Hi everyone,

Yes I'm cross-posting this from the base game haha I don't want to write the same announcement twice

I'm just making a quick post to let you all know that I've released a second chapter of my spicy BL visual novel, The Thistle and the Flower! You can find the DLC on Itchio here, with instructions on how to install it on the top of the page. Do note you need to have purchased The Thistle and the Flower or the DLC will be useless lol (apart from the apk, that will work just fine on its own). (Oh, and if you buy the DLC on Itchio, you can redeem a Steam key for the DLC and you can play it on Steam too, provided you own the base game.)

I actually wrote three chapters of this story (I might have mentioned that in my author's notes of the base game), but I only adapted the first chapter into a VN. I was doubtful it would sell well, and I wasn't sure if I could justify spending more time and money on an unpopular story while working on so many other things... (glances into the horizon) Well, I was right, and The Thistle and the Flower sold very poorly. It probably won't recoup its initial production costs, which is often the way of indie VN dev, but!!! I enjoyed working on it, and I really liked the second chapter, and I wanted to turn it into a real VN I could share with other people...

And so I did haha, surprise. Maybe you can see this as an early Christmas present?

I had initially planned to release the second chapter for free, but in the last couple of months Steam put out a statement saying devs of r18 games are not allowed to update their games to include more adult content which hasn't been through a proper content review: devs need to submit any additional r18 scenes as DLC so they can be checked to determine if they are 'appropriate' for Steam.  

Because of this, I had to release the second chapter of this VN as DLC on Steam so it could be reviewed but even then Valve only reviewed the store page of the DLC, not the actual build, so I'm a bit ??? about this policy which meant setting up the second chapter was more of a pain than anticipated. I won't go into any details but setting up DLC on Steam takes a while, and I had to spend more time troubleshooting this release than I do my usual VNs. It was a bit of a headache, so I figured I would charge for this after all haha

I'm sorry if this is disappointing! The DLC is almost as long as the base game, however, and it has a lot of pretty art, so I hope you will consider it worthwhile! I think the second chapter of this story turned out very cute and I'm happy with it. I hope the handful of Yuel/Tavi likers out there will appreciate it! Thank you so much for your support!

- ebi x