We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re clearly due for a monthly update post to tell you all about Yuri Kissaten’s activities this past month.
If you haven’t been keeping up, and you should keep up by following us on Bluesky or Steam, we did a lot of fun stuff this month. We:
- Released Winter Heat, a fluffy romcom for the Winter Visual Novel Game Jam.
- Announced the Winter Heat full game version, coming Fall 2025–Wishlist it now!
- Toured around Kyoto City and discovered many interesting things.
- Discovered the truth about Yuri from Google AI results.
- Researched isometric game art styles.
- Launched a brand new awesome website – fruz.quest!
- Plus, completed a short, important visual novel coming next month – more on that below.
January is pretty notorious for being the month of huge doldrums, but we were a lot more productive than we expected!
That being said, we are facing a lot of difficulties this year. Not new ones, but heightened ones. And it makes our Yuri Kissaten efforts even more important.
Our Coming Struggles This Year
As you know, Yuri Kissaten has three core members–Fruz, Oomfie, and Bea–who work on every game in our fledgling studio. We’re determined to make some great games and hopefully make a living off these games, with your help.
But we also face some tremendous challenges in 2025. Well, Oomfie is pretty well off, but her net worth is tangled up in some complicated “Tower of Yuriaga” situation. The other two of us, though, are facing some issues that could prevent us from creating games as well as we want.
Bea: “I’ve got a triple whammy of annoying life situations. I need to move very soon, but upfront costs are expensive in Japan, and I already have a lot of debt back in the United States. Thanks to a plummeting exchange rate, my salary is steadily decreasing, too, so it’s difficult to pay off that debt. And to add to all that, I won’t even know if I’ll be employed from April for several more weeks! It’s hard to plan for the future with all this up in the air.”
Fruz: “Economy is bad. Everything is on fire. Send help.”
Basically, we’re going to be fine in the long run. But holy cow, it’s an annoying series of problems for the both of us.
When we say every single dollar helps, we really mean it. Once we get past these coming struggles, it’ll be smooth sailing into several yuri game releases. The 5 for ’25 Campaign is ascendant.
Along with these problems, though, we’re going to promote serious social issues with our next small game release:
Introducing: “Life of a Dispatch English Teacher in Japan”
The next Yuri Kissaten game release will be a short visual novel experience about the problems among foreign English teachers who live and work in Japan.
There are about 20,000 “Assistant English Teachers,” foreign teachers who come to Japan from overseas to promote international culture and language learning. About 30% of those are part of the JET Program, and most of the rest are privately hired by dispatch companies. Working conditions for those dispatch teachers are steadily worsening, though, with worse pay, worse hours, and general instability. It’s causing a slow-motion catastrophe for tens of thousands of people.
But it’s a relatively unknown issue, both within Japan and in the countries people are recruited from. So, with this game, we want to promote the problems of English teachers and the tough choices they have to make almost every year with contract losses, sudden moves, and that pervasive anxiety that comes with job insecurity.
The game is almost complete, and will be releasing very soon for free. It’s a quite short experience, only 15-20 minutes, but we hope it’ll move you emotionally, and maybe even reach a broader audience of people who can make an impact.
As a short project, this is NOT part of our 5 for ’25 Campaign, but it’s still a very important game for our studio.
Here’s a couple backgrounds, lovingly digitized from photos by Fruz:
And here’s a couple Creative Commons tracks we will be using for the soundtrack:
Once the game is finally out, we’ll probably talk a little more about the creation of this game. It came together extremely quickly, and it’s almost entirely thanks to the amazing free-to-use resources the internet provides us.
Looking Forward
We have many more events and activities planned for the next few months! Be excited for them:
- “Life of a Dispatch English Teacher in Japan” coming sometime in February.
- The Visual Novel fest on Steam in early March – Love is in the Airship‘ll definitely be there, and we may be showing off something else new (here was last year’s fest).
- The Game Pavilion event in Osaka is March 29th, and we’ll be running a booth! Come play our next game demo in-person and receive various goods.
Our march towards success (february towards success?) continues on. Please continue to support us.
5 for ’25 Status:
Our monthly project progress tracker. It’s a little boring this early, but it’ll heat up soon.
- Winter Heat – Mid-development
- ??? – Soon to be announced
- ??? – Pitch and demo in-progress
- ??? – ???
- ??? – ???
Closing Cup
Never forget that Oomfie loves you.