March is always really busy for people who live in Japan, and that’s half of Yuri Kissaten (AKA me, Bea). This studio was basically founded in March 2024 in the middle of some other chaos, but that’s a story for another time. Instead, we’re focusing on March 2025!
Of course, February was super busy already, where we:
- Officially launched the Patreon. (Even if some of the earliest posts are from January hehe)
- Attended the wonderful Yuriten event in Osaka.
- Saw an all-female lesbian-coded Dracula musical, also in Osaka?!
- Worked extremely hard on our next demo to show off at this year’s Game Pavilion event (see more below). We also submitted to BitSummit, and hopefully we’ll be accepted!
- Posted introduction bonus posts for Bea, Fruz, and Oomfie, the three founders of Yuri Kissaten.
- Built the amazing Patron Wall on our website!
February feels like the most doldrums-heavy month sometimes, with the peak of winter (or summer) making everything a little dreary (Winter Heat reference). But we did a lot more than I realized. Of course, March is an incredibly packed month, and I’m already spinning with stress trying to get it all done on time.
Visual Novel Fest
Love is in the Airship is on sale on Steam for the Visual Novel Fest! It’s 20% off from now until March 10th at 10 PM PDT. If you haven’t picked the game up yet, this is its biggest sale yet, and it’ll be the biggest price drop for the game for a while. If you have picked the game already, this is the perfect St. Patrick’s Day or Mar10 Day or Pi Day gift for your friends, loved ones, and rivals.
Airship is going to receive a nice content update pretty soon, probably in May, although the timeline is a bit murky. If you liked the hidden secrets buried throughout the game, you’re going to love digging for even more brand-new scenes when this content update comes out. We’re also planning THREE new romance character routes, although I’m not sure if those will be ready in time for this update. Probably one of them will.
With all our 5 for ’25 Campaign games, you’d think we would forget all about our original release… Nope!
Game Pavilion Prep
As I said above, Game Pavilion, an indie game event in Osaka, is coming very soon– 3/29! If you’re in the Kansai area at the end of March, please come and see us! We’ll have a couple demos playable, and some small goodies to give away.
Joi Massat, my longtime compatriot, has been prepping for some New York City-based events of their own, and you can see some of that prep in this post here. It’s got some exclusive Yuri Kissaten art you can only see by clicking, so click it and see!
And, because Joi is a light to the world, a beacon of hope, they’re also helping us make some materials for the Game Pavilion! I wanted to do a lot more sellable items, like a cool SD card that came packed with Love is in the Airship and all our demos, but then I realized that selling loose SD cards is both a little suspicious and way too much work for how little time I have. So printed goods it is.
Here’s a preview of the cool-ass Yuri Kissaten Spring 2025 Pamphlet:
Oops, is that revealing yet another one of our 5 for ’25 Campaign titles? You bet it is. Because we’re going to be showing off Ryugaku Ren’ai at the Game Pavilion event. (Anyone who knows me personally already knows a lot about this project, but I bet it’ll be a surprise to a lot of you!)
As soon as the store page on Steam and other platforms is launched, we’ll be sharing them here and on other platforms.
Anyway… I’ll stop talking about that for now, because you will get a much more detailed look into our Game Pavilion prep for our next BONUS UPDATE exclusive to paid tiers! Join now so you can see the full pamphlet on 3/15!
“Life of a Dispatch English Teacher in Japan” – Delay?
In our February monthly update, we announced an upcoming smaller game release, “Life of a Dispatch English Teacher in Japan,” a free release meant to spread awareness about a serious and underlooked topic. The game is essentially complete, but its goal–to talk about the problems with last-second contract problems and life instability–is a bit too late now. Most of the public school contracts across Japan have already been resolved, so releasing it now wouldn’t make an impact.
We really tried hard to get it released in February, but we couldn’t manage to get the Japanese translation in time. Even for a small and free project, it’s not cheap at all to get a game like this released, and it wouldn’t be worth it to release it English-only, even at first.
So, we’ve delayed the game to next fall, before the next round of dispatch contracts starts, so we can help spread the message across Japan about the tens of thousands of workers who face unstable lives every year.
But since the game is basically done… I guess we should release it on Patreon first? Is that something you want to play months ahead of everyone else? Let us know.
Looking Forward
- Our next Bonus Update on 3/15, all about our first-ever in-person event at the Game Pavilion.
- TWO new game announcements, one of which was already just teased.
- The Patreon-only pre-release of our next minigame?
5 for ’25 Status
- Winter Heat – Mid-development
- ??? – Very soon to be announced
- Ryugaku Ren’ai – Announcement and demo imminent
- ??? – ???
- ??? – ???
Closing Cup
Drink the sunrise.