Greetings, everyone!

With February already coming to an end, here is the February devlog!

We’ve been hard at work, especially with our Beta Access build being live! We completely forgot about the steam review and it was a harrowing few days waiting for the build to get out of steam review limbo. It was even more stressful when we tried to upload the build and encountered a steam bug where steamworks was unable to find the path to the .exe file. It was super weird and we almost lost our minds rebuilding the entire game twice until we realised that other people were also experiencing the same bug ….

Luckily for us, the build managed to get reviewed in a couple of days and we’re grateful for the prompt response ( thank you steam support)

​We also participated in our first Steam Next Fest!! Thank you to everyone who tried our demo and wishlisted our game!! We managed to get quite a large number of wishlists and we’re also eternally grateful for the overwhelming support received! <3

Other than that, we’ve also been working on adding the following to the game!

As you’d expect, we’ve added:

• ​New character sprites!! (All of them now have additional blushing expressions?!)

• Several additional CGs (Dramatic! Endearing! Some of them for the early days as well!)

​- New original music tracks (Courtesy of our music producer, NEETCAT!)

• ​New jumpscares (which have already successfully caught people off guard during testing) >:)

We’ve also been hard at work squashing bugs….. One particularly facepalm inducing bug was easily fixed with a typo so you can imagine how the journey has been going for us…. (The joys of coding….)

Now onto a more serious note, with the games release nearing soon, we thought we’d address some rather more serious topics.

​We believe open communication is vital, especially this close to release. We originally didn’t want to share our struggles as we felt that it was something every indie studio went through and we had to manage it ourselves, but now with the games release coming so soon, we want to at least inform everyone of our current situation.

To be completely transparent, three out of four of our core team members have been working on the game full time without pay for the past six months.

Nearing the end of our development, some of the funding we had planned for the project changed unexpectedly. While we had secured a publisher MG, which helped us alot at the start, a large portion of our day-to-day development costs, had been supported through additional investment that was part of our original funding plan. Due to these changes, we had to make some difficult decisions and scale back certain content in order to stay on track with our current release timeline. (RIP THE STORY FOR A CERTAIN FELINE IN OUR GAME)

Eventually, we launched the kickstarter as a last minute effort in order to help sustain our livelihoods for a few more months. While our Kickstarter has helped sustain us, however, other planned crowdfunding platforms unfortunately fell through, leaving us in a difficult financial struggle.

We have tried looking at other sources of revenue, but unfortunately with how time consuming game development is, we put most of our efforts into developing the game as it is something we were passionate about and we wanted to work on it regardless of our pay.

We don’t regret this decision as we truly do wish to release the game we’ve worked on for so long and we do not want to disappoint the people that have supported us as well.

Personally I understand how rare this opportunity is, to be able to work on a game that we’ve built from the ground up and I truly have no regrets!

Unfortunately, reality is much more cruel….

​Looking ahead, ​we are currently aiming for a late March release, as it is our most viable path forward to complete the project and sustain the studio. That said, we are currently managing some internal operational challenges alongside the final stages of development. We are working hard to navigate these hurdles and will be sure to provide a clear update as soon as we determine how they might impact our final timeline. ​We are beyond grateful for your patience and for standing by us through this incredibly challenging chapter.

Now onto a more sentimental part, despite our struggles as a studio, we are still incredibly motivated to deliver the best experience to you as much as we physically can! We are really grateful that such a large amount of people care enough about our game to join our discord and talk about it, as well as make fanart and even add songs to our shared playlists! wow! I honestly can not thank you enough for following us on this journey and I truly hope, from the bottom of my heart, that the game will resonate with you and give you an experience that you will enjoy as well!

Thank you, and I hope this wont be our last devlog!

Much love from the berries <3