Red Spring Studio - October 2026 Monthly Update

Happy Halloween, patrons!

We hope everyone’s been enjoying the spooky season so far This month, we posted a bunch of VO teasers and reveals on our socials, and we’ve got more treats in store for you down below!

We’ve got a lot of content to cover in this update, so I’ll keep this intro short and sweet Keep reading for hints on upcoming reveals, BTS write-ups from other members of the team, previews of unreleased tracks, and sneak peeks of illustrations!

Full Game – Writing | 100% complete

Full Game – VO Recording | 100% complete

Full Game – CGs & BGs | 90% complete

Full Game | Route and Variable Testing in progress

Full Game | Feature Implementation and Testing in progress

Localization | In progress, All scripts sent in!

Full Game – Public Release | Targeting Spring 2027

It’s been so satisfying typing those 100s and watching our dev snapshots get shorter as more milestones are checked off. Congrats to the team for wrapping up Narrative and VO Recording! Tech and Localization have also been killing it with Demo 2.1 out now  

We can’t forget how close the Art team is to the finish line with 90% of the full game’s content done too! They actually just finished their last CG illustration this month, but I’ll let our Art Director Vika chat more about that in their write-up further down below. Real quick though, let’s take a moment to touch on VO and some highlights from Demo 2.1!

In case you missed it on our socials, here’s a roundup of the 4/5 Love Interest VAs we’ve posted! And don’t worry, Ais is on the way very soon :

Abubakar Salim is KURAS! We love his work as Bayek of Siwa from Assassins Creed Origins, Zanror of the Herd of Storms from The Legend of Vox Machina, and Alyn of Hull from House of the Dragon.

Kayleigh McKee is VERE! We love her work as Yuta Okkotsu from Jujutsu Kaisen, Sparky from Knights of Guinevere, and Testament from Guilty Gear.

Ray Chase is LEANDER! We love his work as Noctis from Final Fantasy XV, Ryomen Sukuna from Jujutsu Kaisen, and Neuvillette from Genshin Impact. 

John Patneaude is MHIN! We love their work as Kinich from Genshin Impact, Doughael in Cookie Run: Kingdom, and Daemon from Date Everything! 

These voice actors have incredible range and lots of us at Red Spring are big fans of other projects they’ve worked on. Big shoutout to Souha for helping us assemble and direct such a wonderful cast! Did you recognize any of the VAs from other games or shows and movies? Let us know what else you’ve heard them in because we can’t get enough! 

Every actor we’ve revealed so far has brought their A-game to TOUCHSTARVED and Ais’s VA is no exception. We know you’ve been on the edge of your seats waiting to hear him, and we promise his teaser and reveal will be posted very soon on our socials in November!

Remember when we worked on localizing the demo a few months ago? Well, it’s finally out! Here are some highlights from our new demo (and you can check out the full patch notes here):

Simplified and Traditional Chinese: Working with our publisher in China has been a very rewarding and educational experience! Maintaining communication has been a consistent and iterative process, but it’s come in real handy when working with teams across the globe. If you’d like to read more about the process of localization, you can read our snippet in the previous update linked above!

Thank you for supporting us from wherever you call home, and helping us create a new home in the world of TOUCHSTARVED

All new original soundtrack by Rinn: The old demo music has been replaced with a completely original soundtrack created specifically for TOUCHSTARVED! Please give it a listen and enjoy! Our composer Rinn did a phenomenal job and it bangs. 

Before you get your hands on Demo 2.1 though, we want to give a heads-up on a small roadblock we’ve run into with the Mac build! The game seems to freeze during the opening animation sequence. While most players can bypass this by pressing ESC, the bug requires more replication and testing, and the tech team would rather use their skills to find a full fix for the issue.

We appreciate everyone’s patience as we complete the fixes and hope you enjoy the rest of the new build! The official soundtrack really brings everything together and we’d love to know your thoughts on it  

In fact, here are 2 more tracks to listen to and a great write-up on developing TOUCHSTARVED’s sound by our Co-Director and Studio Lead Lulu! 

Now that we’ve updated the demo with our official music, let’s talk about some tunes! Below, you can hear two unreleased tracks and get a little peek into how we develop TOUCHSTARVED’s sound. 

A lot of that process involves thinking about where our musical influences come from. Music can evoke a culture just as strongly as food or fashion, and we put a lot of thought into the different influences that come together in Eridia. Some of those choices are easier to spot than others; they shape the city’s architecture and extend all the way to the Eridian alphabet. The soundtrack is another way we get to develop the world. 

This is an unreleased world track you’ll hear in the full game. We wanted a dreary, gothic atmosphere that could support some angsty moments without being distracting. Sometimes a scene needs a little sadness without the music going TOO ham about it, especially when considering these scenes will have voice acting as well.

But as you know, TOUCHSTARVED’s world has some grit to it, so even our gentler tracks tend to have a bassline or some kind of percussion to make things feel grounded. This track uses a subtle bass to avoid calling too much attention to itself. 

I believe we’ve talked about this before, so apologies if I’m repeating stuff you’ve already heard! But we also wanted to approach “gothic” beyond the European influences you might immediately associate with it. Our team is incredibly culturally diverse, and that’s reflected in the world we’re making. In this piece in particular, Chinese instrumentation blends with the violins to help us find a gothic sound that feels more in line with TOUCHSTARVED’s world. 

This (also unreleased) track serves a slightly different purpose. We wanted something that could accompany you as you explore Eridia, whether you're in Hightown or Lowtown. That meant bringing together a wider mix of sounds to reflect the place and the people who live there. I think our composer did an excellent job weaving those instruments into a single “worldly” track. Finding that cohesion can be tricky, especially since we made sure to give each of our love interests a distinct musical identity. Making electric guitar, cellos, bells, synths, and more work together is no small feat, so we’re incredibly lucky to work with Rinn and co!

Having made music for indie games as a hobby, getting to work with such talented artists has been a dream. I’m so excited to hear what you all think of the full OST. There are still plenty of tracks you haven’t heard, including some of my favorites! When the right music plays at just the right moment, it can make a scene stay with you long after you’ve finished a game. I hope we can create something that resonates that deeply with even one person.

- Lulu

Thanks for sharing, Lulu!

I’m a music lover but my music-making experience is limited to shower concerts and tipsy karaoke hahah, so learning about the intentional choices behind TOUCHSTARVED’s music - even down to the instruments chosen for each love interest - is really cool!

I love reading these tidbits from different craft experts on the team, so let’s dive into one more Here’s Vika’s write up on the process of choosing CG illustrations for the game!

With the very last illustration for TOUCHSTARVED finally wrapped up, I thought it’d be fun to share how we decided which scenes to illustrate in the first place! 

Early in development, we spent a lot of time studying other narrative games and visual novels, and figuring out what kinds of illustrations we found the most effective. We loosely sorted them into buckets like “pretty”, “action” or “vulnerable/injured”, using those as a starting point to think about the emotional beats we wanted to highlight. After doing some initial testing to estimate production time and resources, we knew that most of our compositions would lean towards close-ups. This also presented an interesting challenge: how do we portray intimate scenes when the MC is never shown beyond their hands? 

To keep things organized, I mapped out the entire game on a giant Figma board (seen below), working closely with our writers to figure out which moments deserved an illustration. Since we don’t work chronologically, some of our ending illustrations were actually planned and completed long before we even touched the earlier chapters. The board eventually evolved into a massive visual roadmap, where I would compare compositions, track progress and compile color scripts to see how all of the illustrations worked together at a glance. 

Beyond choosing individual scenes, one of my biggest priorities was making sure each route told its own distinct visual story. This meant developing a unique color palette and atmosphere for each character, while making sure the illustrations felt cohesive as a collection. This was surprisingly difficult to balance, but also very rewarding to look back on. With so many illustrations (and many variants) across five routes, we had to be mindful of repeating similar camera angles, crops, poses and emotional beats. 

I also wanted to capture the essence of each character beyond just what was happening in the scene: Kuras’s melancholy, Ais’s honesty, Vere’s predatory allure etc. Each route also explores a particular flavor of horror, and one of my favorite parts of the process was finding ways to weave that unease into illustrations that aren’t particularly scary. One of my favorite illustrations to work on was Mhin’s Chapter 3, which we’ll share eventually, but all I’ll say is that the inspiration behind it was body horror, birth and cracked eggs. 

Looking back at the finished collection now, it's incredibly satisfying to see all these individual decisions come together after years of planning, revisions and collaboration with our wonderful team. It's a little surreal to think that we've finally reached the end of such a huge undertaking! There's so much more I'd love to share about the process, but I think I'm running out of my allotted space. I'll save the rest for another update!

- Vika

Thank you for another insightful look into the art process, Vika! I’d be happy to let you write forever, but we’ll have you back for another update soon

I love using my Community Manager privilege to peek at all the other illustrations we had to blur on the Figma board LOL and I can assure you all, the Chapter 3 illustration from Mhin’s route that Vika mentioned as one of their faves really lives up to the hype! 

We’ll share that one in the future, but for now, here are some other art previews with less cracked eggs and more fun

The intensity and focus in Mhin’s eyes as they do work I can barely comprehend… Chef kiss as always, Art team!

Kuras is lucky he’s fictional because if I saw my doctor walking around in an outfit like this off-duty, I’d be visiting him in the clinic for everything–even a paper cut LOL.

There’s another fun surprise in the full version of this sprite, but we’ll keep it cropped here for now. 

Now that concludes October! We wish you all the sweetest and spookiest of Halloweens and we’ll be back in November for some wintery fun and Vere’s birthday!

You can always reach us:

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With love (and freshly laundered weighted blankets because winter is coming shudders in Canada ),

— Sofi and the Red Spring Studio Team