Been awhile but we're making progress and it's time to both celebrate and give an update to what we've been up to.

At the end of last year we mentioned a third project and it's time to continue that discussion.

To rehash it a little, what we're working on is not a visual novel but a faster to build title with procedural elements. More of a platformer in some ways with a cat as the playable character.

Why not just come out and say more about this sooner? We've been developing prototypes and that has transitioned between 2D and 3D types of games and in the end, we decided 2D was more feasible. So these last six months have been working more on the 2D side while trying to get a projection of every factor of development needed. Settling on an engine, was the first step of that.

This then also branched into not just art and music assets but also getting a lot more into marketing. Something, we've struggled with as we had budget issues with our visual novels. Frankly, they're incredibly asset heavy and trying to work through remote contractors is not working well for consistency.

Our goal is to finish Dust and Air but, to do that, we need to take a detour. The Father's Story was helpful in getting a better glimpse at that since Tyrano was a limiting factor and real life hit our Dust team in a major way. However, bringing on the Father's team to finish Dust was just not going to work out. We'd need to redesign the art and style of the game. The modeler on Father's could work but, she wasn't the all around character, background, and key image person that Georgy is.

Then there was the finances to do it, as she also wouldn't be cheap given the complexity of Dust's models. Thus brings us to the need of a title that can be quick to build, with lesser asset needs, and can reach other markets and target audiences instead of the niche Visual Novel genre.

That's a lot to weigh in and the reason why Project 3: Cat Game (Title TBD later), required a bit of planning and we couldn't do our normal updates like we wanted. After all, the updates would be pretty simple at times or too revealing at other times.

What we can say is that, besides Michael, working on prototypes in Godot, we've touched base with artists and modelers for 2-2.5D sprites and gotten some ideas on the production costs. Music and sound effects won't be a problem as we got connections for those.

Why it took longer to get ideas on the art side was because this would be more animation heavy. Our models in Dust and Air have more animation than other VNs but, this is simple expressions or poses and not motion heavy.

Gameplay is evolving as we've been making the prototypes and we're working on getting a teaser demo together. This will not be for public release but for another use...We're going to prep a crowdfunding for it.

While we don't really want to do another crowdfunding, there are aspects to this title which we think will draw better attention. We also have potential partners in mind to help get advertising done for it without excess cost.

Overall, we'd like more funding going towards marketing which is why doing a funding event is looking more possible.

In the days ahead, we'll reveal more details as we continue to set things up. We'd like to get as much of the base game ready to go this year so we can load in the assets and release it. When the crowdfunding event comes into it, that is still to be determined. The advantage this time over the Dust and Air attempt is that there is a lot more support structures in place for handling it than there was back in then. Even companies specifically formed to help produce products for the crowdfunding that simply didn't exist back then.

So as we go into our 10th year as a company, we're going to be looking towards creating something that can lift us up and provide for a healthy future to come.

For now, happy Steam summer sale! Look forward to updates in the days ahead! See you in the skies!