Hello Hustle Friends! We’re proud to announce that Hustle Cat is now available on Itch.io! If you responded to the Kickstarter backer survey and picked Itch.io as your deliverable you should have it in your inbox!

If you picked a Steam code for your Kickstarter reward, we’ll have to ask you to wait for a couple weeks while we get the Steam build ready. We’re currently aiming for March 14, however, so you won’t have to wait too long.

But what are you waiting for? Get to itch.io and get your Hustle on! :)

Thank you, Hustles! We’ve busted through or original goal of $25,000!

Special for you, we have soooooooome...

$27,500: Samm Neiland will create a whole new vocal track for the Hustle Cat OST!

$30,000: Everyone who pledges $60 or more will receive this fabulous print of Avery and Mochi, by our friend Yuko Ota of Johnny Wander!

You’ve gotten us this far, friends!! Two more days to go! Keep sharing the campaign at

www.HustleCatGame.com

@lolpups showed off Hustle Cat's Graves to celebrate Black Cat Day! Back the Kickstarter so Audra can draw us a ton of magical kitties! www.hustlecatgame.com

We counted down our favorite cats-turned-humans and vice versa on Twitter today (spoilers: Binx from Hocus Pocus is the best one), just so we could do a reveal of our own: everyone you meet in Hustle Cat is under a cat curse!!

So who’s your favorite cursed kitty? Maybe you’ll find them at A Cat’s Paw, the cat cafe where Avery Grey and their new friends work. For the past few years, mysterious boss Graves has been collecting lost souls affected by an evil spell that’s been turning them into cats. Once they step outside of the cat cafe, they can’t change back into humans… but the answers might lie within a fascinating book in the cafe’s basement, and in you!

As Avery, you’ll help each of the Cat’s Paw employees through their curse. Some, like charismatic Finley and her internet-famous alter ego, don’t see a problem with their cat forms. Others are slowly losing their human connections to the outside world, and need Avery’s help. And if Graves isn’t some sinister vampire guy, then what’s his deal?

Learn about all the cuties in Hustle Cat, and you’ll get a chance to find out!

Thanks for all of your support so far. We’ll have some cool events in the coming week. Don’t forget, it’s almost the spooookiest day of the year: the best time for transforming kitties and supernatural goings-on. Tell your friends, and stay tuned for more info!!

Keep reblogging and spreading the word! Here’s the Kickstarter again! http://www.hustlecatgame.com

New Hustle Day, New Hustle Demo!

Meet your new coworkers at A Cat’s Paw, especially maximum cutie Finley!

> Play the Demo! <

> Back the Kickstarter! <

The Date Nighto team needs cat pics to survive! Tag your cat with #MyHustleCat here or on Twitter, and we’ll release a sweet new Hustle Cat demo just for you!

We’ve had a spectacular first week on the Hustle Cat campaign, with over 30% raised, thanks in large part to fans excited about a non-binary protagonist option! Wanna know more about Avery Grey, the slacker-come-lately main character of Hustle Cat?

Here’s writer Kasey Van Hise on what makes Avery different from most visual novel protagonists:

There’s an impulse to create an “everyperson” as the protagonist of a choice-based story to better represent the player, but I think this can be kind of misguided. Often, I see this expressed in terms of giving the protagonist a vague, noncommittal personality, and to me there’s no greater shortcut to an unfulfilling story experience than a Nilla Wafer hero. I felt that leaving gender up to interpretation was a better way to universalize Hustle Cat.

Avery Grey is a careful mix of specific and general ideas. I think presenting their motivations and their actions, without gendered commentary, will hopefully help to fit them under more than one lens. After all, anybody can love painting their nails, or sleep through two alarms every morning, or hate cooking, or shove their dirty socks into the couch. Everyone messes up the smaller stuff from time to time; everyone can be a good, kind person with unrealized potential; everyone’s a little rough around the edges when they’re just standing at the cusp of adulthood.  

At the same time, there is no “canon” gender for Avery as far as I’m concerned, and that’s something I try to balance in the story. That isn’t to say that means Avery, by canon, has no gender; it means that I want to see what Averys are important for you, the players. Avery has no pronoun preference, and also all pronouns.

The idea of including NB Avery came up pretty much immediately in our talks about our protagonist character, and all of the decisions we made as a team have stemmed from that. There are so many wonderful folks who are outside of the binary, and it’s a shame that I’ve never seen anyone like them in a game like this. With your support, I’d like to change that, and hopefully write a character that we can all connect with.

Want to learn more about how Date Nighto makes visual novels? Backers of the Hustle Cat Kickstarter are getting in-depth updates throughout the campaign about our process and progress!

> Support us on Kickstarter! <

HUSTLE CAT, Date Nighto’s first original game, is due out February 2016--and we need your help to get it finished on time! By supporting our Kickstarter campaign, you’ll get the polished visual novel experience you’ve come to expect from the Date Nighto team, and the amazing talents of our writer Kasey Van Hise and artist Lindsay Woods (you can see her fabulous work on the Starfighter: Eclipse backgrounds and in the Danganrompa fanart dark web).

PLUS, we got a helping hand (or paw) from some of our friends:

Want to see it in action? Play the demo, right in your browser!