Kitsune Games

Goodbye Twitter

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Kitsune Games quit Twitter a while ago, but today we’ve made it official by removing all our Twitter links from this site. Instead of Twitter you can find us on Mastodon and Bluesky. You can find the Mastodon and Bluesky links for our staff in the contact section.

Kitsune Tails coming to Nintendo Switch

Sat, 12 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0300

Good news everyone: Kitsune Tails is officially coming to Nintendo Switch! It will launch on Nintendo Switch alongside PC (Windows, Linux) and PlayStation 4 and 5. To celebrate the news we’ve put together a new trailer for the game, showcasing Yuzu in different states of power up:

The earth power up has a straw hat which functions like a drill using breakdancing moves inspired by Samurai Champloo, while the snow fox’s ice power up shoots ice projectiles which freezes enemies into solid platforms. Finally there’s Yuzu as a tiny fox, a form she reverts to upon taking damage to give the player a chance to recover.

Which is your favorite? Let us know on Twitter by tweeting at @KitsuneGamesCom!

Magic and queer romance in Super Bernie World follow up Kitsune Tails

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Run, jump, and dash across a land inspired by Japanese mythology and experience
a story of magic and queer romance in this follow up to Super Bernie World.

Classic Platforming, Magic & Queer Romance

We’re proud to announce development of our upcoming title Kitsune Tails, a platformer styled after beloved classics steeped in Japanese mythology and diverse relationships, coming to PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, as well as Windows and Linux via Steam and itch.io.

Play as a young female kitsune, one of Inari’s fox-eared and bushy-tailed messengers, and embark on a hero’s journey that begins while delivering your first message. Experience a romantic encounter with a kindly sorceress who comes to your aid in a time of need. Explore the complicated relationship with your former mentor turned antagonist and uncover her reasons for sealing your love interest inside an elemental prison. Unlock powers that manifest as cute outfits to help you run, jump, and dash across five elemental worlds to save your love interest.

Features

Classic platforming action set in a land inspired by Japanese mythology
Explore five elemental worlds and various haunted houses
Learn new elemental powers and use them to find secrets and optional story content
Unlock a bonus ending by fully exploring the relationships between characters
Use cute outfits to power up, stomp around by stealing a giant boot from enemies
Defeat your haughty former mentor and her foxy gang of minions
Stomp on pangos to make them curl into a ball, pick them up, and kick them around
Carry lights through haunted houses to reveal secret doors and ward off ghosts

All original Super Bernie World devs are involved in the development, and we’re partnering with MidBoss LLC (2064: Read Only Memories) and console publisher Ratalaika Games to bring you Kitsune Tails. If you like what you see you can find out more at kitsunetails.com or by visiting the Steam store page, and of course you can always stay up-to-date by following us on Twitter.

Save the Day Using Cute Hats: Ultra Hat Dimension out now!

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0300

Ultra Hat Dimension, a puzzle game about adorable hats and getting punched for wearing them is now available on Steam and itch.io for Windows, Mac, and Linux for $4.99! Ratalaika Games has also ported Ultra Hat Dimension to all major consoles, available now on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and releasing on Nintendo Switch tomorrow, July 17.

Everything goes awry shortly after hat designer Bea arrives to accept her award for winning the annual hat design competition when the normally peaceful Spluffs turn violent and start punching anyone who wears a different hat! Featuring grid-based puzzles about maneuvering and displacement, Ultra Hat Dimension is a lovely jaunt through a gauntlet of fisticuffs.

Guide Bea through five seasonally themed floors consisting of 65 puzzles, and uncover the truth behind the terrible curse afflicting the Spluffs through the fully animated introductory cutscene and story intermissions between levels.

Kitsune Games publishes Super Bernie World

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0200

Following our official endorsement of Bernie Sanders, we’ve collaborated with Gamedevs for Bernie to present Super Bernie World, an electoral activist platformer rendered in classic NES style with nostalgic chiptunes available now for free on Steam for Windows and in your browser on itch.io.

Hit the campaign trail with Bernie, guiding him safely past MAGAmbas, Mitch Troopas, ICE Bullets, and Tiki Torchers. Find Vermont cheddar cheese to embiggen Bernie, pick up red roses he can toss to clear a path, and use the power of his iconic fist and “Not Me, Us” to become invincible. Collect votes across 12 states, avoiding defeat at the hands of two notable senators and a congressman before going up against the President of the United States himself.

This game is meant to raise awareness of Bernie Sanders’ platform and options supporters have to help. Political campaigns are costly not just in terms of money but also time and effort, especially for a candidate whose platform is built upon the power of #NotMeUs. As such, we’ve included information on ways to contribute right into the menu of Super Bernie World.

Kitsune Games and Gamedevs for Bernie believe Bernie Sanders is the best way forward for the United States. Whether you agree or not, we hope you’ll get out to vote when it’s your state’s turn. In the meantime, or if you’ve already voted, we hope you’ll enjoy what we’ve put together here.

To learn more about Bernie Sanders’ platform, please visit the Sanders campaign website, follow Bernie Sanders on Twitter, or check out #NotMeUs on social media platforms. For more information on Super Bernie World, follow Kitsune Games on Twitter.

Kitsune Games endorses Bernie Sanders for President

Sun, 02 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0200

Kitsune Games is officially endorsing Senator Bernie Sanders for President of the United States. As the primary field has narrowed it has become increasingly obvious to us that Sanders is the only viable choice to win the nomination and defeat Trump.

More than that, we feel his policies are the best way forward, not just for us, but for our community. Medicare for all is hugely important to everyone, from freelancers and gig economy workers, to self employed developers, to those in the LGBTQ+ community. Sanders is pro-union, pro-living wage, and wants to cancel student debt. Not only that, he has the strongest policy and record for protecting the lives and rights of the trans community, especially when it comes to healthcare access. And last but not least, his support for the Green New Deal makes him our best chance in the fight against climate change.

Senator Bernie Sanders has shown that he’s the candidate most willing and capable of fighting for the most vulnerable members of our community. If you can, please vote or caucus for Bernie, and consider donating or volunteering for his campaign as we have, especially if you’re in one of the early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.

If you’d like our help finding a way to volunteer for Bernie that suits you please join our Discord and message Njord, he can help you get set up.

Signed,

Emma Maassen, President
James Yarrow, CEO

The future of our games on Mac

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0300

Before we discuss the recent events surrounding Apple’s news for Mac users, I’d like to reassure our MidBoss players and Lore Finder backers on Mac that MidBoss will continue to be playable on Macs going forward, and Lore Finder will get a Mac release simultaneously with Windows and Linux.

As you may have heard, Apple’s new OS Catalina will require all applications to be notarized by Apple in order to run on end user machines. There will, for now, be ways to work around Gatekeeper in order to run non-notarized apps, although these methods will likely not be user friendly.

Additionally, Steam has announced that as of October 14, all new applications will need to be notarized by Apple. There’s some debate in developer communities as to whether or not Steam will simply disallow—or be unable to run—unsigned games after that date, or not.

Kitsune Games is committed to having our games available on as many operating systems as possible. However, Mac sales account for only 2% of our sales. Notarizing our software for Mac creates additional cost to maintain a developer account, but also to upgrade to more modern (and expensive) Mac hardware so we can notarize apps at all. Right now that math doesn’t add up for us.

To make matters worse, Apple has deprecated support for OpenGL, which all our games are based on. While OpenGL will continue to work, it’s possible the stability of OpenGL on Mac could degrade over the years. Third parties will likely come up with an OpenGL over Metal backend that we can use before that happens, but it’s just one more way Apple is being increasingly hostile to small independent developers and trying to push them off their platform.

What does this mean for our games?

MidBoss has already been released on Mac, and Lore Finder had Mac and Linux support as a stretch goal during its Kickstarter. We feel a responsibility towards our community, and so will continue supporting Mac for these two games. Unfortunately, while we hope to be able to create Mac ports for our other games such as Cat Slime, Ultra Hat Dimension, and other games we’ll create in the future; we just don’t know if we will be able to.

We take our promises seriously, which is why we’ll continue to evaluate the viability of putting our games on Mac on a case-by-case basis, but the way things stand now Mac support is not something we can promise beyond MidBoss and Lore Finder.

Apple’s consistently anti-developer attitude is making it harder and harder to be able to make our games accessible to fans who use Macs. We want our games to be playable on Macs, but increasingly, it seems that Apple doesn’t want us—or other small developers with limited resources—in their ecosystem.

MidBoss DLC in development, happy birthday MidBoss!

Sat, 25 May 2019 00:00:00 +0300

It’s MidBoss’ 2nd release anniversary, happy birthday MidBoss! Over the past two years MidBoss has had over 11 thousand players, which just blows my mind. It’s been a hell of a journey, but we’re here to tell you that journey isn’t quite over yet.

We’re excited to announce that we’re working on an upcoming aesthetics and randomizer DLC for MidBoss! This DLC will feature all new pixel art for all the monsters in the game, including idle animations. It’ll also add a randomizer mode which should address one of the most common pieces of feedback we receive; that MidBoss isn’t as replayable as other roguelikes.

The randomizer mode will mix up the order of enemies in the game by randomizing their sprites, stats, and abilities. There’ll be two ways to play the randomizer. One will add some sense of order to the randomness: you won’t see late game abilities on early game monsters, and monster stats make sense thematically. The other mode throws all sense out of the window; the first monster you encounter could have skills like Bone Spear, Fireball, or Stomp.

We don’t yet have a fixed timeframe for when the DLC will be done, but it is currently in development.

We’re also planning to add two new features for everyone, including players who don’t pick up the DLC. The first is special monsters, like the champion monsters in Diablo 2 and 3. These will have the same abilities and base stats as their kin, but will have special unique buffs that make them stronger and gives them access to unique powers. These buffs will transfer to you when possessing the creature, although they cannot be unlocked permanently.

The second is rank badges to incentivize playing New Game+ at higher difficulty through increasing the hazard boost option. Beating New Game+ at +20, +40, +60, +80, and +100 hazard boost will unlock a rank achievement and badge. These are bronze, silver, gold, master, and grandmaster respectively. Badges can be displayed on your death and victory cards to show the world what rank you’ve earned. To unlock master rank the game must be beaten on 1UP mode, and to unlock grandmaster the game must be beaten on hardcore mode.

We also intend to add some more seasonal events that’ll happen every year, and expand on the event system.

We feel these changes will take MidBoss to a place where players can keep enjoying the game for years to come.

Collect shamrocks in MidBoss Saint Patrick's Day Event

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0200

MidBoss version 1.4.0 is out now, marking the start of the Saint Patrick’s Day event, which will run until the 31st. Collect 25 shamrocks which drop from random enemies to permanently unlock the new Shamrock card border. MidBoss will be 55% off for the entire duration of the event on itch.io, so if you or any of your friends haven’t picked it up yet, now is a great time!

This new version also fixes several important bugs, including the return of the gold victory card border and the Soul Fatigue mechanic, and clarifications to tooltips for the Guard, Zap, and Shocking Grasp abilities. Check the instructions on how to update, or read a full description of changes in this version in the changelog.

Lore Finder Kickstarter wraps up, hits twice goal amount

Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0200

Our upcoming cosmic horror metroidvania Lore Finder has finished its 30 days on Kickstarter and raised nearly twice the initial $10,000 goal! A big thank you to all our supporters and fans who helped to make this a reality. Lore Finder now has a page on our website.

Lore Finder can be wishlisted on Steam.

About Lore Finder

Lore Finder is a modern queer reimagining of the cosmic horror genre, taking influences from the various games and literary works in the genre first inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, set in the latter half of the 20th century. It is the story of K.C. Morgan (a non-binary character) who is a Private Investigator turned Paranormal Investigator after the disappearance of their father, Richard Morgan, a professor and researcher at Boston University. Eventually, their search takes them to a mansion owned by the Wright family on an island off the New England Coast. Once there K.C. discovers that the residents and staff have been horribly corrupted by some twisted occult influence, the only clues as to their fate, and the fate of their father seems to be found within scrolls, written on human skin, filled with dark forbidden lore so terrible that it may rend the very fabric of reality itself.

Matters become even more disturbing once K.C. begins to explore the basement. Evidence of terrible, inhuman experiments lie discarded next to twisted bodies and implements of torture.

Alone, and facing terror, madness, and corruption, not only all around them, but also within their very soul, K.C. must work their way through the mansion, risking death, madness or worse in an attempt to uncover what happened to the inhabitants of the mansion, and their father.

Features

Traverse a changing world:
Individual rooms will transform and hold new surprises as you accumulate powers.
Find your own path:
Non-linear design encourages freeform, exploration-based, and self-directed progression. Complete sections of the game in what order you like.
Experience atmosphere:
From the dark and oppressive living areas, to the impersonal basement with its cold steel and mortar, to the dank caverns that lie even further below.
Accumulate forbidden powers:
Embrace your own corruption, fight fire with fire, and wield dark powers against their own progenitors.
Face climactic terrors:
Within the mansion dwell dangers of elevated strength and influence, often guarding crucial ways and powers.
Uncover a family’s corruption:
Experience the result of the restless emotions of the mansion’s formerly human inhabitants expressed through an eldritch power, from the anxiety of a frustrated would-be scientist to the isolation and anguish of a child unloved.
Piece together past events:
Explore and find scattered evidence of the inhabitants’ otherworldly transformation through journal entries and memory-stained objects.
Girlfriend mode:
Beat the game to unlock this mode, allowing you to play as K.C.’s girlfriend, with all new powers and story.
Speedrun mode:
The speedrun mode offers a built-in timer and will streamline play experience for speedrunners.