September 2024 Monthly Update

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).

Now that we've hit September, it's only 3 months until Beyond the Bet releases! It's coming up on us really fast, and we're working to have everything ready by release.

This is actually the shortest development time we've had on a project of this size. We expect the DLC to come out at roughly 60,000 words or so, which we're making very good progress on and we'll talk about a little more below.

Overall, we're in the home stretch now, but lets jump into our monthly update to get more into the nitty gritty.

A Date with Death - Beyond the Bet

Art

Artwise, we're working on the final CGs of the game - four of them total. We went into this DLC expecting two extra endings, but we've expanded that because we're just full of ideas, haha.

On top of that, we're working on the backer outfits for Casper. There's six of these total, and we'll be showing some sketches for these later this month.

Other backer art rewards, like the couple colored sketches, the custom accessories, and the custom outfits will be completed after the Beyond the Bet releases, likely. We need to put all of our time, for now, into art that is needed for the DLC to release. Once those are all done, we'll move onto the rest!

Writing & Editing

The first four days of Beyond the Bet are now completely written and edited. We've also just wrapped up writing on the DLCs new bad ending, though we still need to do an editing pass over it.

This leaves just the three new good endings to write. One of them is nearly complete, and we anticipate that it'll be finished in the next few days.

The other two endings are fully planned out, so we're hoping that writing and editing will be wrapped on the DLC by this time next month.

Japanese Translation & Voice Acting

Our lovely friends over at Kakehashi Games have let us know that the first pass translation of the original game (and expansion DLC) is nearly complete! We expect to receive it late September, early October. Once we've implemented the translation, we'll be sending it back over for testing.

Once writing on Beyond the Bet is complete, we'll also be passing over the script to them for translation.

Once all of it is complete, we'll then be working with Kakehashi Games to choose a Japanese voice actor to go along with the localisation.

None of these things are very fast, but we're hoping that we'll be able to release the Japanese translation & voice acting by or before mid next year. This is still a little up in the air, but we'll see how we go.

On the Engish voice acting front, we're making progress with the original game, but it is likely that the English voice acting will release alongside the Japanese voice acting, though it could be beforehand. When it does all release, it'll all be added to the base game for free.

Programming & Beta

We released a brand new beta that encompasses the first three days of Beyond the Bet last month!

You can go play it here.

We're now working on the final beta, which will be the complete DLC, including all endings. It's likely this won't release until shortly before the actual release date, since we're always fiddling with things in-game until last minute.

For now, how about a few new testing screenshots?

We've been carefully combing through the new backer created DM profiles to make sure everything aligns with the rules we laid out. 600+ submissions later, we've now started implementing them!

 You can see a few of the newbies here (the refresh contacts is just for testing)!

This is a task that is going to take some time just because of how manual it is, but we hope to have it done soon.

The Willowmist Emporium of Antiques and Curiosities

If you didn't see last month, we've got a name! We opted for something longer after all of our short titles, haha.

The Willowmist Emporium of Antiques and Curiosities is our unannounced, upcoming shop/narrative sim about running your aunt's antique store for three months and meeting the strange inhabitants of the small and isolated Willowmist.

We're only in very early development, but we plan to begin working on it in earnest once Beyond the Bet is complete.

Art

Character art wise, we have now completed three of the love interests sprites! You were introduced to the sketch of Florian last month, but we'll be showing off his complete sprite & maybe someone new later in September.

Here's a tiny little preview!

Anzai, our lead artist, is now working on the fourth love interest.

Like we said last month, this game will feature three male and two female love interests. This is our first time really making any female romanceable characters, which we're very excited about.

We're still deciding on the route we want to go for the main character, but for the moment we're leaning towards having two base sprites to pick from of an already designed and established character, and allowing you to rename them and choose their pronouns/gender.

It's a bit of a middle point between A Date with Death, which features a full character creator, and the rest of our games, which have more defined protagonists with set looks and names. We really enjoy trying new things, and this will allow us to have the main character in CGs. For now though, this is still up in the air and could change, though we won't be doing a full character creator in this game no matter our decision due to the nature and size of this game.

Background wise, our lead BG artist Saedee has completed the first two backgrounds (both day and night variants!), one of which you can get a preview of above. We'll be showing these properly this month.

We're now working on the third BG, an apartment design.

UI

We're really excited to announce we're working with the wonderul Tris on our UI for The Willowmist Emporium of Antiques and Curiosities (I'm going to shorten this to WEAC in the future, I swear...). We've begun work on a few of the screens, though we plan to have the full UI complete by hopefully mid 2025.

This first screen will be complete in September, so we hope to show it off later this month or early October!

Outlining

95% of the demo is now outlined, and we've finished planning our last love interest!

With such a big cast, it's a lot to juggle and make sure we get right. We also plan to have a lot of side characters, though we've yet to start planning those.

Writing will hopefully begin in the next couple of months, once Beyond the Bet is complete.

Astralis Publishing Title - The Inn Between

General Update

We helped to hire two brand new hands to help out with The Inn Between... please welcome Joy and Noobie to the team, who will be assisting with writing and editing respectively.

Two of three routes are now in production, and we're hoping will be complete before the end of the year for a release in Q1 2025.

Art Teasers

 Lots of pretty new art!

Support the Game

For now, you can support the game by wishlisting on Steam, following the team on Patreon, or following them on Twitter!

Astralis Publishing Title - Cage of Roses

Demo

Cage of Roses has had huge progress in the last month!

With the demo releasing next month, the developer Ebi has implemented most of the games UI, and also coded/edited the first act of the store (the first of four!).

This first act will likely make up the demo, around 25% of the game.

We'll be releasing a trailer closer to the demo release, so keep an eye out for that.

UI

Support the Game

You can support Cage of Roses by wishlisting the game on Steam and following the developer on Twitter!

Focus for the next month

• A Date with Death - Finishing writing, programming, testing

• New project - Background art, outline completion, sprite art

Thanks once again for reading, and I'll see you next month!