We’re unveiling a new project, or rather a series of projects, that we’ll be working on! This comes as a bit of a course adjustment for Tentakero since we need to adapt to changing conditions around NSFW content, game development, and the economy in general. TentaLabs is our way of categorizing main line work like the Project Cappuccino games, and side stuff.

Development on Project Cappuccino 2 is not stopping and this is purely being done on the side on an “as we’re able to” basis.

We have a huge list of things we wanna try making, ranging from doujins to one-shot mini-games without a large overarching plot. Usually, when we get an idea like that, we end up shelving it in the “someday” section, and that someday may never come. That someday is now!

Here’s stuff you can expect to see soon that we’re cooking.

Project #1 - Cow Girl Milking Game

This idea came about because Doku made that one artwork of Cerise getting milked once and it ended up being one of our most popular works. We want to try our hand at a small game where players collect rare Cow Girls and upgrade their barn with different features.

The first test subject for this one is going to be Mira! We just thought she'd make a nice hucow.

Project #2 - Doku’s Doujins

Doku has been wanting to try her hand at a doujin for a long time and has started working on one featuring a character from Jujutsu Kaisen. Depending on how this one does, she may take on additional doujins and reach out to the community for which series or characters you guys want to see.

Keep an eye out for this one on her social media pages for when it's done! Since it's fan content, it'll be freely posted there.

Project #3 - One Shot OC Animation Experiments

Sometimes we get ideas for characters that might be cool to see in a specific scenario, but they may not fit into the current game’s world. In these cases, we’ll be making small encapsulated scenes or animations featuring these characters as a one-off thing for people to enjoy.

Take these cat girls for example! Doku has had these OCs spinning in her head for years but never been able to use them in anything. We can’t throw random cat girls into Project Cappuccino without derailing the plot or adding something that was never intended to be there just for the sake of having cat girls.

So, why are we doing this?

Tired of Being Broke

Let's be real. This is the main one. With everything going up in price in the past few years, we’re slowly getting choked out and not in the sexy way. Things have gotten miserable to the point where we can rarely spend more than 50-100 bucks a month on anything other than groceries and bills. We’re faced with one of three options.

• Devote additional time to second jobs and commissions. (Longer development time, sidelining Tentakero.)
• Increase prices of tiers for existing patrons. (Unfair to patrons, we risk losing more than gaining.)
• Diversify and bring in a larger audience. (Longer dev time for cappuccino but increases potential audience. The healthiest long term since it has other benefits.)

Diversifying is probably our best bet.

Battling Burn Out

Over the years, we’ve constantly struggled with hitting walls of burnout with our games that end up making the work painful. This is mostly due to large projects being draining without having much of a return. Trying out new bite-sized projects here and there will allow us to mix things up once in a while.

Experimenting With Rough Ideas

The reality is that finished products tend to pay as opposed to in-development and early access stuff, and with this approach, we hope to have more finished things out faster. Even if they may be smaller scoped.

Making a game with the intent to release it as a paid product means taking a huge risk with a time and money investment. If one of these small projects fails, then that’s that and we can flush it. On the other hand, if one of them ends up being really popular, we can then make plans to turn it into a full game.

Easier Marketing Material

It’s a painful matter of fact that the internet demands constant content in order to remain relevant. This tends to create huge pressure on us to have something presentable all the time in order to find new patrons and maintain a steady funding. 

Let’s take the recent BJ scene in Project Cappuccino 2 for example. While it’s cool for players to have a bigger pool of characters to choose from, posting the same scene on social media over and over as we work through it gets monotonous and doesn’t garner much attention after the first couple of times. The technical side of things tends to also be best suited for progress logs or behind-the-scenes stuff.

With the TentaLabs projects, we’ll have more things to show and more often too.

Possibility for Fanart or Unique Characters

Since some of these projects are going to be completely free, there’s the possibility of doing fan games or fan animations of existing series. (Probably not Nintendo since we don’t want to get assassinated.)

Prior to this, we've only been able to do it through commissions like in this One Piece artwork. Doing some fan art here and there will hopefully get more eyes on our work since that tends to be easier to spread around than OC stuff.

Salvaging Assets

The engine we’ve built for Project Cappuccino that allows the use of toys and interactive scenes is now in an encapsulated state that lets us reuse it. This means we can start building projects from an existing base as opposed to starting from 0.

Not to mention that over the years we’ve had scrapped characters, music and art that may be reusable instead of sitting in our files collecting dust!

The Adult Content Crackdown

Patreon has recently been taking down pages that break their guidelines and we’re preparing for a plan B and C should we make something that happens to set them off.

Plan B would be to jump ship to SubscribeStar. We’ve already got a page setup there should we get the ban hammer and we’ll do our best to transfer all our content there.

Plan C would be to end adult content development entirely and switch to horror games like stuff you would see in the Haunted PS1 Disks. Gore, guts and murder are unfortunately more socially acceptable than some hentai topics. In reality, I’d probably like to make surreal, unsettling horror instead of the gory kind, but this plan is a last resort at the moment.

We put Yani in the lab rat cage for some experiments. Don't stick any appendages in there because she bites.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to ask us any questions and we’ll be glad to answer! If you'd like to support Tentakero, the best way is to do so on Patreon. Wishlisting Project Cappuccino 2 on Steam also helps a lot!

-Vanis & Doku