Steam Early Access Release! (alpha 0.5)

      11 Comments on Steam Early Access Release! (alpha 0.5)

NEW FEATURES AND CONTENT IN THIS RELEASE:

☆ Shinto Shrine location

A new Shinto shrine map is added to the game. It can be used for dating activities, buying Shinto amulets, and catching bamboo squirrels (they can be exchanged for money at higher rates than regular park squirrels).

The map contains the main shrine buildings (haiden & honden), water purification pavilion (temizuya), auxiliary shrines and buildings, wooden and stone lanterns, a sacred rock, an amulet shop. All models and designs in this location are accurate recreations of contemporary Japanese Shinto architecture.

You can also obtain pine cones in this map (occasionally drop from pine trees) and put them on display in your apartment.

☆ Omamori, omikuji, and new “luck” feature

In the Shinto shrine location you can buy two types of amulets: omikuji and omamori. They both affect your luck, but work differently:

  • Omikuji are fortune-telling paper strips granting you one of possible luck or curse effects for one day. You cannot know what effect you’ll get until omikuji is opened. If you open a sealed omikuji, it takes effect immediately and goes into your “amulet” equipment slot, overriding all omamori effects (if you had any). Activated omikuji will disappear automatically next day.
  • Omamori are amulets granting you a certain kind of luck. They cost a lot more than omikuji, but you can choose what luck effect you want and can equip or remove them from equipment slot as you wish. Omamori are depleted every time their luck is used, and lose their effect after reaching 0%.

Omamori/omikuji effects:

  1. romantic luck: all your romantic interactions will give you increased double scores (up to 50 points per interaction); romantic curse: all romantic relationships will give -1 score.
  2. shopping luck: all prices in shops are decreased by 25%; shopping curse: all prices are increased by 50%. These amulets are useful for buying expensive items.
  3. cooking luck: quality of all cooked food will always be 100% (this doesn’t affect burned food); cooking curse: all recipes will result in burned food. By using these amulets you can easily unlock full recipes instead of trying to figure out all optional ingredients on your own. But if you get cooking curse it’s better to go to a cafe that day.

☆ Beauty Salon

A new beauty salon is open next to the Taiyaki Shop. You can change hairstyle and hair color for your character using the chair closer to the entrance, and change your girlfriend’s hairstyle using the second chair. In total there are 7 different hairstyles (#7 with two small tails on sides of the head is new, added in this update). More hairstyles will be added in future updates.

☆ New accessories

  • Glasses (3 colors) – in the Fashion Store.

☆ New food and recipes

  • Curry recipes: pork curry, chicken curry, katsu curry, chicken katsu curry, vegetable curry, and seafood curry.
  • Tonkatsu and chicken katsu recipes.
  • Chocolate baum and matcha baum (convenience store).
  • Mikan ( convenience store).
  • Panko and curry mix (convenience store, used for cooking).

☆ Faster UI

  • Sprites for item previews are now loaded asynchronously, and all lists for item names and descriptions are cached in memory. Thanks to this, inventory, shops, gachapons, recipe book, cafe menus, messages now open significantly faster (in most cases instantly).

☆ Other additions and improvements

  • Several equipment slots in your girlfriend’s inventory are now locked until you reach a certain relationship level – you can check required level by clicking on locked slots.
  • Locked equipment slots are now explicitly marked by “lock” icons.
  • Serving and removing food from table in your apartment is now done through inventory (you still can put food on table directly from hands if you put it in your hands slot previously).
  • Improved shader for glass windows – now it lets light to go through glass.
  • Improved textures for all umbrellas.
  • Fixed the bug that occasionally disabled AI of your girlfriend if you used computer desk chair.
  • Fixed the bug with incorrect hands animation that happened if you used smartphone while holding leek.

☆ Translations and dating dialogues

  • All translations are updated according to their current status in the wiki.
  • Additional dating dialogues.
  • Additional translations for UI texts.

11 thoughts on “Steam Early Access Release! (alpha 0.5)

  1. April Wyessa Hicks

    Can at least please just put it on play store please I am begging for you to put it on google play store on our phones because I don’t have a laptop yet until 2019

    Reply
    1. Laika Post author

      In 2019 the game still will be right in the middle of active development, so it’s not too late at all.

      It will be released on Google Play this year, no worries. ^^

      Reply
  2. Baka

    I have a question! Back in October blog post, there was mentioned about development roadmap. In roadmap was information about Shinto location that it will contain food, sovenir stalls, area-specific activities etc. and in this update we have none of these things. Wil it be updated someday?

    Reply
    1. Laika Post author

      That development roadmap was a part of my plan of distributing the game for free and funding it through Patreon. All those plans and development roadmaps were cancelled, because the Patreon idea didn’t work at all.

      Since the game is distributed now through Steam Early Access, I’m going to listen to comments and suggestions from people from Steam community, and will implement new features taking their comments into account. That’s why some planned game features and development goals may change.

      The Shinto area is not final, nothing is final in the game at this point, there will be more content added to it in the future. If you have any ideas on how that area can be improved, please post your ideas right here.

      Reply
  3. Koibito Chan

    So I just bought your game on Steam Early Access and I love the game thus far. But I just wanted to say a few things I noticed right away is camera rotation is very slow, and there was no way to jump, as far as the character goes. I think that it would be good to work on those when you can, and maybe soon allow for the player to work for more yen 🙂

    I look forward to the game’s progress and personally enjoyed the yandere simulator arcade games you added in!

    I would also like to ask if there are any volunteer positions you need on your team for 3D modeling or storyboard or such.

    Reply
    1. Laika Post author

      Thank you. Working in cafe to earn money is planned for one of future updates.

      As to help, I’m in permanent search of translators, so if you know any other languages apart from English, you can help by translating game texts. All translations are done online in a wiki, so it’s very easy to contribute something even if you have just a few free minutes per day or per week.

      All other work, like 3D modelling, requires a lot of dedication and free time, so I’m not sure if you would be interested in that? It would be cool if you could create some 3D models, but if you want to volunteer for that, it’s better to be prepared to invest a lot of your time in it, and then yet more time to redo and fix your work, because fixing stuff becomes inevitable every now and then as the game develops.

      Reply
        1. Laika Post author

          Download links are on the right. Download archive on your computer, unpack it, and double click on executable file. That’s it. Please describe what exactly you have difficulties with.

          Reply

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