Hiya patrons!
We’ve made it through the first quarter of the year and it’s finally starting to feel like spring is here 🥳 We hope you’ve been well and are seeing sunnier days.
Thank you all for waiting a couple more days for this update as well! We wanted to take a bit more time with this one to address some questions and concerns we saw after the Chapter 1 Preview Release (more on that down below) and appreciate your patience.
Lots has happened this month, so I won’t keep you waiting any longer - let’s get into it!
🎂 Happy Birthday, Mhin
We celebrated Mhin’s birthday on April 10th!
To absolutely no one’s surprise, they’re not big on birthday parties, but they seemed to have the purr-fect celebration with the stray cats along the riverbank!Thank you for all the well wishes and virtual birthday sweets! Mhin may not show it (as a tsundere and an Aries), but I promise they’re grateful behind their fiery exterior 🤭
🛠️ April 2026 Dev Snapshot
Narrative
Full Game – Writing | ⚒️ 96% Drafted, 78% through final passes
Full Game – VO Prep | ⚒️ In Progress, scene + line selects underway for remaining characters
Voice Acting
Full Game – VO Recording | VO recorded for 3 characters so far
Art
Full Game – CGs & BGs | ⚒️ ~70% Complete
Chapter 1 – CG & UI Art | ⚒️ 96% Complete, final polish in progress
Chapter 2 – CG & UI Art | ⚒️ 75% Complete
Systems & Testing
Full Game – Systems/Code | ⚒️ 81% Complete, revamped UI in progress
Localization Planning | ⚒️ In Progress (Chinese Prologue localization going through a second round - more on that down below!)
Release Plan
Chapter 1 Preview - Early Access | 🔓 Launched December 5, 2025 for qualifying backer tiers
Chapter 1 Preview - General Access | 🔓 Launched December 5, 2025 for all other backer tiers
Chapter 1 Preview - Patreon Access | 🔓 Launched April 23, 2026 for paid Patrons
Full Game – Public Release | ⏳ Targeting 2026 (exact quarter TBD)
We had quite the eventful April with the Chapter 1 Preview release on the 23rd!
In case you missed it, we initially released the Chapter 1 Preview back in December 2025 as a gift to our Kickstarter backers after our delay announcement. After all the love they gave us in December, we decided to release it here on Patreon so that more of you could experience it! You can check out this post for more information on how to access it.
We also lifted our streaming/posting embargo, so you’re welcome to post about the CH1 Preview after you finish it or check out other fan playthroughs if you don’t plan on playing it yourself just yet! We hope you enjoy getting to chat with more fans about TOUCHSTARVED now that more content is accessible 🥳
❤️ A Big Thank You!
For those who have had the chance to play the CH1 Preview, thank you, from the bottom of our hearts. If we’re being honest, we were a little nervous about releasing this publicly, but the reception has been so constructive and thoughtful. We’re sharing all your positive messages about the music and art to their respective teams! 🫶
We truly appreciate hearing from everyone - both those who enjoyed parts of the game and those who felt that there were areas of improvement. The constructive criticism and consideration you put into your comments truly reflects what a supportive community you are and we’re eternally grateful.
We also want to give an extra shoutout to our Tip Jar Patrons who continually support us with their subscription! Your interest and investment in our team does not go unnoticed 🥹 Your belief in us means everything, and we’ll continue learning and improving to make the final game an experience you can be proud of!
📄 A New Feedback Form
Speaking of improvement, we want to collect more of your thoughtful feedback! So, we created a dedicated form (separate from the existing bug report form) for our team to better understand your experiences and improve our development process. Links down below!
Feedback Form: For more qualitative/general feedback for the team
Bug Report Form: For more technical concerns and issues
We look forward to reading your submissions and appreciate every contribution you make to help shape TOUCHSTARVED into the best experience it can be!
🌟 Commonly Asked Questions/Concerns
As we eagerly await your new Feedback form submissions, we first wanted to address some major concerns we saw floating around after the CH1 Preview release. Here are some responses ⬇️
Re: CH1 Preview’s Limited Choices
We’ve seen some confusion re: the limited choices in the Chapter 1 Preview and wanted to clarify that this is due to the build being incompatible with the Demo/Prologue saves.
Since we put the Chapter 1 Preview together as an extra treat after the delay announcement, we had to bundle all the different variables and choices from the Demo into 2 very basic preset profiles per character. This was done so our small tech team could handle QA testing and keep the scope of this quick project manageable before directing our focus back on the full game!
We can see how these basic profiles may have flattened the experience and failed to capture the effects of player choices though. Rest assured, the full game will reflect your choices and won’t contain any preset profiles at all.
Re: CH1 Preview’s Polish and Pacing
We’ve seen some concerns re: the polish and pacing in certain routes and wanted to reassure you that the CH1 Preview is an old build we released on Kickstarter in December 2025 and we’re still tweaking things as we go!
Just like our progress from previous build releases and patches, we are continuously developing and improving the game, and we’ve made a lot of progress since putting out the Preview. There are still scripts going through additional stages of drafting before being reviewed by our editor and polished. And art, UI, and other areas are also undergoing upgrades and improvements as we move through development.
This is only Chapter 1 so far and there’s still so much we’ve been cooking up! While it may seem like some routes have more illustrations and polish than others, Chapter 1 is a small part of the greater experience of the game, and every route will receive the love and care it deserves.
Re: The Full Game - At what point in development are you now?
We’re still on track to complete the game by the end of the year and will continue to regularly update our progress in the Monthly posts! If there are any delays, we’ll be sure to let you know as soon as possible.
Our monthly updates will also contain more details into our development, which include tasks we’ve worked on for the month, initiatives we’re looking to start, and deep dives into our production process. Speaking of, don’t forget to see below for this month’s update!
🤫 A Gentle Reminder on Spoilers
Now that Chapter 1 content will be floating around more on social media, we kindly ask that you please do the following:
Spoiler tag and add warnings to any streams, videos, fanart, and text posts you publish
Refrain from commenting spoilers under our social media posts
Engage appropriately with other fan posts (eg. if the post doesn’t specify that it’s spoiler-friendly, please don’t comment anything revealing)
Direct any spoiler-y feedback to the new feedback form. This way, you can express all your thoughts to the team without affecting other fans reading through!
We appreciate everyone playing their part in having thoughtful and considerate conversations about the game!
Now that that’s covered, let’s get into the juicy stuff!
Development Updates
🛠️ Unity Engine & Naninovel Extension Upgrade Update
As we mentioned in our previous update, our tech team spent the past 2 months upgrading our Unity engine. For those of you who are tech savvy and/or game engineers, you probably know how much of a hurdle it is to move an entire branch over to a new engine edition (huge shout out to our programmers! pls don’t hate me, ily 😖). Now we’re in the weeds of fixing things that have broken along the way!
I know what you’re thinking - “YOU UPDATED YOUR ENTIRE ENGINE?! 😱” And yeah…. 😅 We love using the Naninovel extension and it’s done wonders for us, but as with all technology, old versions of software lose support over time. With this upgrade, we were able to maintain tech support from Naninovel and its community, and introduce new functionality that the old version never had!
Text animation, asynchronous asset movements, and more are all things we felt we needed to fully polish this game. And don’t worry, we’re actively doing tests on all these new features! We’ll be showing you some of these effects in future updates since we’re spending a lot of our latter months of development making sure tech is in tip-top shape, so be on the lookout!
✨ UI Testing and Implementation
New UI has been mostly implemented and we’re moving into UI testing!
If anyone is familiar with UI/UX, you’ll know how much of UI design and implementation is a constant process of testing and tweaking. We’ll be spending the next few weeks nailing down and finalizing our new UI like the features below!
New Loading Screen
WE NO LONGER HAVE THE UGLY DEFAULT GREY LOADING SCREEN WOOHOO! BEGONE!
Testing Rewind Functionality
We’re also looking into sprucing up an existing feature to make it more of a seamless part of your gameplay! The rewind functionality can oftentimes be buggy, hard to use, and way too easy to click accidentally.
We’re hoping to provide a limitation and visual element to rewind the rewind functionality (similar to Life is Strange) as a part of the gameplay experience. It’s still a work in progress (no promises that it’ll be complete!), but these are the kinds of tests we’re doing in tech development.
🇨🇳 Localization in CN Underway
We touched on this briefly before, but TOUCHSTARVED will be getting Chinese localization! 🥳 Currently, our CN partners are working on localizing Demo 2.0 and our CN Steam page.
So far, we’ve received a localization script and we’re testing implementation. We’re running into a few bugs however, so we’re now moving onto round two of localization! With these implementation and change sprints, we’re hoping that full game localization will go very smoothly! There is SO MUCH work that goes into localization, and we can get into the details in a future update if anyone is interested.
Now that we’ve covered some more technical updates, let’s get into the fun stuff 🤭 (okay tech is also fun, I just like seeing pretty pictures more LOL)
🎨 Art Previews
Before we move on from Mhin’s birthday, here’s another little treat from our Art Team! Usually when I picture Mhin, they’ve got a little frown on their face, so I’m extra soft for this lineart of them 🥺 Their wide eyes and lashes… I know they’d hate it, but god I wanna squish them 😭
Next up, we’ve got another background preview! Not sure what actually happened here, but yikes 😬 I would not wanna be on clean-up duty after this!
Last but not least, here’s one last gift from our partners at Knights of the Light Table! Enjoy this animation rough of Mhin doing what they do best - kicking Soulless ass 🤭
💌 Till Next Time
And with that, that’s a wrap on this one! ☺️
Thank you all for the love and support, we’ll see ya in the next one 😉 (and I swear, I’ll get the end-of-May update actually posted end of May 😅 thanks again for the patience on this beefier belated April post! 🙏)
👀 Got Questions?
You can always reach us:
via comments
With love (and Chapter 1 streams to watch)— Sofi and the Red Spring Studio Team