Hello everyone, and welcome to the 4th report for v0.16.1!

I have a lot of news to share today, but first, I want to say I am going to try to broaden the reach of these posts and the game by posting them on Itch and Reddit! So if you're reading this from there, hello! I make weekly update reports on the game! Now you get to see them :D

v0.16.1 Progress

The next build looks great! All the art, animation, assets, and code work is done! We fixed all bugs and made all improvements! Starting next week, we'll reset the board a bit to focus on improvements we want to make across Episode 2. We were still working on the Episode 1 list.

We just need to finish the script, implement it, and make the update playable. Thankfully, it comes out on 10/6, so we have some time. We just have a few last things to go over in the script; then I am gonna do a pass, and it should be good!

Ep 2 Total Asset Progress

We are making good progress on the total assets needed for Episode 2! 7 out of the 17 music tracks we want to add are finalized! We'll start Lolurio on the next batch soon.

Koth is currently animating 3 sprites that are needed for v0.16.2. It is a lot of work, but these are 3 big characters, so having them animated will be very important.

Pamika has started work on Noto's backgrounds, which look fun so far! We're still in the gray box stage, but I'm hyped.

Publisher and Steam Changes

Now onto the BIG NEWS!

Recently, we decided to leave our publisher, Shady Corner Games, and go independent. We enjoyed our time at Shady Corner Games, and I am happy to call Shades a friend from even before I joined the industry. That said, I wanted to strike out on my own and steer the ship myself. I'm grateful for Shady Corner Games' support over the last 3 years, and I wish them well!

That said, during my exit, we ran into some complications with Steam.

If anyone remembers, when we tried to submit our game to Steam Next Fest last year, Steam denied our demo. At the time, we thought it was just the demo, since the store page didn't go down. Cut to last month: we tried to transfer ownership of the game to my studio, but Steam told us the game had been banned the whole time and couldn't be moved because it couldn't be sold.

This, obviously, sucks! So if you go to the Steam Page for Hazelnut Latte, you will see this.

So all of the wishlists over the last few years are gone. A bummer, but not the end of the world.

The plan now is to launch a new Steam Page! I have it in the works. I am hoping to have it live in time for the new demo, but we shall see. This whole thing came out of nowhere and threw a wrench into some of my plans.

Demo Prep

If you go to our Itch page, you may notice that the free demo, v0.11.7, is gone. That is because we are preparing our new demo, v0.15.5.3, and plan to launch it on October 19th.

The old demo is gone because it no longer represents the game. Anyone who played this demo in the past 8 months got the wrong impression of the game, and we want to stop that. This new demo will reflect the game accurately.

The final Ren'Py build is still available for those who enjoy that version.

While we finalize v0.16.1, we are also hard at work preparing v0.15.5.3 so that when the public gets its hands on it, they love it as much as we do and want to support the game further.

Wrap Up

That's it for today! Big news day, but we're gonna keep on cruising and doing our best!

Thank you all so much for your support, and stay Rad!