Devlog - May 2025

Hello Everyone!

We have some news to share, and we also want to update you about progress in development. We’ll also adjust the release schedule a little.

Stretch Goals

First, let’s talk about stretch goals from our crowdfunding campaign. New pledges are trickling in very slowly, so from them alone it’d take a lot of time to reach any new goals. However, as we mentioned before, we’ll also use funds from Patreon to fund stretch goals.

Everything above $1000 from our Patreon will be counted toward reaching the stretch goals. It’s above $1000 because when we were estimating budgets required to do stretch goals, we already included ~$800 that we are getting from Patreon. Of course, because Patreon funds are a recurring source of funds, we’ll also count them differently. To make things simple, we’ll simply multiply them by ten. So if our pledges on Patreon reach $1250, we’ll count it as $2500 toward the stretch goals.

We’re almost at the Amy and Cole stretch goal, so we’re basically considering it as reached and already started planning their route. However, we’ll add it to the game as an update after the release on Steam. The same goes for other future stretch goals we reach.

Initially, we wanted to release the game in Early Access, polish it, and add stretch goals during the Early Access phase. However, the publisher advised us that doing Early Access will negatively impact our sales, unless we plan for Bloodcrave to stay in Early Access for over a year. But as our original plan was to do it only for a few months and we don’t want to artificially extend it, we decided to go with full release in Oct-Nov.

Kickstarter

If you backed our Kickstarter, we’ll publish an update there too. Long story short, we’ll send out codes to the backers at the Reconnaissance tier and above on Monday. Others will get Steam codes on June 30th.

Expanded Team

We hired an extra artist who will be an assistant for our lead artist/character designer, who designs our characters, draws sprites, and does lineart for scenes. It should help with art output significantly.

We also hired an extra writer, but onboarding takes longer than expected, so the first scenes written by them will probably be added in June.

Builds Release Schedule

In April, we moved to weekly releases. It improved our productivity, and overall, we find it a good change. Working with smaller batches helped us organize work better. However, we feel that we need to make a small adjustment. Instead of weekly releases, we will have releases every ~10 days. Having a week for release leaves little room for error, so we often had to delay releases for a few days. With 10 days, it should be much easier to keep the deadline.

Therefore, from now on, we’ll release builds on the 10th, 20th, and the last day of each month. The releases on 10th and 20th will be partial releases meaning that they might include unfinished scenes (missing routes/variants) while the releases on the last day will be full releases and we’ll aim to have all scenes fully finished in those builds (of course we might add voice acting and animations to them later).

Schedule

• May 20th: Kurt-themed release.

• May 31st: The release of the full monthly build. It’ll be villain/plot themed. Adding the last key events in Week 2, scene with Sarah, and probably a new Twins scene.

• June 10th: Violet-themed release.