Hiya, my fellow yuri lovers. Yuri Kissaten’s April Monthly Update is here!
As you might have noticed, March was probably our busiest month our existence, which somehow includes the launch of Love is in the Airship back in October. It was a crazy month where we:
- Participated in the Steam Visual Novel Fest with our biggest sale yet (20% off!).
- Debuted FIVE new game trailers in our first Yuri Kissaten Espresso (detailed here).
- Revealed two new games: Ryugaku Ren’ai and Toxic Yuri.
- Enjoyed tons of Steam Next Fest demos.
- Announced a new Airship character who was definitely not just an April Fool’s joke.
- Announced a new Airship character who was actually, shockingly real.
- And, of course, exhibited in our first live game event ever, the Game Pavilion! It even had a brief Steam event.
How’d the Game Pavilion Go?
It was very, very, very tiring, I’ll tell you that. Two people was not enough to run a multi-game booth for six hours with guiding demos and handing out flyers nearly nonstop.
But it was also extremely fun. We went out there and spread the word of Yuri Kissaten as one of the only foreigner-run booths in the entire Game Pavilion, and even one of the only openly LGBTQ+ games featured. Even with all those differences, we weren’t treated any differently. It was a great experience to be a part of a hundred other indie game developers showing off the fruits of their passion projects. Our booth neighbors showing off this game I loosely title as “Strange Sprite Posing Love Adventure” were awesome to talk to and helped us out with some inevitable first-timer problems.
I (Bea) didn’t get to explore the other games enough, due to near-constant hustling, dissapointingly. Most of my interactions with other developers came when they went to the Yuri Kissaten booth to talk to us! That part was sad because I really wanted to check out some of the other narrative games at the event such as BatteryNote and Danchi Days, but there were so many people playing our demos and asking us about our games that we had no time to split off for long.
In the end, we made less of an impact than I hoped simply because only one of our three demos was in Japanese; only a single person played the Ryugaku Ren’ai prototype demo, and everyone else played Love is in the Airship. The Japan-set games naturally had the most interest, but no Japanese demo meant a little bit less hype. And that’s okay! This whole event was a trial run, our first attempt.
Ryugaku Ren’ai, for instance, isn’t coming out until April 2027. There’s at least 8 more in-person game events in Japan between now and then, and we’ll keep showing the game off. Now that we learned what’s ACTUALLY required to adequately run a game booth, it’s going to be that much better in the future.
For now, I’m just excited to have talked to many dozens, maybe 100+ people and gotten them aware of just how big a deal Yuri Kissaten is going to be.
Ryugaku Ren’ai Teaser
Looking Forward
- Our next Patreon Bonus Post covers the cold, hard finances on what it’ll take for Yuri Kissaten to become a full-time game studio. Subscribe for $3+ for that post and many more.
- The Japanese localization of Love is in the Airship will release in April!
- The Love is in the Airship’s first major content update is set for a mid-May release. You But Good will be your fourth romance option!
- Our fourth 5 for ’25 game announcement looms on the horizon…
5 for ’25 Status
{List the 5 games and their status, nothing else, just a quick thing}
- Winter Heat – mid-development
- Toxic Yuri – very early development
- Ryugaku Ren’ai – prototype demo done, seeking funding
- ??? – announcement looms
- ??? – ???
Closing Cup
