Happy Holidays everyone! Hope you’re all ending the year with a blast! Wavi here bringing you our own year-end’s summary.

2021 has been a real roller-coaster ride for us at TotES Studio, and we’re still drunk on all the excitement from our demo release
70 downloads, 35+ collections and 550+ views in a week, I'm so happy I'm crying
.･ﾟﾟ･(／ω＼)･ﾟﾟ･. 

We started work on Her Choice around April this year, so to see it come to life and finally being able to share it with everyone was the best gift our team could wish for this Christmas.

Let’s take a trip together down our year’s memory lane, shall we?

February

Moon and I come up with the wild idea of making a visual novel together. We have been building in the same fantasy world for the good part of two decades now, and I had a story I wanted to tell and Moon had characters they wanted to draw.

March

After spending some time gathering our thoughts, we started the real work on Her Choice (which at the time was still The Choice She Made). 

April

It was immediately clear that planning a 5+3 route game (plus a bunch of unnecessary features) was out of our current league, so we sat down and re-scoped everything. I also last minute, underhandedly, swapped Scai out for Kanzen, much to Moon’s horror (considering how Kanzen has consistently been the top-ranked character, aren’t we glad I did (￢‿￢ ) ).

Moon drew almost desperately throughout April to complete the first batch of sprites, while I worked out the main plot points.

May

In May our team was joined by our lovely advisor Inka and talented composer Hiroki Eto. Being able to delegate the soundtrack to a professional musician, really took a load off my shoulders, allowing me to fully focus on writing (the fact that the music is sooo good, also motivates me to write to the best of my abilities, lest it goes to waste hahaha). Inka’s presence has been a real game-changer, and if I can say so myself, the game quality has been steadily improving ever since she came on board.

June

Armed with Inka’s feedback, Moon and I reworked the character designs. I know Moon felt really hurt at the time because of the merciless critique, but looking at how far they have come in these few months really fills me with pride and admiration to have such a talented artist on our team.

I also had my fair share of rewriting to do, wracking my head to make the love interests as appealing as possible while still staying true to their core personalities. We also decided to drastically shorten the common route and include the first chapter of every route into the demo, which doubled our workload in an instant hahaha.

July through October

More drawing and more writing …

We painted the main menu, Moon worked on the sprites and CGs while I wrote and coded the script. The game was up and running without hitches, but the “fine-tuning” and “touch-up” just kept growing hahaha. 

We also busted our originally planned demo release, and were slumped for a while after that. Work proceeded slower than usual, and we felt all over the place. 

We did eventually pull ourselves back together. 

November

I finished rendering and painting all the backgrounds. In the meantime, Moon decided to redraw all the sprites … again. To be honest, I was sweating the whole time, thinking we would bust our demo release deadline again. Thank you Moon for always delivering as and beyond promised (*￣▽￣)b .

December

December was a rush towards the finish line, that left both Moon and I sleep-deprived and exhausted. But the satisfaction of releasing the demo on the deadline we had given ourselves made every minute worth it.

It's free to play, so grab a copy today!

Our Goals for 2022:

Releasing Her Choice of course!

I would love to be bold and say that we will be able to release the full game within the next year, but we got burned once already and it hurt, a lot. So I won’t be greedy this time, and set our goal to release Act 1 on the three main routes (around 40% of the final game), hopefully sometime in Summer 2022.

I’ll give you more details about everything that you can look forward to in Act 1 during our next update, so stay tuned.

Happy New Year and see you all in 2022!

- Wavi -