#otome game announcement

[discotenny]

WAIT! You can't love me! - Day 1 Demo

I've spoken about it long ago in my tags- but here it finally is! For Otome Jam 2024- I bring you WAIT! You can't love me!

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩ Synopsis⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

For all of your academic career, you were always second best to Satoshi Fujihara. And while you seemed to care too much about it, he never seemed to care at all. In your final semester of community college together- he suddenly says he's going to confess to you in four days!

Do you choose to accept his feelings, or is this going to be the one time you can get the upper hand on him? 

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩Demo Features⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

A completed Day 1 of 7 days of events

13k+ words of playable script - roughly an hour to experience everything

A nameable MC with the ability to pick from she/he/they pronouns

1 cute romanceable sleepyhead 

A variable cast of eccentric side characters

4 "routes" for the Day 1 date

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩Characters⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

Obnoxiously smart, aloof, hopelessly in love, hella sleepy

Ever since high school he’s had a crush on you, but didn't want to deal with any awkwardness. With the horizon of your transfer looming, Satoshi decides to go out of his way for once and ask you out. Not wanting you to be nervous, he lets you know beforehand that he will be confessing.  

Unfortunately that’s not really how it should go but he doesn’t know that.

Incredibly stubborn, incredibly dense

Throughout high school, you were always labeled as “second best” compared to Satoshi. You have a lot of pent up resentment towards him because he never seemed to care about his successes despite you wanting him to so badly. 

You think his carefree attitude towards his studies is some level of spite towards you. 

Elias Bolkiah - 5'8" - Same age as MC - June 7th - 491/524

Your childhood best friend with an unreasonable amount of hatred towards Satoshi.

Lilit Alighieri - 5'10" - One year older than MC - November 27th - 10/210

Considers themselves in a best friend trio with you and Elias. Questionable whether you feel the same.

Paden Canmore - 5'5" - One year younger than MC - June 1st - 45/120

Couldn’t care less about your love life but feels dragged into it because he likes that Lilit includes him in their gossip.

Yamato Suzuki - 5'9" - 49 - January 17th

Your statistics professor and advisor for the art club. Cares for his students like they're his own children.

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩Credits⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

Iotenny - Director, programmer, lead writer

kezukaity - Sprite artist

Autumn - CG artist, co-writer

mellonaes - CG artist

itspsyklone - Main theme composer

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩Final⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

Thanks for reading, and thank you so much more if you choose to play :3 ! I'll be posting some writings revolving around the characters to celebrate the release, thanks once again <3 !

[iotenny]

Please Boost Me Over a 2.0! DEMO RELEASE ✩

Made for the 2024 Winter VN Jam and submitted to the Queer Winter Jam~ I bring you PBMO2!

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩ Synopsis⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

Please Boost Me Over a 2.0! is an otome chatsim featuring you- a struggling college student barely hanging onto merit based financial aid. Hoping to boost your horrible GPA, you decide to use your winter break to take an online management course. 

Unfortunately, it seems you've been paired with the most incompatible group of people in existence to finish your final paper. A pair of scorned exes, an annoying troll, and you- an introvert with a crippling fear of confrontation. 

With everyone procrastinating till the last second, you four scramble to put together a paper that’s somewhat coherent. Stay up late, beg others to do their parts, and find there’s more to each of you than what meets the eye. 

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩Demo Features⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

1 common day

3 love interests

3 nights of calls per character 

Over 25k words for roughly 2 hours of full playtime

A choose-your-name MC with the option to pick between she/he/they pronouns and decide whether you want to appear feminine/masculine/neutral

The ability to choose your username

Server arguments

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩Characters⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

~ You and your eccentric roommate ~

~ Our three love interests ~

| The confused senior that's lost without your help | The annoying sophomore that can't help but tease you | The cheery junior that loves to complain to you |

⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩Final⋆｡°✩⋆｡°✩

The final game is planned to have six days of story in total! Thank you so much for reading, and even more so if you decide to play <3

I hope everyone had a great 2024, and I hope 2025 will only bring great things to come ~

[blank-house]

Keyframes Updated!

Well, folks. Our eyeballs are falling out and the last two weeks have felt a little like cramming for an exam— which is very funny considering none of the leads have been in college for a minute— but we did it. The Spring Semester demo that isn't really a demo is up!

You can now finally(!) enjoy the last two weeks of your semester with Deja, Cameron, Elio, Jamie, and Percy. Play from five new events, completely free on our itch.io page— including partial voice acting, eight CGs, and about 280,000 words total!

As we've mentioned before, we are releasing this update ahead of the Kickstarter!

If you haven't already heard, the Kickstarter only aims to fund production for Summer. We'll explain the reasons for this in full detail later, but for now, keep an eye on our social channels for news!

It's been a long year of development and an even longer wait, and we're excited to hear what you all think. We'll be taking a short break to recuperate, but our askbox is open! (But if you encounter any bugs, please send a report to support@blankhousegames.com.)

Until our next update, happy gaming everyone!

[herotome]

Herotome Super Demo

SHE's OUT. She is HERE.

FINALLY

I've been working on this damned update since march 2021 I really hope yall like it 😭

Herotome (hero-otome) is a superhero dating sim: romance optional, ✨aroace-friendly.✨

You can now meet ALL five love interests in this first official 'episode' of the game and there's

50,000+  words. (It. is. massive.)

180+ dialogue choice trees.

Animated CGs.

You can even get achievements for petting your cat.

Do you want to save the day and impress everyone with your might and wit and skill? Or do you prefer being an absolute menace who fist fights their mentor in his office and sets fire to fan mail? Why not both?

I been solo funding this project out of pocket for half a decade and I'm not going anywhere until its DONE; if you like the game, pls consider sharing with your friends, hyping it up on social media, or supporting me on Ko-Fi~

Herotome is completely free to play. It comes with a walkthrough if you tip (or have ever spent) 2.99$ or more on the itch.io page, but you shouldn't need a walkthrough to beat the game.

Have fun!!!

Proper link to the demo will be in a reblog so tumblr doesnt nuke this post from search engines XOXO

[ragyragd0ll]

[diodellet]

hot take: from the beginning, obm has always been carried by its fans. maybe it's just the collective nostalgia and attachment towards the franchise that make it seem like solmare is bringing an end to an amazing era, but the games were not really that good.

you—artists and writers and cosplayers and editors and everyone with a soul and creative bone and love for these characters—you all made it good.

[atelieronthemoon]

Cold-hearted ✔️

Single father ✔️

British accent ✔️

Our ice king Joseph will be voiced by the amazing Jason Hall. I think he does a really good job at portraying Joseph's coldness. Also, that British accent is just chef's kiss 😏

[miragenoirvn]

Mirage Noir mini demo is now officially up!

~14,000 words showcasing the first half of the common route

~1-1.5 hours of playtime

Brief overview of world/characters

One minigame

Download the demo here: https://studiochawan.itch.io/mirage-noir

[lovebirdgames]

Band Camp Boyfriend is now available to play on Steam and Itch.io! What are you waiting for? The drums are starting the tap-off! Get on the field!!!

Download on Steam for PC!

Download on Itch.io for PC, Mac, & Linux!

Not so eager to lead your band to tragedy? Our good ending walkthrough has your back.

[beautifulbutdoomed]

so there are people who, when playing one gacha/otome game, actually play this one game and nothing else? (like never tried anything else but this)

how to live like this...

ofc I don't mean to offend anyone, I'm just the kind of person who likes trying new things

[eydi-andrius]

.

[windchimesgames]

End of Year Recap + Plans for 2024

Hey everyone!

Belated Happy New Year to everyone! I know this is a very late end of year recap 😂Unfortunately, the past week ended up much busier for me than expected, so I could only get around to doing this now that things have calmed down a little.

This is a crosspost of a public post I made on Patreon a few days ago, so if you prefer the formatting there, you can read the post at this link:

PS: I do free monthly devlogs / posts there on Patreon, so consider joining the free tier of the Patreon even if you aren't interested in the paid tiers!

For those who'd rather read the post here, I'll leave the extraordinarily long ramble in a Read More cut below!

Let's start with a quick recap of the highlights / achievements accomplished in 2023!

Okay, this one may be slightly cheating. While Emberfate only launched on Steam in Jan 2023 so the 92 positive reviews came in in the year of 2023, it was up on Itch.io since mid 2022, so not all 383 Itch.io ratings came in in 2023.

Still, I'm pretty proud of these stats! Perhaps the numbers are nothing compared to some other amazing games' out there, but it's still something I'm proud of. It makes me happy that my silly experimental nostalgic little game struck a chord in so many players — much more than I expected given how niche the topic was!

Now, unfortunately, I could not get Emberfate's DLC for Potato's route out by end of 2023 like I had hoped. Porting the game to mobile also ended up much more difficult than I expected because of just how much of the UI I'm going to have to redesign — and hence, programming to be redone — if I wanted to make the game fit a small mobile screen. So both plans are going to have to be postponed to 2024.

The other notable highlight of 2023 is that both Lyrissa's and Kierdan's routes for Reanimation Scheme were released for beta access! That put the game at 3/5 routes complete, with a total of 431,786 words for the script.

I recruited a handful of beta testers to test the three completed routes a few months ago, and so far, the feedback has been positive overall. That's been a huge relief and lifted a massive weight off my chest — due to the controversial reception of the demo, I've been extremely anxious that the game would be hated by the players, and I've done so many rounds of editing and honestly perhaps somewhat unnecessary and obsessive rewriting of the script, but none of it felt good enough 😂 So hearing the positive comments has been a huge motivation / morale booster. Perhaps I should have done beta testing sooner… LOL

There are two more achievements unrelated to a specific game project that I'd like to mention:

2023 is the year that I became more interested in and better at Ren'Py programming! Most of it is thanks to my amazing programmer friend and Ren'Py wizard, Feniks (whom you may know as the programmer for Our Life series), who sparked my interest in programming and helped teach me a LOT. While I'm by no means a professional now at coding, I feel much more comfortable navigating around Ren'Py code and setting up what I need to in the backend of the games I'm developing, which opens up new doors for me for future projects in terms of what kind of features (big or small) that I may be able to include! Though the side effect of that is I looked back at the code I did for Reanimation Scheme from previous years and was immediately horrified by how ugly and inefficient it was. 😂I did redo the backend code of the Gallery and Achievements system a bit, but the rest will just have to stay for now.

I made quite a few new connections within the indie VN dev sphere in 2023! I made a shocking discovery that there's enough number of indie VN developers from Hong Kong to fill half a minibus, and I was lucky enough to connect with them and share our experiences and learn from each other! Due to new project commissions I took on for $$$ (real life financial needs suck), as well as a couple of small game jam projects I joined as programmer to buff up my programming portfolio, I also made some new VN dev friends unexpectedly. It's been really nice, because honestly, solo dev can be a really lonely and isolating endeavor sometimes. I'm super grateful for the new connections I found myself making in 2023!

Looking Ahead: 2024

Okay, that was a lot of rambling for the recap. More than I thought I would write. Now let's move forward to what the future will look like for this studio in 2024 and what goals I'm setting for myself this year!

Priority #1: Finishing Reanimation Scheme

Of course it's Reanimation Scheme. As mentioned above, we're currently at 3 out of 5 routes completed (sans partial voice acting). So the biggest goal for 2024 will be to get the game done. and out. Finally.

I won't be giving a concrete release date until we're like, literally in beta phase for all 5 routes, just so I won't have to announce a delay and let people down. But given the current progress and pace of work, I'd say probably around mid-year — maybe Q3 latest.

I'll be keeping up with the episodic updates of Reanimation Scheme's beta build on Patreon (and Kickstarter) from this month onwards, beginning with Jori's route and then followed by Sebastien's.

The remaining Kickstarter rewards may take a little longer — but ideally, all of them (artbook / lorebook / short stories collections, etc.) will be done by end of the year as well.

Priority #2: Potato's Route DLC for Emberfate

Potato, poor Potato. His DLC had to be put on the sidelines until Reanimation Scheme is done.

Half of the art has already been commissioned and completed by the amazing Remnantation — we're just missing his selfie CG & his MMO character sprite! So the next step would be the script and then the voice acting for the calls part. I won't be able to start on the script until mid-2024 earliest, but given the fact that his route won't be that long if it's parallel in length compared to the existing three routes, it probably won't take too long to do. Perhaps 2-3 months for the development process of the DLC?

I'll likely be releasing his DLC early on Patreon, potentially also episodically as it's completed, like I did with Emberfate. So if you're interested, keep an eye out for it when the time comes!

Something Secretly Brewing in the Shadows?

If you're pledged to this Patreon on $10 tier or above, you'll probably already know what I'm alluding to.

I won't be announcing or talking much about this for now, since I don't know when I'll be able to start working on this project properly (i.e. I need to meet my above two goals first). For all I know, it might end up being not a 2024 thing but a 2025 thing. So I'll only tease it slightly for now here.

Bonus Goal: Market, for the Love of God

If you follow Wind Chimes Games on either Twitter or Tumblr, you'll probably have noticed the sorry state of my social media. I… really do not like marketing or posting on social media. I never know what to post or say. I'm too unfunny and uncreative to meme or write humorous captions that get engagement. 😂It kind of feels like I'm shouting into the void, and nobody really cares about what I have to say on my projects when there's so many cooler and more interesting things out there. So I always try for a brief period of time, and then I give up 😭

This year though, I really really need to take marketing more seriously. With two releases planned for 2024, marketing is going to be important if I want the games to sell more than like 20 copies LOL

So I guess, uh, hold me to it and call me out if I don't start posting regularly after all 🥹

Conclusion

If you've made it this far on this post, thank you so much for listening to me ramble. 🥹 2024 is going to be a very busy year, but hopefully, a productive one that will end with me meeting all of the above listed goals.

Thank you so much for joining me on the wild and bumpy journey that was 2023, and I hope you'll stick around for the exciting things to come this year too! Here's to a great year ahead of all of us!

[semperestvn]

Thank you for over 100 downloads!

Thank you everyone, we reached over 100 downloads for Semper Est! Sometimes 100 seems a little small in our current world obsessed with numbers, but I still want to commemorate such a milestone because so much work was put in to bring the game to where it is today.  Your interest and support in Semper Est is greatly valued and I hope you'll stick around as we continue hitting milestones and growing with each other!

I've also been working on writing a post mortem devlog that is unfortunately taking a lot longer than I thought to put together because of how much there is to discuss. If you're interested in who I am as an artist and a developer, then you can check out a recent interview I did​ with Boxcat who streams and covers otome games! (I somehow managed to yap for about 4 hours, so be prepared!) I also made a Meet the Team thread​ on Twitter to introduce you to our team members!

From now until the SuNoFes update, you probably won't be hearing from me as I take time to push out the rest of the planned content for Semper Est. If you liked the game, make sure to comment or leave a review! 

[blank-house]

Ayo! With the end of September coming soon, we thought it's a good time to drop this link now! We're gearing up for a Kickstarter next month, and in the build up to the campaign's date we're preparing to have the rest of the Spring Semester of Keyframes finally be shipped out! In just a couple of days, the wait will be over! I can now finally respond to those asks in our inbox ahdalkdw Yes, we're going to have a Kickstarter. Yes, the extended demo is coming out super soon. And yes, the demo would be available on Steam as well!

There's so much more I want to say with a year's plus worth of development wrapping up real soon, but I'll leave those remarks for when the Extended Demo is finally released. In the meantime, thank you for your patience!

[herotome]

Herotome Super Demo

❤ coming December 2nd ❤

[iotenny]

Message incoming ~ bumble_boi

bumble_boi: hey bumble_boi: hey bumble_boi: hey bumble_boi: i see ur online bumble_boi: r u ignoring me :x

>Yeah bumble_boi: cringe! ur cringe!!!! >Who even are you? bumble_boi: huuuuuuuuuuuuuh??? bumble_boi: wait omg is this an amnesia moment bumble_boi: im ur fav person ever bumble_boi: and u promised if anything were to happen 2 u , u would give me all ur savings bumble_boi: pay up >YOU'RE CRINGE bumble_boi: sniff bumble_boi: now that was just hurtful

>No! Why would I? bumble_boi: were u busy not doing ur homework or smthn bumble_boi: jkjk LOL >I was doing my homework bumble_boi: boo tomato bumble_boi: be responsible later bumble_boi: i miss u :(( >Why are you asking? bumble_boi: errrrrrm bumble_boi: lets hang? i found smthn u might like

bumble_boi: now hop on itch bumble_boi: and get ready to download bumble_boi: our new game bumble_boi: please boost me over a 2.0 bumble_boi: releasing december 31st bumble_boi: >:)

Friend request sent! View profile?

The annoying sophomore who loves to tease you~

Keep an eye out for Please Boost Me Over a 2.0! I’ll be doing teasers like these every day until the lead up to the game on December 31st ! :)