Canvas Menagerie — patch notes and updates
Stored observation / content update:
Dated developer announcements recorded from Steam. Open the source for the complete update.
| Update | Date | Excerpt / source |
|---|---|---|
| Games That Ace It | 2026-10-26 | The Games That Ace It Steam festival hosted by Carrot just started, celebrating ace developers (like us) and games about asexuality! 2 of our games, Canvas Menagerie and Harlequinade, are part of the festivities.The artbook for Canvas Menagerie is also on sale......and our next romance visual novel Harlequinade just got a new demo!p.s. Ren's birthday was earlier this month, so here's a small sketch for it~ |
| Fall in Love Visual Novel Steam Festival is live! | 2026-09-01 | Fall in love with visual novels from September 1-9 in the Fall in Love Visual Novel Festival!Canvas Menagerie is currently taking part in the Fall in Love Visual Novel Festival, a Steam festival dedicated to romance visual novels from around the world, hosted by Studio Élan! From September 1-9 you can find over 200 visual novels in the festival, ranging from discounted games, new demos, and more~The artbook for Canvas Menagerie is on sale alongside a few of our other visual novels!And you can try out the demos for our upcoming games as well~ |
| Merch Sale! | 2026-03-02 | This week, as part of Citrus Con, Canvas Menagerie (and our other boys love game, Asphodelium) are on sale! You can get the art book DLC for 15% off.The merch for Canvas Menagerie is also 20% off this week with discount CITRUSCON26! You can find our webstore here on Kofi. There's acrylic stands, washi tape, stickers, keychains, and more of Niko & Ren~ |
| 1st Anniversary! | 2025-12-18 | Happy 1st Anniversary to Canvas Menagerie!A year ago today, Canvas Menagerie released after 3 years of solo development. Thank you everyone who has spent time with Niko & Ren and growing alongside them.If you haven't played it yet, Canvas Menagerie is on sale for the Steam Winter Sale until January 5th~ |
| Happy Halloween! | 2025-10-31 | The ghost bunny has visited us once again...!Happy Halloween, everyone! 👻🐰🎃 |
| Fall in Love Visual Novel Festival has started! | 2025-09-24 | The first ever Fall in Love Visual Novel Festival has started! It's a new festival focused on celebrating romance visual novels with over 200 visual novels from 100+ developers—including us!Our romance visual novels are on sale, including Canvas Menagerie and our other boys love visual novel Asphodelium!We also have demos available for our other romance visual novels that are upcoming~ |
| Storyteller's Festival 2025 | 2025-02-17 | The Storyteller's Festival is now live! This event is a festival focused on celebrating story-driven games, primarily visual novels, ran by our friends at Two and a Half Studios. Canvas Menagerie and 2 of our other games are taking part in it! Asphodelium is a melancholic lite horror boys love visual novel about cults, killing, and killing cults. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3139260/Asphodelium/ Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea: Amaranthine Moon is a mystery Victorian vampire otome game about a young woman deciding her next step in life—and finding the killer of her former business partner. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3072470/Cri |
| Canvas Menagerie is out now! | 2024-12-18 | After 3 years of development, Canvas Menagerie is now fully playable! Canvas Menagerie is a comfy slice-of-life boys love romance about a group of actors going through their mid-20s together while filming together. Follow Niko, a transmasc TV actor as he falls for his celebrity costar who plays his rival. The final game is over 135k words long with 15+ CGs and 10+ characters spread out over 3 main Acts, so around 10+ hours of playtime. While the story is mostly wholesome and meant to be a comfy experience, there are some content notes to be aware about as this game features: Adults drinking and being inebriated Adults smoking Mentions of gend |
| Canvas Menagerie releases in 3 days! | 2024-12-15 | There’s only 3 days left until Canvas Menagerie releases on Steam & itchio! After 3 years of development, it’s finally ready to be fully released. The full game sits right at 138k words with 15+ CGs, so around 10-12 hours of story. You’ll be able to play it on December 18th here on Steam, but you can also pick up a physical CD copy! These physical copies are available for pre-order on our Ko-fi shop. It comes with a working CD with the game & artbook on it as well as a digital key (Steam or itchio) for both the game & artbook. The physical copies won’t ship out until after Christmas (it’s coming up so quickly...) but you’ll get the keys immed |
| Season of Pride Event + Release Date! | 2024-11-21 | Today marks the beginning of Season of Pride presented by MidBoss, IDGA, and Gayming Magazine! It's a festival celebrating a variety of queer games, including visual novels... like these! Together with some friends we're celebrating queer visual novels in the festival. Check them out! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2231680/Of_Sense_and_Soul/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2993720/Cage_of_Roses/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1803850/Lock__Key_A_Magical_Girl_Mystery/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1652580/Imperial_Grace/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3139260/Asphodelium/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2537980/Drculeti/ |
| Steam Next Fest + Updated Demo | 2024-10-14 | It's been a while but Canvas Menagerie finally has an updated demo, just in time for the Steam Next Fest event. If you haven't already, please wishlist the game on Steam as it helps out with development! Here's a brief overview of the demo changes: Easier to read subtitles - in the filming segments, the subtitles are now slightly easier to read with name colors added. Improved scene direction - some scenes have been revamped to have more attention to the visual direction. Grammar fixes - some typos have been fixed. Better blurring - we've redone the blurring to look better in engine. Additional scene - a new scene is added towards the beginni |
| July Updates - Writing Complete | 2024-08-09 | It’s the start of August so it’s time to look back at progress made in July, of which there were a lot. First off and more importantly, the first draft for the entirety of Canvas Menagerie is complete! Act 1 & 2 are already past the first draft with Act 1 currently receiving final touches from beta testing, and now Act 3 is joining them as being fully drafted. The final wordcount on the documents is 153k words, though once it’s ported to Ren’Py this number will go down slightly, so more realistically the full game will be around 140k words with Act 2 being the shortest (but only slightly). Here’s a small snippet of a scene in Act 3 where Niko |
| May Updates – Editing & Playtesting | 2024-06-05 | May was a very hectic month for me personally, so there wasn’t much progress made this month – but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any! I wrote about 4k words for Canvas Menagerie. I also did a fair amount of editing for Act 2 of Canvas Menagerie, proofreading what’s there and trying to make sure it all fits together. There’s one somewhat frustrating character in particular that is fully introduced in Act 2 who’s named Rose – I won’t go into who he is for spoiler reasons, but I will talk a bit about him as a person. Rose is a very secretive person with low self-esteem and not a solid self-image of himself. He’s quiet and can come across as rud |
| Women's Day Sale + Game Updates! | 2024-03-01 | Hiya, today is the first day of the Women's Day Sale on Steam! It's a 10-day long festival celebrating games made by women and women-led teams. Canvas Menagerie is taking part in it as well! To go with the festivities, we'll be running a playthrough of the demo through Steam broadcast and we have some new game updates. To start off, Valentine's Day was earlier this month! I drew couples chibis of Niko & Ren to celebrate. Maybe they’ll be available as stickers soon? Who knows~ Now onto writing! I ended up writing about 8k for Canvas Menagerie in February, with me taking a break from writing it the last week of February. That brings the current |
| January Updates - New Chapters + Art | 2024-01-31 | Canvas Menagerie is a large boys love story told over 3 Acts, which represent different stages in the relationship between the main character Niko and his love interest Ren. Act 1 is them meeting and falling for each other, Act 2 is them starting to date, and Act 3 is them getting closer. Currently, the first 2 Acts have first drafts. I started the new year with 5k written and I wrote 5k this month. That means there’s a total of 10k written out of an estimated 45k for the last section, as every Act was estimated to be around 45-50k words long. It’s my goal to not only finish writing the entire game by the end of the year but also make signifi |
| July Updates - Writing and Scene Direction | 2023-08-01 | The total script has now passed 95k words! Several scenes were added to the middle section of Act 2, namely involving Ren and a certain character introduced in Act 2. Canvas Menagerie is structured to be somewhat episodic, where each Act is a different focus on the character's lives. Act 1 is a romance VN following Niko and Ren meeting and ending with them confessing. Acts 2 and 3 focus on their lives on set afterwards, dealing with interpersonal events and other spoilery stuff I won't get into here. One scene written this past month in particular is the first time Niko and Ren have an actual argument as a couple. The inciting incident is Ren |