twoandahalfstudios

March 2025 Monthly Update

Added 2025-03-05 23:27:23 +0000 UTC

Hello lovely patrons!

Welcome to our newest monthly update where we update you on all things Two and a Half Studios. As always, these will come out every month on the 6th (AEST).

It was another busy month as we focused on our new project, Willowmist, with updates for A Date with Death. We also ran our very own Steam event - The Storyteller's Festival! It was fantastic to celebrate everything narrative in games and I enjoyed it immensely once again.

For now, lets jump into our monthly update!

A Date with Death

While Beyond the Bet marks the (mostly) completion of A Date with Death, we still have a few quick updates to give!

A Date with Death ZERO

The fifth chapter of A Date with Death ZERO, our prequel webcomic about Casper, will release early on Patreon next week! We've now moved onto chapter 6, but here's a little preview:

Makeship Collab

Our new Casper chibi hoodie is available on Makeship for another week!

Merch Store Reopened

Our merch store is open for the next ~6 days! A lot of leftovers have now sold out, but there's still some keychains, desk mats, and other goodies available!

Game Updates

We made a small update to A Date with Death last month to add a new character card maker to the computer!

At the same time, we fixed some small bugs and adjusted how text displays in game. It was a lot of effort to... make the game look exactly the same, to be honest. The reason we did this was to assist with our Japanese localization, which I'll speak on more below.

Voice Acting & Translation

The team at Kakehashi games are now doing their final tests of the translation in game and making any adjustments they see fit. This part of localization is a lot of back and forth, fixing things, changing things, retesting, etc. I won't lie, I'll be glad when this part is done! However, that also means that our Japanese voice acting recording will begin soon. We're excited to show off some snippets later!

The Willowmist Emporium of Antiques and Curiosities

Art

Character wise, we've now completed the sprite for our first side character - her name is Vienna, or Vivi! You'll meet her in the demo of Willowmist and be able to experience her side story about family.

Here's a tiny teaser:

Our second side character is completely different to the first - with a boisterous, romantic, flamboyant personality. We're excited to get him complete, too!

Background wise, we're nearly complete with our main menu illustration:

This one is going to have a few very cool moving elements. Here's a mockup of how it'll look with our UI:

Apart from the above, we've been working on a few other screens for the game with Tris.

We're making some new additions to the dialogue screen - specifically, adding to the 'namebox' and adding a wallet. We'll still tweak and move some things around, but it's about there!

There will be different stores you can visit throughout the game, so we made up a UI to accommodate! At the moment we're planning various flea markets, festivals and events!

Writing

The demo is now up to its 'sixth' day, writing-wise, out of seven. This demo is going to be pretty large as demos go, as it's currently sitting at 40,000 words. If I had to estimate, it would likely be 50,000-60,000 words, which is longer than the length of A Date with Death without any DLCs!

This also doesn't account for our character/random events. During the game, you'll be able to plan out your days in the store and decide what to do - at the start you'll be limited to things like running the store, cleaning, and sorting out the storage room. Each time you do one of these things, it will pull from a pool of events for related to what you're doing.

Running the store might make you run into side characters and begin their storylines, or let you play through a 'break' where you start a bookclub with Florian and the rest of the crew. Cleaning might lead to a cleaning competition with Winnie, or a chance to find something cool.

Basically, we have a lot of events to write, which I haven't yet begun. I'll be coming back to these once the demo writing is complete.

Here's a tiny little super-duper out of context snippet:

Steam Page Live!

The Steam page for Willowmist went live last month in time for The Storyteller's Fest, and the reception has been amazing! We're already at over 14,000 wishlists <3 if you haven't yet had the chance to check it out, you can see it here!

Astralis Publishing Title - The Inn Between

Art

Background and character artwork continues on The Inn Between, with the CGs now getting near completion for each of the routes!

UI and Screenshots

TIB includes a very cool beastiary features, with some of the creatures being designed by backers and friends of the studio! For example, here's a creature I designed:

There will also be some interactable sections of the game:

And I'm not biased at all, because here's another screenshot of my backer designed character Mercury!

Cats on a Lilypad also run their own Patreon, which you can sign up to even for free to get updates from!

Support the Game

You can support the The Inn Between by wishlisting on Steam, following the team on Patreon, or following them on Twitter!

Astralis Publishing Title - Cage of Roses

Cage of Roses is out NOW on Steam!

If you haven't yet picked the game up, you can do so here. If you HAVE, then we'd super appreciate a review on Steam (even short ones make a huge difference)!