Tri City Monsters has funded at 141% with the help of 273 of you!  The total raised was $7,064!!

Firstly, I want to say thank you from the absolute bottom of my heart for helping me make this game.  For backers to trust and believe in the project to make pledges literally just makes my stupid little goblin heart swell.  I had someone pledge over $300.  I had an ARMY of $2 and $5 pledges that did so much heavy lifting together and everything in between.  I had snipers down at the last second putting pledges in.  It's insane!

Beyond pledges though, I want to specifically thank everyone who took time to play the game on itch, who wishlisted on steam, who talked about it on socials, who drew or made posts or wrote about it.  Your effort to get the game seen was HUGE.  And it WORKED.  TCM doesn't have a formal marketing budget- while I did save up and set aside some specific money this month for tumblr blaze posts and some other ad runs, the fact of the matter is that you guys did a ton of heavy lifting and I don't make the kind of money it would take to buy those numbers.  (Not a lot of indies do, that's how much you guys pushed).

As mentioned in during the campaign, I will be using Pledgebox to help me organize orders and move ahead with logistics way later down the line when we get to that point.  To reiterate some important dates, here's what the immediate future is kinda going to look like

• I'm happy to report that I've already got a head start on some of the digital rewards
• Backer surveys will go out towards the end of July at the earliest, I may push it back a little bit depending but I want to give Kickstarter the full 14 days to collect payments with some buffer.
• These surveys will be where you can choose variants for what products you purchased.  So if you backed for a daki, you'll be able to choose your character at this point.
• Digital rewards will begin filling in July as well.  I hope to have the discord space ready for you within a week or two (the tcm server is chill to hang out in anyway but a backer dedicated space will give you instant updates and banter with me as I'm working plus you'll be able to talk about love letter contents and pinups and stuff like that without a lot of worry about spoilers or anything.  I hope to see yall there soon!
• The wallpaper pack will be quick to follow this.
• I would like to finish all the love letters before I begin releasing them, right now that's also looking to be a late July delivery, possibly early August delivery.  I've gotten a couple done already and they're very fun to work on, I think yall will enjoy them a lot! >:3c
• Pinups will be on a longer time scale.  I have one of three artists confirmed (Atlas will be doing Mori's!) and we're going to go through their schedule to see what their timeframe looks like.   Regardless, you can expect updates on that as I make progress.
• As far as the physical merch, remember that fulfillment is slated to begin Q1 2024.  The process to produce physical goods is long and I want to have plenty of time to carefully go over samples and get through packing and shipping. 
• Also slated for Q1 is the prologue release!  The prologue will be one long introductory chapter featuring all three ROs and will segue into the route of your choosing.
• And then, my goal is to update the game each subsequent month with a chapter update to one character's route, cycling through all of them in turn until we can wrap them up.

SO this is my plan for the latter half of 2023 now that the Kickstarter is over and I took a long weekend to recover from the exhaustion of running a campaign of this size!  The Pledgebox will continue to sell TCM merch, including digital stretch goal access, for the next few months while I prepare all of this stuff.  If there's something you missed, you'll be able to add it to pick it up through TCM's Preorder Page and add it to your Kickstarter order.  (Please be sure to contact me if you have any questions or need clarification regarding the Pledgebox page, you can find me on discord 99% of the time (i'm pockatuck) or email tricitymonsters@gmail.com!)

As always, transparency is a huge priority for me so please expect more updates as all of these tasks get underway!

in TOTAL gratitude,

cloud/ sam