A Year in Review & A Look to the Future! (Patreon)

It's New Years Eve already here in Australia, and the perfect time to look back at what we achieved in 2023 and what 2024 is going to look like for Two and a Half Studios!

First of all, thank you all for being here and supporting us. It makes a huge difference to what we're able to do and the level of detail we can put into our projects.

2023 was a very busy year for multiple reasons, but especially when it comes to game development. For those that don't know, we're just a two person dev team, so we don't have a large team to handle all the aspects of game development. 

This year, we released two (and a half???) games publicly, as well as worked on a number of projects that will be coming out in the future.

Let's start first with a look back at our releases this year.

The Divine Speaker: The Sun and the Moon

In June 2023 we released The Divine Speaker: The Sun and the Moon, an 18+ prequel to our first major game, The Divine Speaker.

It took us a few years to work on this game and release it, mostly because it was on the back burner while we focused on other projects.

As you can see, we originally wrote the game all the way back in 2019! That script was very different to the one that ended up being released.

It was around 40,000 words, and focused only on the characters Aemyl and Caspian, with no other POVs. Once we released The Divine Speaker, I found that I wanted to explore more of what made the characters reach that point. 

And as such, I rewrote the project and added in an entirely new storyline about Lucius, my favorite sunshine-turned-no-morals baby boy (he's not a good person but I still love him <3).

It ended up being over 80,000 words, one 18+ scene became two, and I was much happier with the final product.

It took us a few extra months to put together the additional art and program the new script, but we finally released it on June 9th!

In all, looking back on this project I'm very happy. It was something I very much enjoyed writing, and  I wanted very badly to expand on Lucius and his backstory. I'd like to write more about him in the future, but as you can imagine the more you have a reoccuring character, the less people are going to play a game - playing two games before someone plays your new one is a big ask! Still, I'd love to write more about him, even just for myself, in the future if I get time.

A Date with Death

We released A Date with Death, our very first free to play game, on December 8th! 

As a team, we started brainstorming for A Date with Death in late December 2022. I wanted to work on a chat sim because the format has always been very enjoyable to me. The creative format seemed like a really fun challenge to tackle, as it's very different to all of our prior projects - cutting out the narration and relying solely on dialogue to carry a story forward is an entirely different beast.

We did end up adding small parts of narration to some parts of the game, though. When we were first planning the game, I knew I wanted to add two things - character creation and room creation (two very expensive and time consuming features).

When we were working out what the room creation would look like, we decided that the room segments of the game would be the perfect place for some narration, as well as some chances to build your characters personality in small ways. Interacting with your pet, eavesdropping on your neighbours, and picking books off of your bookshelf were fun to implement, though quite time consuming.

In total, it took us around a year of production time to have A Date with Death ready for release, but that's on top of working on other projects. Art is also very time consuming, and now that we have the base down (character sprite + Grim's sprite), it would theoretically make it faster to add to.

A Date with Death ended up over 60,000 words, which was pretty monumental compared to what we were planning. Originally we wanted it to be closer to 25k, or 2k per day. 

As we both do game development full time, we had to evaluate the risk involved when it came to making a free game. Putting resources and money towards working on a free game means not putting them towards a new paid game, and obviously as an indie developer that is a bit of a risk. A lot of people ask us about translations and voice acting, and even offer to do them for free! While we appreciate the intention, we're not comfortable accepting free work even on a free game - everyone deserves to get paid for their work. We'd love to add additional languages and voice acting, but the cost is a lot higher than you might expect. We hope we can maybe come back to it at a later date!

In the end, we did what we do with all of our projects - put in more than we originally planned because we fall totally and completely in love with the process of creating it. A Date with Death means so much to both of us, and we wanted to show all of you how much we love it too. So we ended up with more CGs, more writing, more character choices... more of everything. But we did it!

Looking back on this project, it's been an overwhelming success. Much more than we originally expected, and we're well aware how keen you all are for what comes next for the game. We'll talk about that a little more below!

The Divine Speaker: A Bounty Hunter's First Christmas

A Bounty Hunter's First Christmas gets an honorable mention - we actually released the game last December, but after a year of exclusivity we released it on Steam and itch.io!

This was our first attempt at making a DLC/Afterstory for one of our games, and was super fun. Leos is one of my favorite characters (he was the original inspiration for Grim!), and I love writing about him.

A chance to write about both Leos and Illran? Sign me up!

I'd love to go back and write extra afterstories for the other The Divine Speaker love interests if I ever get the chance. 

The Future

We have a very packed 2024 coming up, with a big release in the next four months! We also will being work on some new projects... perhaps a new DLC?

Dreambound

Dreambound is our next major release, planned for around April 2024! 

We ran a Kickstarter for it last year. It's a pretty huge project, so we've been working on it all this time (on top of everything else we release).

It's a supernatural mystery about a painter who has lost the will to live and his ability to enter dreams. It's a bit darker than some of our other projects, but it is all ages.

We finished up all the writing on it a couple of months ago, and it came out a little over 200,000 words. Again, we didn't plan for it to be such a long project... but such is the way with us it seems.

At the moment we're working on finishing up the art (a few CGs left to go!) and programming the character routes, which there are three of. We're also working on releasing some beta builds for those that want to play ahead of time.

We started preliminary work on Dreambound back in 2020, which feels like so long ago now. At the time, we were still mainly working on other projects and it was worked on for fun in the background. 

We're really excited to concentrate on it for the next few months as we prepare for release.

A Date with Death

Yes, we are beginning work on a new DLC for A Date with Death. Yippee!

We're still working out the actual logistics of it, but we're planning for it to add multiple days of content to the game, branching off after day 5. There will be a new day 6, and then the game will go on to day 10. This is subject to change, but what we're thinking of at the moment.

We're also planning to add some kind of NSFW content to this (which will be optional, you'll have to install an additional patch to access it). As you can imagine, this is made a little tougher by allowing players to create their own character - we're still working out exactly what this will look like.

As we're concentrating first on releasing Dreambound, this will take us a little while to get released, but we'll be working on it all the same. We'll be showing sketches, snippets, and screenshots here in 2024.

We've got a fun idea for the additional story and why your bet has to be drawn out for longer - and lots of ideas for some domestic fun between your MC and Casper.

Lots more to talk about later, so keep an eye out! We'll also be making a public announcement about this in the near future.

The Divine Speaker... Sequel? Ish.

We're still working on a story that focuses on Nox and Soren from The Divine Speaker, set after the main game. This will be an 18+ game with a host of new characters and a fun adventure-style journey narrative.

This year, while focusing our attention on other games, we worked a little on outlining the story and creating character sprites. We're not quite ready to talk about it in detail, but once Dreambound is released it will go into writing, finally!

We'd love to be able to work on more projects simultaneously, but with two people we're at our limit with what we currently have on our plate. We're looking forward to emptying it slightly so we can begin production here.

Astralis

For those that don't know, we have a small publishing wing of Two and a Half Studios for games we think align with our studio.

The Last Rose

Next year production will begin formally on the first game we're publishing, The Last Rose. Writing on it is well underway already, and you're in for an emotional, thought-provoking journey that's been in the making for many, many years.

The Last Rose is an apocolyptic adventure visual novel with one love interest, three routes, and over 100k words. It's illustrated by the wonderful Miyukiko, and written and developed by RJ Fern.

We're really excited to work alongside them in 2024 to create a demo for the game, as well as help to run a Kickstarter campaign.

You can follow along on the developer's Twitter to keep up to date with announcements!

That's all for now - Happy (Early) New Year, and let's look forward to an exciting 2024 together!