- The Ghost of Alcantra is in the Fall In Love Steam Festival! + A Special Update - 24 September 2025
Hello everyone, Nick here. I have two pieces of exciting news for you all. First and most importantly, We are a part of the Fall in Love Steam Festival! Our game, along with over 200 others are a part of the festival. Please check us out if you have not already, and check out the other fantastic romance visual novels participating.To celebrate the festival, we are adding additional content to The Ghost of Alcantra! These are bonus scenes that will unlock as you read the story (don't worry if you have read the story already, the scenes will unlock on their own if you have played though the game). We have 5 of them for now, but we plan on adding more in the future that will tie into our other planned works that also take place in the same world as The Ghost of Alcantra!Keep an eye out for people streaming our game during the fest, and in particular, keep an eye out for and as we will be j…
- Bug Fix Update - 7 August 2025
Small bug fix update to address a few misc. items including: One scene where the incorrect name was shown for a character Some sprite errors Touched up some background images Several spelling/grammatical errorsIf you notice any other errors please don't hesitate to reach out to us on our socials!Until Next Time, Nick
- Major Update for The Ghost of Alcantra! - 14 June 2025
Hello everyone, Nick here. It's been almost two months since we released The Ghost of Alcantra. A huge thank you to everyone who has read our work so far. Your positive feedback has been heartwarming to see. This weekend is actually a special one for us. In our hometown of Houghton Michigan, it is Bridge Fest, which was the direct inspiration for the Summer Festival used in The Ghost of Alcantra. In fact, the background images used during the first scene were all taken during Bridge Fest. To celebrate, we have a content update for you all! The Ghost of Alcantra now has a replay feature. Now, every time the date changes in game, it unlocks that scene in the Replay Library. Unfortunately, this will not work retroactively, so scenes witnessed before the update will need to be viewed again before unlocking. We also addressed some minor script errors while we were at it. Until next time,Nick…
- The Ghost of Alcantra is Out NOW! - 25 April 2025
Hello all, Nick here. The day has finally come. The Ghost of Alcantra is finally out! I will keep this short, but sweet. Thank you all for waiting, and I hope you enjoy the culmination of over a year and a half of effort! Until next time, Nick
- The Ghost of Alcantra Releases Tomorrow (and Author's Note)! - 24 April 2025
Hi everyone, Nick here again. With The Ghost of Alcantra releasing tomorrow, we have something different planned for this post. We have talked about sprites, backgrounds, and music, but we haven't talked about the most important part of any visual novel, the writing. And who better to talk about the writing of The Ghost of Alcantra then the author? Below is Colin's experience writing The Ghost of Alcantra: I’ve always wanted to write a visual novel. More specifically, I wanted to leave something behind that expressed a me that would otherwise never be known, and I figured that making a visual novel was the best way to do that. After having the story in my head for years and procrastinating on actually making it, I finally began formally outlining the story in the May of 2023, and then began actually writing it on July 8th. I finished the first draft of the story, which was around 202k w…
- The Ghost of Alcantra Releases in Two Days! - 24 April 2025
Hello, Nick here. Two days remain. Today, I am going to talk a little bit about music. Music in The Ghost of Alcantra is entirely composed of classical pieces. This was done not only for the obvious budgetary reasons, but for aesthetic reasons as well. For one, classical music generally fits the aesthetic of The Ghost of Alcantra, given its slow, subtle presentation. Classical music has a large range of emotions it can invoke. Anywhere from romantic swells to dramatic, tension building pieces. In addition to this, several scenes were written with specific classical pieces in mind. Our work flow worked like this: Colin would pick out music for us to use in every scene (he has an in depth knowledge of classical music stemming from his being taught piano as a child). I would clean up the recording and/or cut the track as needed. Then after review, the track would eventually be put in engin…
- The Ghost of Alcantra Releases in 3 Days! - 22 April 2025
Hello again, Nick here. 3 Days to go! The final countdown. I will share another list of facts today, this time on name inspirations. 1. Nick Fox is named after two people, Nick's origin comes from myself and Fox comes from another friend of ours. 2. Detective Kyle Rage was named Kyle because we have two friends named Kyle. 3. Alexandria was picked because of the similarity Colin's sister’s name. Look forward to tomorrows post, where we will be discussing music. Until next time, Nick
- The Ghost of Alcantra Releases in 4 Days! (Also Sprite Process DevLog!) - 22 April 2025
Hello everyone, Nick here again with another daily dev topic. Today, we will be talking about sprite direction. There are different ways one can approach implementation of sprites in one's Visual Novel. You can have static sprites, animated sprites or anything between. We elected for a more subtle approach in the Ghost of Alcantra. Now, just because an effect is subtle, doesn't mean it isn't effective. We receive our sprites as layered .psd files with each modifiable sprite part as its own individual layer. This means we can mix and match sprite combinations as we see fit. Alexandria for example has 3 outfits, 3 eye permutations, 8 mouth types, 5 eyebrow positions, and 5 "extras" (extras being emotional modifiers like a bead of sweat). This amounts to a lot of different possible combinations. But how does one use these combinations effectively? That answer depends on what sort of story…
- The Ghost of Alcantra Releases in 5 days! - 20 April 2025
Hello Everyone, Nick here again. 5 days remain before The Ghost of Alcantra releases. Today's fun fact is less of a discussion on something on the creation process, and more of some interesting facts about when and how we worked on The Ghost of Alcantra. 1. This story was written part-time and as such, most of The Ghost of Alcantra was written between midnight and 4 in the morning. 2. A Mountain Dew was drank for every writing session, meaning, around 70 Mountain Dews were drank during the writing of this. 3. I did not burn the midnight oil to program myself, instead working during the evenings after work and during the day on Sundays. According to my timetable, ~265 hours were spent putting the first draft into engine. 4. Instead of Mountain Dew, I allowed myself a glass of whisky on my particularly long Friday programming sessions. 5. Colin and I have spent well over 100 hours in a ca…
- The Ghost of Alcantra Releases in 6 Days! - 19 April 2025
Hello everyone, Nick here again. With the release one day closer, another daily development fact is ready to be presented. I am going to take a moment to talk about backgrounds. Our backgrounds consist almost entirely of photographs that Colin (our illustrious writer and creative director) and I took. Above you will see one of the most commonly used backgrounds we use in The Ghost of Alcantra. While pretty, Stylistically, the image doesn't quite mesh with the drawn aesthetic of the characters. They should primarily be the focus of the scene, and as such, some image editing is required. Add a bit of blur, and some filters to thicken the sharper lines of the background, and you have a background that doesn't distract from the scene, but still maintains enough of its own intrinsic beauty as to enhance the scene it is in. Slap a sprite in there, and you have the makings of a well put togeth…
- The Ghost of Alcantra Releases One Week From Now! - 19 April 2025
Hello everyone! Nick here, technical director of The Ghost of Alcantra. It is kind of crazy to be sitting here typing this, but The Ghost of Alcantra is one week from release! The culmination of this year and a half long herculean effort will finally come to a head. I won't belabor the point too much, but this development has been a journey. This was our first experience writing and programming period. We have learned a lot about the development process along the way. As such, I thought it would be fun to share some development learnings/fun facts as we approach the release date. I will warm you all up with a relatively small one: The original draft of The Ghost of Alcantra was over 200,000 words. This length was cut down during the editing phase to the ~176,000 word script we now have, but it was not only cuts, despite the amount of words trimmed down, many scenes were added as well! U…
