twoandahalfstudios

May 2025 Monthly Update

Added 2025-05-06 00:58:51 +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).

This month we've made some big progress on both of our current projects, plus on the A Date with Death VA update coming later this year, but more on that below.

A Date with Death

A Date with Death ZERO

The seventh chapter of A Date with Death ZERO, our prequel webcomic about Casper, will release early on Patreon next week! We're now working on chapter 8 (of 10! we're nearly done 🥺).

Next, we have a character sheet for Leonie!

Voice Acting & Translation

As we mentioned last month, we received the (probably not but hopefully???) final edits for the JP localization. We spent around a week or so going over the various bugs and issues reported by our localization team, and implementing all the changes they asked for.

On the VO front, we also mentioned last month that all of the base game for A Date with Death has wrapped in recording. We're now pleased to add that our editor, C.L, has also finished editing and cutting the lines! We hope to be testing them all in game soon.

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.

Here's a new preview:

A familiar outfit for those who have played our other projects!

We've now finished up with all the outfits, so messages will be going out to Kickstarter backers later today with a link to see their outfit. Keep an eye out if thats you!

Necklace Complete

We had the chance to share the amazing mockup of our new Casper necklace with you last month, but now the sample is complete! Our partners at Hirari are currently inspecting it before it's forwarded over to us, and then we'll hold preorders.

We'll have some nice photos done up to show it off too, so keep an eye out!

5012 Makeship Plushie Available Now

There's a little over two weeks left to grab the 5012 Plushie over on Makeship! We're hoping to make a matching Casper plush, so please consider picking up 5012 if you'd like to see that.

???

🤔🤔🤔 Curious indeed.

The Willowmist Emporium of Antiques and Curiosities

Art

We just finished up with our first character CG! As of right now, we have 5 CGs left (one for each characters "route", plus a general one), 1 character sprite, and a handful of backgrounds.

Once we wrap up with the rest of the BGs, Saed will also move on to illustrating a lot of our shop antique art. Since this is a game where you run a store, we also need a LOT of different items we can actually sell. This will likely take us a little bit of time, but we're excited to see it come together.

In the kind-of item department, Saed recently finished the art for this "book".

Writing

Exciting news... 🎉

The writing on the demo for Willowmist is now complete (minus the extra event sections)! We rounded out the demo at approx. 67,000 words. Once we're done with all the events, it should be, likely, closer to 85,000 or so. This is by far our longest demo ever, so I hope you all dig in and enjoy it!

Programming

Past writing the demo, past working on the ADWD localization, and past everything else you read here... most of my month has been dedicated to programming screens and systems for Willowmist.

This game is pretty far removed from our usual projects (which I love!!!) and comes with its own set of challenges. Each of the screens I show you here took me between 5-15+ hours to complete. Even the ones that look simple, haha. I'm learning new things every day!

I still have a lot of big screens and systems to go:

1. Stat and level up screen and system
2. Auction screen and system (I have a mockup of this working to adapt, though!)
3. Marketplace screen and system
4. Gallery (should be easy!)
5. Journal
6. History (my most hated...)
7. Relationship tracker screen (should be simple!)
8. Stat tree (should be simple enough...?)
8. Updates to the NVL/dialogue window

I've also been doing work on the overall presentation of the game (how to show scenes with a lot of characters, when we're working with half of the screen), and how we'll distribute experience and the levelling up curve.

Basically, when this is done we'll be doing a LOT of testing to make sure it all works together smoothly and isn't too difficult. We'll also likely be implementing a story mode where the bills are optional, so you can't lose halfway through the game. That may come later, though!

Check out the video update here on Youtube!

In order of screens shown:

1. Settings screen! This one was simple and didn't take much time at all. Implementing a font option as a toggle though, did take a little bit.

2. Music screen - this one was mostly simple, though the audio times is a new thing for me, as well as the looping.

3. Character creation screen! I love doing these. It took a decent amount of time, but it turned out very cool, so worth it in the end. We have the option of different pronouns, or to customize your own, as well as honorifics. You can also change your name and character model!

4. Schedule! Yeah this one took a really, really long time. Ren'Py doesn't natively have a way of putting draggable objects in a scrollable container (for good reason). I ended up implementing my own scrolling method which lead to 1000 problems - the scroll area going up and of the screen, the drops returning to the wrong places in the list depending on how much you've scrolled, etc. It was a major thing to actually track where everything is meant to be, while making the list able to expand to as long or as short as needed.

In the end, scrolling actually changes the y-position of the list of items inside a frame, and I get the positions of every drag from their index in a list. Hopefully we don't run into any bugs because I might die if I have to work on this screen any more.

This also leads to a working system for jumping to the correct event for the day. If you put man the counter in the morning slot, it will pick an event for you thats randomized from the available events that day, taking into account special tags that track who is in the store. For example, Florian doesn't work mornings - any events including him will be excluded from the morning slot.

5. Day progression screen! I was really inspired by games like Persona who have a fun lil animation when the day changes. This one was a lot of work, actually - it tracks how many days are in each month as well as the weather for each day. Just getting the turning to work correctly was annoying, but it looks cool! There's 3 other weathers that you don't see here, too.

6. Save screen! Usually quite simple, but having things on different angles made this take a decent chunk of time. It looks pretty cool, though!

7. Panning system. This one took up my day yesterday - it's a semi-automatic system that will be used for scenes with lots of characters. Panning like this can be done manually, but adds a lot of time to programming, so I decided to work on something to help with that.

The system automatically pans left or right, depending on the last one used, as well as zooms, hides the previous sprite, and shows the new one. It's going to be a huge timesaver in the very large scenes.

In scenes with less people, though, we'll be fine using something more static.

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 28,000 wishlists. If you haven't yet, we'd really appreciate you adding it to your wishlist, too! <3

Opening Animation

We're working on a new opening animation!!! We super love working with animators, and our opening(s) for A Date with Death will always have a huge place in our hearts.

Here's a tiny little preview:

We'll be sharing more of this later in the month!

Astralis Publishing Title - The Inn Between

Art

Art continues at a steady pace for The Inn Between.

We've worked with Vui, the background artist of The Inn Between, quite a few times in the past, too, so it feels almost nostalgic to look at his work. He did the new backgrounds on The Divine Speaker: The Sun and the Moon, as well as a handful in Dreambound!