twoandahalfstudios

September 2023 Monthly Update

Added 2023-09-06 04:13:38 +0000 UTC

Hello lovely patrons!

August came and went, and we're already into September. Spooky month is coming up ahead of us so quickly! The last month has been a busy one, with progress across our range of WIP games.

Anyway, on to the update:

Dreambound

Art

This month, we're still working on Ivan's last CGs. While we can't show a preview of them due to the spoilers, we're looking forward to soon moving on to Kaine's route CGs.

Art is definitely one of the most time consuming parts of making Dreambound, as our lead artist Sinran also works full time on their comic (Night Fragments, go check it out!). So while we're making steady progress, we know it will take a good 4-6 months to finish the remaining art before we start on the mystery DLC art.

This might seem like a long time, but it puts us in Q1 2024, like we expected. In the meantime, we'll be working on beta builds over that time to release Crow's and Ivan's routes while Kaine's CGs are in the works.

Writing

In super exciting news, writing on Ivan's 4th chapter is complete! That leaves just chapter 5 left. We expect to be finished writing his route in the next week and a half.

That means the full game writing will be complete! This will free up a lot of our time to begin further programming.

We still have to go through and edit both Ivan's and Kaine's routes-with Kaine's route having a different writer, I will be going through it with a comb personally to add additional scenes and make sure it matches up well with the rest of our writing.

Here's some previews:

A teaser from Noah's point of view, with a few characters you may not recognize.

And another from Ivan's flashbacks! He's lived a varied life.

Programming

We're still working on programming Crow's route. It's not a fast process, but we're slowly getting through his first chapter scenes. Lets look at a couple of previews (which feature Ivan):

Ivan features quite heavily throughout the route as a companion in the "real" world. I think you'll enjoy seeing two different sides of him when comparing his scenes in Crow's route to his scenes in his own route.

A Date with Death

You can wishlist A Date with Death on Steam NOW!

Demo Release

A demo for A Date with Death will be releasing at the end of September, yay! At the same time, we plan to open up a few support slots where you can donate some money to create hairstyles, outfits, accessories or fake ads to go in the game. This will help us with the cost of producing the game (which, as you can imagine, is quite high for a free game!) and give people a chance to add their own little flair to A Date with Death.

Here's a preview of the demo!

Art

Fuyuure finished up all of the Grim Reaper's sprites last month, and he's already programmed and ready for the demo to be released this month!

Fuyuure has also started the work on the character creator. The character creator will feature a range of outfits, hairstyles and accessories, as well as two base body types to work from. Here's some of the previews we shared earlier this month:

Writing

We spent the past week combing through the demo build of A Date with Death, which includes the first day of the game (out of seven). We added a lot more choices and extra conversations, as well as polishing up the writing to be as good as it can be.

Going from writing games with a very defined protagonist like Dreambound and The Divine Speaker to writing something where you need to account for a range of personalities, all the while making the character not seem like too much of a "blank slate", is an interesting challenge!

Not only interesting, but also enjoyable. I personally like all kinda of games--games with very defined protagonists, or ones where I can create my own character (looking at you, Baldur's Gate 3 that I've been spending all my free time on). As a team, we've really enjoyed writing something different, and while we're not giving up our more defined main characters anytime soon, if A Date with Death is successful it's something we'd love to do more of.

Some random out of context lines I really enjoy ^

Programming

We've finished the base programming of A Date with Death's second day! As you can imagine, this is a very, very slow process. The amount of choices (all of these menus....) is a little crazy and it is much slower than our other games to program.

Next I'll be giving it a once over, checking all the choices work where they should, and working on day 2s "room scenes". These are things you can do in between chats, from playing with your pet, practicing on minigames on your computer, or eavesdropping on your neighbours developing love story.

After than we all play through the game and note down any places for extra choices, and work on editing any lines that we've decided don't work well.

It's a whole process, that's for sure.

We also recently worked on polishing up a lot of the screens, adding "incoming call", "hangup" animations, as well as other animations that play when going from bedroom -> chat room. It's been a fun time.

Patreon Update

With Alyssa sadly leaving us to work on her career (good luck, Alyssa!) we're still working out exactly who will be taking over the monthly arts. We're still searching this month, so they will resume next month.

Fuyuure is unfortunately slightly late with the monthly NSFW as well, as she has been focussing mostly on A Date with Death demo assets. We will still hold a NSFW monthly art poll this month ASAP!