February 2023 Monthly Update (Patreon)

Hello hello, from a month into 2023. We hope everyone has had a great start to the year so far. We know we sure have!

If you've tuned into one of the recent art streams then you'll have already seen, but we're diving into our next big project: Summer at the Edge of the Universe. After letting it simmer for a couple years while we worked on Please Be Happy, we've been off to a quick start. As it stands, we have 14 music tracks done or over halfway done, at least 60,000 words of script written (the vast majority of it so far being Izzy's route), and the sprites for the four main characters (plus the one main robot) are just about complete.

adi has been streaming art progress every Sunday-Thursday from 3pm to 7pm Pacific time on our second Youtube channel, so be sure to tune in there if you're interested in watching her draw for the game. At some point, it might get kind of tricky because of spoilers, but for now, her schedule's been consistent. Later this month, we'll also be posting a sneak peek of the first scene of the game here on Patreon.

Part of the privilege of writing these updates is that I get to decide which girl gets featured in posts. I hope you're all ready to see lots of Hanna!

In fact, we're going to be posting a lot more sneak peeks from here on out. We're going to do a bigger post about this later, but at the moment, none of our projects are signed to any publisher, and we're looking to keep things that way. Instead of getting the bulk of the funding to make our games from a publisher, we'd like to instead work on building up what we're able to do ourselves. That's why we're aiming to have physical copies of our games available on our webstore very soon, and also to sell at more conventions.

Without a publisher, we're going to be a lot more reliant on crowdfunding like Patreon and Kickstarter, but we're hoping it'll let us do more cool, out-of-the-ordinary things like Elanfest and be more efficient about porting and bringing our games to other platforms. It's a really big risk; the biggest we'll have ever taken since our inception as a studio. But it's one that, if it works out, could be pretty huge for us. So wish us luck!

Of course, it means we're going to have to change how we use Patreon. Instead of just posting bonus content and the occasional behind-the-scenes peek, we want to show of a lot more of the Samayuuni development process (we won't spoil anything big, of course) and also give patrons some opportunities to contribute to the games, like having polls for some in-game details or even adding a couple cameos/characters designed by Patrons. Basically, we want you to get a lot more content out of your pledges to us. We're still figuring out all the details, but we're hoping to finalize them later this month. We've asked before, but if there are any particular rewards you'd like to see or changes you'd like to request, now's the time to share 'em.

Anyway, to get back to the monthly update, we've had some progress on our other projects as well. In a couple days, you can look forward to a big update on Twofold to celebrate Caprice's birthday on the fourth. There'll be new screenshots, a comic, and more. Art for Our Home, My Keeper just resumed as well, and hopefully we'll have some stuff to share soon. Finally, we got the completed key visual and some new sketches for our secret project, the one that we haven't mentioned at all yet. Wait, pretend you didn't read that!

There's also a handful of other neat things coming up, like vinyl editions of the Please Be Happy soundtrack and and the rest of the Highway Blossoms soundtrack. We're also making plans for this year's Elanfest, too. Oh yeah, and we also approved the final design for someone very squishy.

Okay, that's enough teasers for now. Have a good month!