hai everyone!! ( ^_^)／so sorry to keep disappearing on you all... i wanted to let everyone know that, yes, i am still alive and, yes, i am still working on the dlc, hahaha, among other things. i wanted to provide y'all with a little nyewks status update with some answers to questions i've been receiving lately!
q: when is the afterparty dlc releasing?
a: it's been a really busy couple of months for me, so things are going pretty slow. the prologue of the dlc (which i finished a couple weeks ago) was some of the more difficult things to write and was holding me back quite a bit. now that it's complete, there's a lot less to slog through. i've gone through the afterparty dlc request form and there's actually a pretty concise set of requests in there as a lot of people are looking for the same thing, so i don't anticipate that i'm going to write like 10 different sex scenes or anything.
afterwards, i'll need to code everything, draw some new artwork, commission maybe one or two new songs for the ost, and then run through a quick playtesting phase. with that in mind, i hope to finish by the end of the year... if not then, then by the second or third week of january. the writing is genuinely what takes the most time, which is soooo annoying sometimes, but at least everyone will have at least one or two hours of stuff to play once i'm all done!
q: is the afterparty dlc still going to cost money?
a: yes! currently, i plan on the dlc costing $10.99, but honestly, with the way i'm writing, there's so much that i might raise it to $15. my current thought process is that if the dlc exceeds 75k words, i'll raise the price. from my rough calculations, the prologue is about 39k.
the thought process for this is that the entirety of the cryptid coffeehouse is 152k spread over 13 events, so about 11.7k per event. the game costs $10.99, but is free to like 90% of the player base since most people download from itch.io. if the dlc is 75k words, that's like half of the size of the original game and i'm kind of compensating for not making very much money from the original game anyway. does that make sense? i hope to not have to go this far lol but all of this has been a lot of work for the past several years. i'll keep everyone updated!
q: where is the dlc going to be purchasable?
a: okay, what with the whole nsfw content nightmare on itch.io (where i was originally planning on putting the game up), i'm attempting to consider what the options are. obviously, things are still changing every day and i'm taking my time finishing the dlc, hahaha, so maybe things will be okay by the time i put the dlc up online.
my preference list would be as follows:
on itch.io, on the original game page
on itch.io, on a separate deindexed page (since last i checked that was fine...? maybe card payments aren't good but paypal might be)
patreon
a secret fourth thing that i haven't figured out yet but might just be a storefront on my personal website
steam... le sigh. really don't want to pull that one out but will if i have to, probably by switching itch.io to $10.99 and steam to free, then uploading the paid dlc to steam afterwards.
it's sometimes a lot to consider, but i think it'll be okay to cross that bridge when we get there :-)
q: what about kurou connect? what's happening with that?
a: great question! i haven't forgotten about kurou connect by any means— i'm just in a state where the afterparty dlc is pretty much the only thing i can handle thinking about right now. but as soon as the afterparty dlc is finished, i'll be diving straight into kurou connect dev! practically the entire "true ending" of the game is completely boarded and just needs to be written and coded.
my first step will be a quality of life update to the original demo, which will mostly contain artwork updates and maybe some voice acting if i can afford it. after that, i'll be starting either a kickstarter or a patreon situation as i work on the game in earnest, as it's going to be a very expensive game to make ^^; the idea is that i'm going to have a multi-tiered patreon that will allow access to different builds of the game at different times since i'll be developing it mostly in an episodic nature. i'm not sure about all of this yet because genuinely, my following isn't too large hahaha and i'm not trying to mooch off of you guys for my silly little gay demon guy. but i will provide more information as that develops!
q: will there ever be more merch?
a: YES there will be more merch and it will be better than all the old stuff i made. once the afterparty dlc is finished, i'll have more brainspace to think about other stuff and merch will be one of them! i have lots of ideas. if anyone wants anything specific, let me know and i can probably do it. so far i have lots of plans for acrylic things... mostly charms and standees.
anyways! i'll be back to answering asks shortly, and hopefully in the next week or so i'll have some new game-related stuff to share with you all :-) thanks for your patience everyone!! i appreciate you all so much <3
not actively right now, since i'm working on the cryptid coffeehouse dlc, but i hope to get back into working on kurou connect after i take a little break post-dlc release. i talked about my future plans for kurou connect a bit in this faq i posted back in october! i'm not sure how long of a break i'm going to take before i start working on another project, but hopefully by the latter half of 2026 i'll have some new things to give y'all in the kurou department.
very excited for the dlc !!! but also wondering if theres any consideration or possibility for a kurou connect update(not necessarily now, but just generally in the future) :33
yes, absolutely! i talked a bit about it in the faq i posted a little bit ago, and i've talked about the general structure i intend to build & release kurou connect in in this ask from last november.
i might take a short break between releasing the afterparty dlc and beginning work on the next kurou connect update, but honestly lol i've been taking so long to finish the afterparty dlc that i might just dive into it because it'll be a whole new project and might feel more refreshing, hahaha
