Hi again!

Waifu Collector version 1.0.01, the first update to the game since release, is here, with a few little tweaks in response to your feedback and a bug fix that we wanted to make sure got in ASAP. The change list is as follows:

Card Modifications:
Jane Doe SSR #2 - reworked text to avoid run-off
Yara SR #1 - reworked text and fixed dangling new line
Yara SR #3 - added missing new line tag

Bugfix:
Fixed an issue where the "Getting Started" (first waifu collected in game) achievement could be missed, and, less likely, other card-counting achievements. If this issue has affected you these achievements should unlock correctly next time you visit your home area.

Thank you for playing Waifu Collector!

Hello again!

Waifu Collector has now been released and should be for sale to adult gamers everywhere. If you see any issues, please drop us an email (via the address on the store page) or post in the Steam discussion forums for the game. This is the first time we've done this on Steam, so we may well have messed it up! :)

We sent out a dozen or so Curator Connect copies and squashed a few more bugs since you last heard from us, as well as finishing off the partly completed waifu we mentioned and squeezing in one more! That brings the total at release to 19 collectible waifus and well over 200 inventory items ("cards")!

We've added some "sticky" posts to the Steam discussions, so if you have any questions about the game then please look there first. There are posts there on controls and basic card drop mechanics, for example.

We hope you enjoy the game and we're looking forward to hearing from you.

Thank you again for your interest in Waifu Collector! :)

Hello again!

We have the best news this week: Waifu Collector's release date has been announced! We'll be releasing the game at the end of the month, on September 30th (or October 1st, depending on where you live). Hooray!

The game will be priced at USD$3.99 with a 15% launch discount, and using Valve's recommended pricing for other currencies in most cases. The soundtrack DLC will be USD$0.99, and there will be a "Waifu Collector - Soundtrack Edition" bundle featuring the game and soundtrack together at a reduced price. It's the first time we've released on Steam, but we think we have it set up so everything should be available at the same time. :)

We'll soon add a little more in-depth information on the game in the form of "sticky" posts in the Waifu Collector Steam discussion forums. We want to do this for two reasons. First, to support people who buy the game and have any questions while they're playing, or just want to learn more about how it works. And second, to try to dissuade people who might not like some of the design decisions or game systems from buying the game. We'd love it if everyone who has added Waifu Collector to their wishlist actually ends up buying and loving it, but we're realistic enough to know that some of the decisions we've made won't be for everybody. So we want to be transparent about how it works.

We've managed to work around most of the issues we saw with card drops and have added in some in-game functionality to allow the player to specify a redrop attempt in some situations. Don't use this too often, though, as the goddesses don't like you questioning their authority! Our last few days of tests have been 100% with requested drops happening properly, so we're confident that you won't need to hassle the goddesses very often; we hope not at all.

We also finished off the extra waifu we mentioned last week and added her to the current Steam build, and then started work on another. We're not sure if the latest one will be finished in time for inclusion in the release version, but we'll try!

Okay, that's enough from us for now. We'll get back to designing waifus and fixing up any more little niggles we can find before release! We'll post again next week if we have any news to share, otherwise we'll see you at the end of the month! :)

If you've contacted us regarding a review key then don't worry; over the next few days we'll take a look through the requests we've received and send out keys to any review groups or curators that we think are suitable. We'll be taking another look through the Curator Connect programme soon, too, and sending out a few more to any curators who jump out at us there.

Thank you again for your interest in Waifu Collector! :)

Hello again!

We're still waiting on Valve support to get back to us with regard to the card drop issue we've been working on. Our recent testing has had the daily card drops working flawlessly, but every now and then there's a hiccup and some cards fail to drop, and we're trying to work out why.

In the meantime we've been working on a few extra dialogue branches and another of the waifus originally planned for post-release, though she's not quite ready yet this week.

The biggest unexpected addition this week is the Linux build. We're using Unity for development of Waifu Collector and always planned to release it on Linux if doing so wasn't too difficult, but we're Windows users for the most part and don't have much experience with Unity on Linux (and especially Steam). Since we had a bit of time early in the week we gave it a shot, anyway.

We were pleasantly surprised to be able to download and play the first build we made on Ubuntu desktop 20.04.1 LTS in a VM! It was a bit slow and clunky with a single virtual CPU core, 127 MB video RAM, and 8GB system RAM for the whole machine, but it worked. Hooray!

Unfortunately we're too small a team to be able to test it on any more flavours and versions, but given that in this case it "just worked", we're relatively confident that as long as you're using a 64-bit Linux release that can comfortably run other modern Unity games, you should be able to play Waifu Collector as well. A 64-bit Linux depot has now been added to all of the Waifu Collector packages for release, and the store page system requirements have been updated.

We'd love to be able to release on Mac, but we don't even know where to begin with that one!

We'll issue another update once we have more news on the card drop issue. We're just waiting on that issue to be resolved and we'll be ready to go, so fingers crossed we get some feedback soon.

Thank you again for your interest in Waifu Collector! :)

Hello again!

In the last week we've added a few more QoL features and tidied up more typos, image glitches, and a hard-to-track-down mistagged bit of text. It doesn't sound like much, we know, but it all adds up! Most importantly, we've been working on the outstanding card drop issue that's been plaguing us the last few weeks and is delaying release, but it's been working a lot better in the last few days. We're still waiting on a bit of feedback from Valve Support, but we're hopeful the release isn't too far off now.

As is becoming normal for these updates, we're happy to say that another of the waifus scheduled for a post-release update was brought forward and added to the development build on Steam yesterday. Hooray for more waifus!

We'll issue another update once we have more news.

Thank you again for your interest in Waifu Collector! :)

Hello again!

We weren't really intending to provide updates on a weekly basis during this period, but somehow it's turned out that way, so here we are with another one about a week after the last.

QA is still progressing, with bug squashing and manuscript editing occurring on a daily basis. A draft implementation of the duplicate-card-exchange feature we mentioned in last week's update has been added to the current development build and seems to be working well, with no obvious ways to lose your hard-earned cards and not receive anything in exchange. The original idea was that you'd be able to swap a day's worth of Tier 1 cards for a single Tier 2 card, or a day's worth of Tier 2 cards for a single Tier 3 card, but we ended up making the rates more evenly distributed instead. We'll keep playing with them to make sure we're happy with the overall accrual rate of the different tiers.

We still don't have a solid release date, but we've asked Valve support for help in order for us to try to work out the issue we mentioned in the last couple of updates, so we're hoping it can be resolved soon. As part of this work we've actually restructured how the daily card drops work, which should mean that anyone who doesn't care about the VN aspects (or has already read all of the script) can skip through it much more quickly and receive their daily cards in considerably less time than we'd previously planned. We'll provide more detail on how all of that stuff works in a discussion post around release time.

Since this is all taking a little longer than we'd hoped, another of the waifus scheduled for a post-release update was brought forward and added to the development build on Steam yesterday. Hooray!

We'll issue another update once we have more news.

Thank you again for your interest in Waifu Collector! :)

Hello again!

Our QA is progressing on a daily basis. We've squashed some bugs, corrected some typos, and found some areas where some additional content or features were needed, so we've been working on adding those as well.

One feature we started working on during a brief QA hiatus earlier this week was originally in our post-release schedule: a way to exchange duplicates of lower-tier cards for higher-tier cards. We think we've found a simple way forward with this, so we're hopeful to have it in for the first public release, but we want to ensure it gets tested thoroughly; at the moment there's no way for the game to remove items from your inventory, so adding this introduces a lot of possibilities for things to go wrong. We'll keep working on it for now, anyway, and if it's not complete by release time, we're pretty sure it'll be in the first free post-release update.

We still don't have a solid release date yet -- that pesky bug we mentioned last week still hasn't been eliminated -- but while we continue to work on issues and areas for improvement discovered during testing, we're also slowly working through the backlog of designed-but-not-yet-implemented waifus; we added another one in a development build earlier this week and she's just been uploaded to the Steam build today. Hooray!

Fingers crossed we'll have some good news again next week.

Thank you again for your interest in Waifu Collector! :)

Hello again!

We have some great news: our test build passed Valve's review and we're now able to release Waifu Collector as soon as our internal QA is completed and we're happy with the game's state.

We've squashed a good collection of bugs since our last update and tweaked some internals, but there's still a way to go. Since we don't want to be one of those dev teams that posts release dates and always misses them, we're going to hold off a little longer -- at least until we've managed to fix one particular issue we encountered yesterday, anyway.

The soundtrack has also passed review, both of the store page and the test build we sent to Valve, so it will release at the same time as the game. It's already linked to the parent store page, so feel free to take a look.

We'll post again as soon as we have set a public release date.

Thank you again for your interest in Waifu Collector! :)

Hello everyone!

This is our first public announcement, so please go easy on us. :)

We just wanted to give you a quick update on the state of the game, since so far we've been digital hermits.

Waifu Collector feature development was completed late last week. A test build has been submitted to Valve for approval, but since this is our first Steam game we're sort of expecting to have to do some rework. We'll see! We're currently spending our time playtesting, editing, touching up, and adjusting, as well as fixing any bugs we find.

The game currently features 13 waifus apart from the goddesses (and guide), each with approximately 10 cards to collect across different rarity tiers, as well as 16 "special" cards, and close to 50000 words of text across the VN sequences and card encounters. At the moment there are 161 marketable and tradable cards altogether. Nine more waifus are already planned to be added as free updates over the next few months, which should bring the total card count up to about 250.

A single Steam-tracked Stat has been implemented -- the number of waifu cards actually collected -- and 23 Steam Achievements have been implemented, with over half of them being hidden / secret achievements that we're hoping will add a bit more of a feeling of, well, achievement.

Controller support has been tested using an Xbox 360 controller and the game is completely playable using this: advancing text, skipping through text, etc. all work with buttons. We've had trouble getting the DPAD working for menu/choice selection, though, so at the moment it's left stick only for these. So while we actually think we meet the "Full Controller Support" definition, we've specified Partial Controller Support on the store page, since we're still not completely happy with it. Still, if you want to sit back and relax while you play with a controller, you can definitely do that!

A soundtrack featuring 23 tracks (mostly electronic / chill) has been produced and is also currently awaiting Valve approval.

We don't have a solid release date that we want to make public, but rest assured we want to see the game out in the next couple of months. If things go well with the Valve test build and our internal testing, then we'll bring it forward, but if we end up having to rework any major systems then it will take longer. We'll post another update once it's set.

Thank you for your interest in our game! :)