Only a few more days until August 26 when we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of our first VN SHINRAI – Broken Beyond Despair. And, of course, when we plan to publish our latest project, its direct follow-up SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair!
In case this should be the first time you’re hearing of it, you can learn all you need to know in the Saku section on this website, or on the store pages over on itch.io and Steam (where you could also add it to your wishlist, so you’ll be notified the moment it’s out)!
Now, given that the release and anniversary celebrations are right around the corner, we’ve obviously been very busy with the final preparations. I’ve made some updates to the website (although most of them will only go live on the 26th), started preparing the posts for the big day, and begun working on the instruction manual. Which technically isn’t necessary for a kinetic VN like Saku, because there just isn’t much in terms of gameplay features to explain, but still… I made manuals for our first two projects and it’s something I truly enjoy doing, so I wanted to have one for Saku as well! It’ll just not be as long I guess…
Anyway, all the really important stuff is pretty much good to go and we will definitely get the last couple things done before Wednesday. I’m just hoping the same will be true for Valve. If you’ve read last week’s blog post, you may remember me stating that I hope they won’t leave us hanging until this Saturday. Well, they’ve left us hanging. I’m used to their build review process taking longer than the 3 to 5 business days (7 to account for adjustments) that they say it typically does, so we kept that in mind and tried to account for it, but Saku still hasn’t been approved for release… which is the reason I still haven’t made an “official” release date announcement yet.
I mean, we will definitely release Saku on itch on the 26th, but as long as we don’t have the final confirmation from Valve, I sadly can’t make the same claim about the Steam release. Naturally, that has me pretty antsy, but there’s not much we can do about it. We have already done everything we can. The game works from start to finish, all content is there, the achievements unlock as intended, we’ve fulfilled all the other release requirements and are technically locked in for the 26th within Steamworks, and we’ve fixed the tiny issues they pointed out during an earlier review, so yeah… all that’s really left now is for someone to finally give it one more quick glance to confirm we’ve fixed said issues. Let’s hope that’ll happen on Monday or Tuesday, then >_<
In the meantime, I guess I’ll just continue working on that manual and some other things to calm my nerves, ahahah…
As for you, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until Wednesday, take care!
