Sweet Leaves

In case y'all may have ever wanted to get something from Mousenoises/Flint

I am opening 3 painted bust slots to complete this month! They are £100 GBP each.

If you're interested, please fill out a form on my site! https://mousenoises.art

The rest of the month I am back with sorting out my queue, thanks for your continued patience!

Also, mur crimbo for size diff enjoyers, have some handsome men with disparate heights and frames. ❤️

Mur chrimbas!

One of the things that I'll either put in the VN directly, or perhaps on YouTube (or both?) are some of the backgrounds on loop with the soundtrack playing on top of them. A bit of Pinecrest n' Chill.

Who wants to spend Christmas with the Graingers? ❤️

The weight, captain, she's lifted

I'm putting a lot of thought and time into the presentation; I'm really leaning hard on the V part of the VN.

Soul Nero is helping me add some nice flourishes on our pause menu. To the right of the divider line is transparency, which will show the current scene/location blurred out, and the leaves are layered atop that. Ain't this cool?

Here's autumn.

I continue to plug away at the script, and I'm just hours away from completing the second draft. Then, it's back over the editor's comments for the third draft, and to add in a number of things like foley, doll movements in the background, before a final pass-through.

On top of that, I'm working through the UI design over time too. The map is nearly done, though I still need to figure out the presentation of location names on the map, when they are "selected" (you don't select, the story will do that for you). Reo did the map; I did the Pinecrest logo and Cedarville sign. What is really cool is that, just like the backgrounds, the map changes through the seasons too!

If any of you have any questions about any SL projects or in general, I'll be around for a few hours on the computer, so please feel free to leave a comment on this post and I'll reply!

We've knocked out a few more background dolls! This is them in their summer outfits.

Now the gang truly is all here. <3

Working on their sprites and fiddling with drop shadows has been so much fun, because I get to look at these critters for hours. Mousenoises/Flint is just doing a bang up job with all the character work, and the outfits (of which there will be multiple for each character!) are looking great.

Note, Nico not pictured yet because he's still having his outfit worked on!

Love a good "???" ...

Better.

They're just so cute next to one another...

The best boy...

Hmmm... Who's this? 🤔🤔

rainbow shading 🤔

Cozy living room at the Grainger house. <3

The screenshots are probably giving the impression that you play as a self-insert character, and that the cast is addressing you, the player, but that's not the case. This will be a lightly animated kinetic novel where all characters are fleshed out and the narration is in third person, past tense.

In combination with the character dolls for placement into the background, we're using the eye positioning of the sprites to indicate whether they're looking at someone they're talking to or not, or if they're staring off into space.

I hope that fans of the FVN genre aren't turned off by this and will give it a chance. I know it's not the typical presentation, but I wanted to tell a story that was kind of impossible to tell with always having Red, the MC, present in every scene.

Considering pulling an Undertale and having each character have their own font, to represent their voice and personality. Lots of messing around to find out the best ones ahead. x_x

Not me staying up late to make these for all the characters in their houses...

And this is what his eye color is.

Oh, durr, I forgot to include the drop shadow. Every character gets a unique name plate color, and a drop shadow that matches. I can't decide between mint green (which has future story implications associated with Sebastien), or purple, which is just a good color for him, period.

Which one do you guys like more?

Also her

Here are some birdclothes

Him....

Personally, I dislike winter quite a lot, but I like it when it snows. Since this story takes place in the far north of Minnesota, I'm gonna make it the coziest snowy winter there ever was, because I can.

da fire do dis too

it's just snow and no snow

Wake up babe, new Nico just dropped

Speaking of not shutting up (last post for the night, I swear), I made a public Patreon post about the VN which has some additional details on it: https://www.patreon.com/posts/115562534

Boy, I just didn't shut up today, did I? Thank you for the positive reception everyone, it's nice to have something uplifting instead of... everything else going on.

Music is central to the narrative, too, in a way that would be wayyyyy to spoilery to reveal right now. But I'm excited to tell that aspect to everyone very much.

Oh, I didn't mention about the VN earlier - Wattson will be our programmer, and our musicians are Icky/Birdbot, FoxAmoore, and I'll be contributing the rare piece here and there too. I'll find a way to use past music I've done like this, and probably compose short and simple ukulele stuff stuff in there for end credits of episodes.

https://colsongrainger.bandcamp.com/track/something-to-quote

Holy what

Finally, to add, because I know a lot of people will ask or have already -

If we're able to get to $1500/month on the Patreon we can add some NSFW romance scenes, so you'd get more Spicy Leaves content, if you enjoy that kind of stuff. Flint will be illustrating these as well, so you'll get a consistent sprite and CG experience across all the art, SFW and not.

It's worth noting that the romance scenes, if we get to produce them, will be skippable and not affect the storyline if skipped!

If you guys are liking these asset previews and want to assist with production costs moving forward, that'd be huge for me. As you might imagine, this is very expensive to produce, haha. >.>

https://patreon.com/sweetleaves

Eventually Patrons will be given early access to episodes as they're finished. We're not using the concepts of builds or routes for our releases; it's a kinetic narrative that's told over the course of six episodes. Each episode is two calendar months, so you'll get a full year with the gang. The idea is to make you feel like you're in on their daily lives and that you'll come to know the town they live in (and then hopefully enjoy both of those things).

But here it is in fall:

And I've posted one animated background here so far, but because the story takes place over four seasons, we have seasonal variations of some of the backgrounds. Here's a snowy wintery day in Northern Minnesota:

Taking things a few more steps further with respect to the backgrounds, it was Mousenoises/Flint's idea to create these simplified sprites, that we call "dolls", that we could place into the backgrounds to illustrate their positioning in the environment. Here's what it looks like in practice:

We've also got @r_snep_art (on Twitter, no Bsky account) who is creating hand drawn backgrounds. Since the novel takes place over the course of a school year, I wanted to ensure that we took into account different times of day/lighting and seasonal variations. For example, the faculty lounge.

Hi everyone!

Many of you know that I'm producing a VN, and we finally have enough assets completed that I can tell you more about it.

First up, let's talk sprites! Mousenoises/Flint is doing some incredible sprite work; here's several characters' expression sheets. We're still working on Nico's and the... last character I cannot show you for spoilery reasons.

The female badger is Emma, Sebastien's younger sister. The ferret is the main character, named Red.


🧵

Well lookee here, our first fully finished BG, now with animation.

Yeah! Our BGs are a huge focus of the game, and we want to make character placement into these environments a focal point, to help increase the immersion. Seeing this is very motivating, and I hope you are excited about more of these as much as I am!

Joking aside, I love GDoc's header scroll in their app so much. >.>

Can't sleep, script will eat me, can't sleep, script will eat me, can't sleep, script will eat me

I randomly got a DM from the voice actor for Nico, who had seen the VN UI mockup. Funny guy. I'd love to do VA in the VN but that's a massively stretchy goal, so there likely won't be VA, unless donations go way up. Maybe we can find a way to do select scenes with VA. We'll see!

Hi everyone! Just a little VN teaser here - I'll go more public (on Twitter/Bluesky) with things when there's more to show, but right now we're busy working on scripts and sprite creations. With six core characters, it's a lot!

For the UI, we're aiming to be aesthetically pleasing and stylish; hopefully you like this mock up!

I did officially hire the BG artist who did this "mock up" (yes, he considered this a quick and easy "test") - it's https://x.com/r_snep_art

Channel photo updated

Channel photo updated

One last update, the cookbook - Soul had to take a bit of a health break (he'll be just fine!), but we're still pretty far along with it, currently sitting at 50 pages of content, so I'd say we're nearing 40% completion as far as length goes. I'll have more to share on Patreon when the art starts back up, but until then, I continue to work on page layouts, and Wusky continues to work his magic in the kitchen. This project is definitely still very much on track!

And just a general note on the VN - I know it's more niche and many of you aren't VN players, but I hope you'll give it a chance when the first episode launches next year. I'm trying to do some different things with it, and varying the presentation style in atypical ways. It'll definitely have some staples of the VN genre, of course - sprites, text boxes, etc., but I'm also going to use the things I've learned over the years and incorporate scenes which are motion comics, similar to What Brings Us Together and Setsuzokuyo. The idea is to tell a much larger, grander story, and a VN is the only way to efficiently do that. I think the narrative I've got outlined and already started in earnest in actual script writing is my best yet, and I'm looking forward to the VN's launch early next year.

It's been a while since I posted anything here, since we've hit one of those "silent" production phases, where big projects are being worked on in the background.

I did want to show you guys some of the fantastic work that Flint/Mousenoises is doing for the VN, on the base sprites that we'll dress up like dolls for various parts in the VN narrative.

I love brother and sister (Emma) side by side here, and I can't wait for you guys to meet Emma and learn more about her and Sebastien's relationship!

Also, you can't go anywhere in Japan without otters crawling all over you. Infestation

I know this isn't technically SL content, but this walk in Japan to a tiny shrine at the end of a wooden path was just so beautiful. If you're a fan of anime, you have no doubt heard Japanese cicadas, just like this. Glorious.

Check out this ridiculous cheesecake Wusky did for the cookbook!

https://x.com/wuskythehusky/status/1825207878460010878?s=35

The perfect image to describe Jo. Let's see you pull those sunglasses off. (Art for the Cookbook, by Soul Nero!)

https://x.com/wuskythehusky/status/1822348352996209017?s=35

👀

First off, thank you so much for your responses to the merch question! I was pleasantly surprised. Normally when I try asking questions on Twitter I get very few responses, so I really appreciate everyone chiming in.

What I'm hearing so far as the most common/popular options:

1. Enamel pins - I'll look into this! I already have artwork that would make good pins, I think.

2. Plushies - I'm not sure this one is viable - custom plushies are very expensive and difficult/time consuming to design. A cursory search on Google shows most prices are $200+ (easily), and I don't know that there are any fulfillment and production houses for that. I'd love to be able to give you guys the option of getting your paws on these (since so many of you seem to want them!), but there's definitely challenges here, and they're quite expensive challenges as previously mentioned. x_x

3. T-shirts/clothing - Doable. This would likely be Badgercakes themed with the logo on them.

4. Physical copies of the collection of comics thus far - probably doable, but I'd need to hire someone to take the existing files and prep them for printing, now that I'm on the self-publishing track. That's a labor-intensive process, and again, one I don't have time for at the moment, unless someone else is doing it for me.

As a general note - I simply don't have time to do fulfillment for merch (nor have the cash to fork over for double shipping!), because I'm so busy working on the cookbook and early stages of the VN, so any vendor that I find needs to be able to do both. If anyone has any suggestions for production + shipping fulfillment companies that have a digital storefront you can link to, please toss them my way! I'll be doing my own research for vendors but recommendations are usually easiest to follow up on.

Hey everyone! Open question for all of you - what, if any, Sweet Leaves physical merch might you want, if you could choose anything (within reason, of course)?

There's also a hint about a character's background in this image somewhere! Can you find it?