much more interesting, don’t you think?
– Lynne
🎨 Art Previews
Thanks again, Lynne, for sharing some of your secret writing sauce! 😁 We hope you patrons enjoyed that little peek into the process! Now, let's get into some more sneak peeks with art updates!
Here are some ideation sketches for a new background! Last month, we shared some rough thumbnail sketches for a Leander CG with slightly different poses and expressions. Just like our Love Interest CGs, our background CGs get the same treatment!
I’m always so impressed by how versatile our artists are with their abilities to depict both the human form and such detailed settings and objects. Even in its early sketch form, this background has some impressive interior design options, so I can’t wait to see what our artists cook up for the final version with all the details and finishing touches!
You know I love to sprinkle a dash of angst into our art previews, so check out this bloody rough sketch of one of our Love Interests! Looks like they got themselves into quite the sticky situation 😬 Kuras should be able to treat them, but feel free to throw in some get-well-soon kisses for extra good measure 🥺
Last but not least, here are some more props! If you’ll recall in our March update, we shared an Adderstone recruitment poster featuring Leander. Since then, we’ve used the template to create a lot more posters with different characters and messages! Here are a few for you to decode and ponder about 😎
Every small detail from the face crossed out and the blood (?? maybe it’s just red paint, but it’s definitely not strawberry jam LOL) in the first poster to the medal on the second poster has a story behind it, and after reading Lynne’s tips on lore-writing, I’m definitely looking at these posters with renewed interest!
It’s really fun seeing how much we can communicate with a few images and very small word counts on a poster, so shoutout again to our artists and writers for their attention to detail and storytelling! Let us know what messages you find or what poster theories you come up with down below.
💌 Till Next Time
And that’s a wrap on June! We hope you enjoyed the deeper dive into lore writing this time around. Let us know what other topics you’d be interested in reading about for next time!
Until then, thanks again for all the birthday wishes for Leander, and your continued support. We hope everyone had a safe and fun last week of Pride, and we’ll see you in July! 🫶
👀 Got Questions?
You can always reach us:
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With love,— Sofi and the Red Spring Studio Team