twoandahalfstudios

April 2025 Monthly Update

Added 2025-04-06 01:03:49 +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).

Somehow we're already 4 months into the year and it's starting to get cold at the bottom of Australia, but we're keeping rugged up and getting on with a buttload of different work across our projects. We managed to dedicate most of March to our new project, The Willowmist Emporium of Antiques & Curiosities, but much of the start of April will be on the A Date with Death Japanese localization. More on that below!

A Date with Death ZERO

The sixth 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 7, but here's a little preview:

And a tiny little preview of our storyboard for episode 7:

And lastly, a little character sheet for ZERO 5012!

After this, we have three chapters left before A Date with Death ZERO is complete. It's been an incredibly fun project and we'll forever be thankful to our wonderful artist Kariyeen, who continues to impress every single month.

Kariyeen also did a beautiful art of Rowan and Leonie on Twitter - make sure to take a look!

Voice Acting & Translation

Updates on a few fronts this month here!

Firstly, we have received the final (hopefully...) edits to both Beyond the Bet and the base game translations. It's an incredibly manual process to update, so we'll probably spend most of the coming week working on it.

We have our Japanese voice over ready to begin, with the studio, director, sound team and actor chosen, but we've run into a small roadblock in that the director wants all of the English voice files before beginning.

That leads us onto our second point. English voice acting is going well - the full base game is already recorded (including all of the original endings), and the first few days of Beyond the Bet, but it will still take some time to get the last few days recorded and edited.

Once that's complete, we'll be passing over all of these lines to our Japanese team who will then get going on recording.

Our hope is to have the Japanese localization, plus both voice overs, all released at once, but we may in fact end up releasing the localization before any voice acting is complete. We're still working on the timeline.

Working on translating this game has been a monumental task, and a major reason we probably wouldn't consider translating into other language in the future. Translating most of our other games is very straight forward, but A Date with Death has a lot of difficulties in its format that have been sore points. It's still amazing to have, though, and we're looking forward to releasing it for all of our Japanese fans!

New Character Outfits

Thanks to our wonderful Kickstarter backers, we're having a host of new outfits and accessories added to A Date with Death! Specifically to the Expansion DLC.

We posted a few sketches last month, but here's another preview:

There will, of course, be updates for both body models!

We're really excited to get these in-game, and Fuyuure is working hard going through every custom request. There is close to 30 of them, but we're hoping to be able to finish in the next couple of months.

Backers will get a message when their outfit is complete so they can see it first, so if you grabbed one please keep an eye out :)

New Merch

We're currently working with a new exciting partner on a merch item we've never worked on before. We're still waiting for the sample to reach us, but we'll be showing off the mockups this month, too!

We also have a few other ideas for new merch items we'd like to explore. Both of us LOVE doing merch (I mean, then WE get merch...), but it's a lot of manual labor that takes away from our creative work. Still, we definitely plan to reopen the store with leftovers later, and hopefully with some new things, too :)

The Willowmist Emporium of Antiques and Curiosities

Art

In the art department, we've been working on a few things - including three side characters for our demo! One we already showed a tiny preview of last month, but here's the next preview:

The owner of The Sleeping Oak, poet extraordinaire, Quinn! You'll meet him and get to see the first part of his story in our demo.

Anzai is now working on the demo CGs, which we plan to have 6-7 of. Balancing them between such a large cast is quite difficult, but I think we've managed a nice selection.

Saedee is technically working on a character sprite for us right now, too, but soon will be going back to finish up on backgrounds for the demo. We have a lot of different locations around Willowmist to visit, after all!

We've also welcomed Shiro to the team, who is completing some character icons for us. These will feature in a screen where you can check your friendship/romance levels with each character.

Writing

Last month's update had us at 40,000 words, but now we're sitting at 65,000 without taking into account the character/random events. I would say I am 99% through writing it - we have one variant scene to write, and the final scene of the demo.

This is... absolutely our longest demo ever. I had guessed 40-50k words total, but after all the random events we're probably looking at more like 75-85k. Of all the in-game weeks, this is probably the most packed one, but it's still a lot longer than we originally expected or planned.

There's a lot of difficulties to writing a romance game where you can be friends and complete the storyline of the other romance options. It's not something we've explored before, but the idea of getting cut off from the other romanceable characters just because you started romancing another didn't sit well with us.

We plan to have each story compleable without romance (though, some character may be naturally flirty), but choosing flirty options will lead to extra romance scenes. Once you are committed to a relationship, too, there will naturally be romance scenes you wouldn't see if you weren't on that path. We have a lot of work to do with that, but I think the demo showcases it pretty well - though this is just early days, who falls in love in a week (looking at you, Casper...)?

Towards the end of the demo, you'll have a chance to play a good ol' game of two truths, one lie with the rest of your newfound friends. We're prepared some fun little scenes, so I'm looking forward to sharing them with you all.

Opening Song

We've been working with the amazing Mizu on an original opening song for Willowmist! It's been awhile since we've been able to do this, so it's been an absolutely wonderful experience.

The full song is now complete, and we'll be sharing it with you later this month once we receive the final files!

Steam Page Live

The Steam page for Willowmist went live in February for The Storyteller's Fest, and the reception has been amazing! We're already sitting at over 23,000 wishlists. To put this into perspective, we launched The Divine Speaker with about the same wishlists after years of development. Thank you all!

Astralis Publishing Title - The Inn Between

Art

There's been lots of great art progress for The Inn Between in the last month. C.L hired a brand new item artist, who is working on illustrating various adorable cat-related items (okay, they're not all cat-related, but there is a LOT of cats).

There's also been lots of work in the other art fronts. Here's a look at a particularly pretty catboy:

Beta

We're so pleased to announce that Cats on a Lilypad Studios have given us access to a beta of their game to have available here on our Patreon. This beta will let you play through the entire common route of the game. Then, if you enjoy it, you can go take a look at their Patreon, too :)

We'll have this available in the coming days!

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 now available in English AND Simplified Chinese 🥳

If you haven't yet checked out Cage of Roses by ebi-hime, now is a great time to do it! If you HAVE played, then please consider leaving us a review - we'd love to get to 100 soon!