June 2023 Monthly Update + Publishing News (Patreon)

Gosh, hard to believe today is the first day of June. In the month of May, which totally just ended yesterday, we did a lot of things, including one big change to our operations. Here are some of them.

-We wrote and edited and talked about a lot of Samayuuni stuff! We're expanding the common route a bit from what was originally planned, and so I've been rewriting and combining some of the old drafts + writing new ones. It's a bit slow going right now, as I'm still getting used to writing Summer, but I'm pretty excited with how it's turning out.  Other assets for the game have been coming in too, and soon we'll be getting to the point of starting to actually script the demo in-engine.

-We finished the designs for all the Kickstarter merchandise, and items are already starting to arrive in our hands. Just today, all the soundtracks came in. Those alone took up a whopping 8 boxes, and the games are gonna be another 15. At least I'll have a lot of incentive to get orders mailed out fast - there won't be any space until I do. We're still waiting for the artbooks, postcards, and accessories. Those should all be here soon.

-If they arrive in time, we should also have those items available at OffKai Expo next week in San Francisco! Not sure if any of you will be attending that, but if so, we hope to see you! We're sponsoring the con, and adi + myuto both contributed art to the convention that will be used around the event. We'll post some pictures when we have 'em! Syon and I will be running the merch booth. We'll also have some items available of the VTubers from Virtuality Project, a streaming group that some of us are part of. Because OffKai Expo is a VTuber-centric convention, it just made sense to carry some merch of the VirPro girls.

(Lirie is one of the VTuber members of VirPro. Her original design is by adi, and this keychain design is by myuto!)

We'll also be doing a panel at OffKai! It'll be hosted by Syon, and will be focused on voice acting for visual novels. Lisa Reimold, voice actress of Tess and Zion, as well as Dottovu, the voice actress for Miho and Olive, will be joining the panel as digital guests too.

-We've been working on a patch for Please Be Happy to fix some issues like missing voice lines, typos, and other small things. We're also planning to add a Chinese and Korean version of the demo in the near future, but that will probably be a separate patch. The same goes for Steam cloud saves, which we know a lot of people have been asking for. We want to include them, and intend to - they'll just take a bit longer to be implemented.

-We received the prototype of someone very squishy

(we'll post a proper preview soon)

Finally, the big one.

After more than 7 years, we're going to be parting with Sekai Project as our publisher for the most part. They'll still publish the console version of Heart of the Woods, as well as the upcoming console version of Highway Blossoms. However, the PC versions of our games, current and upcoming, as well as the console version of Please Be Happy, are in our own hands. We're super grateful to them for the years of support, because we legitimately couldn't have gotten this far without them. However, we felt like it was time to part ways and try things on our own for a while.

We're talking to a potential publisher about Samayuuni, but there's also a very good chance that we end up self-publishing it too. Same goes for Our Home, My Keeper, and other stuff that we have in the works. It's a big risk, but one that we're excited to take!

 That wraps it up for this month. Until next time!