Side Story Update & Apology (Release Scheduled for Jan 10)

Hi everyone, this is LactoQuest.

I’m really sorry I haven’t been able to interact and chat with you much lately. My schedule has been extremely tight, and I’ve been pouring almost all of my time into development, so updates have been pretty rare. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

First, an update on progress: the side story is finished, and I’m currently focusing on testing and translation.

I also owe you an apology—when I previously mentioned January 9, I had the date wrong. After confirming with the platform, the official release date is January 10. I’m truly sorry for making you wait one extra day.

Even though the game is completed, I don’t feel relieved. If anything, I feel even more worried and pressured. Maybe it’s because I’ve been under high stress for so long, but my inspiration doesn’t feel as smooth as it used to. I get stuck on the same issues for a long time, and it’s harder than before to find a breakthrough.
I still remember working on the main game back in 2024—my experience was basically zero, and the challenges were honestly even bigger than they are now. But I’d often wake up after sleep with a solution suddenly popping into my head. These “lightbulb moments” have become much rarer lately, and sleep is now filled more with anxiety and pressure…

The side story’s total playtime is roughly 3–4 hours. This is my first time making a shorter title, so I can’t say I’m fully confident about the pacing, length, and overall structure. Writing a short game is completely different from writing a long one, so I simplified the systems and tried my best to make the pacing faster and the content more focused.
Also, since this is a smaller follow-up to the main game, the overall buildup won’t be as extensive as a full-length title. I hope you can understand that.

This title has 4 endings in total, including 1 pure love ending.
To be honest, I’ve never been the kind of creator who feels strongly confident in their own work. The only way I know to push quality is to pour all my time into it. So I want to ask you for one thing—please lower your expectations a little. If you end up having fun, that alone would mean everything to me.

About the price / access: even though this release adds a lot of new CG and in many ways is almost like rebuilding the game from the ground up, the original purpose of the side story was to give something back for your continued support. Since Patreon also isn’t a great place to sell R18 works directly—and I don’t want to create a separate new membership tier just for this—I decided to include it in the $3.99 membership tier instead.
Thank you so much for supporting me, for playing my work, and for being so patient and understanding.

What’s next: after launch, I’ll set aside about one week for bug fixes, Q&A, and necessary updates/maintenance. After that, I’ll go all-in on developing Stigma of Corruption.
A lot of the small ideas in this side story are also experiments and validation for the systems and mechanics of Stigma of Corruption. If something works well and players accept it, I’ll bring it into the new game and expand it further.

I also left plenty of room to expand the side story’s framework. If you truly love it, I may consider a future 2.0 version—such as a more complete video-style walkie-talkie presentation, more puzzle stages, more hidden events, and additional CG.
That said, even if I do it, it would only happen after Stigma of Corruption is released. I don’t want to make casual promises right now, so all I can say is: if I have the capacity and it truly feels worth doing, I’ll seriously consider it.

Over the next 3 days, I’ll finish translations for all three languages, and then hand them over to professional proofreaders to push the quality even higher. Thank you again for your continued support and patience.

Finally, a quick progress update on Stigma of Corruption: the pure love CG is complete, and both the Merchant route and the Blacksmith route are about 50% finished. If I can maintain the same workload and pace as I did in December, finishing within Q1 is still very achievable.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope in the new year you’ll get to play all the games you’ve been looking forward to. Sorry this greeting is a bit late!

I’ll keep working hard.
Thank you so much—truly.