My new game Danchi Days is now out on Steam, for PC, Mac and Steam Deck, in English, Japanese and Simplified Chinese! Check it out here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3107530/Danchi_Days/ . I also released the soundtrack on Steam + Bandcamp. No solid console port plans yet!

If you're unfamiliar, Danchi Days is a story-driven adventure set in a 2000s Japanese mass-housing complex called a "danchi." You play as a 12-year old girl, Hoshino, who, after some years, has returned from the USA and decides to revive her local summer festival for her grandmother who is now living with dementia. Along the way, she meets all sorts of unique neighbors, while also learning about their relationships and history together. It's a very funny and charming game, and I hope you'll try it out!

I made it as part of a new studio, gingham games.

Usually these game announcement posts are short, but I think this time I'll write an extended version of the credits which are otherwise only viewable at the end of the game.

Main Staff Credits

gingham games consists of a development team and some marketing assistants.

For the development team, it’s 3: me, sandy powder, and mogumu. sandy wrote the story in Japanese, was a junior game designer, and co-directed the game with me, as well as doing Japanese bizdev. mogumu did all of the art, and I handled coding, music, English bizdev, production, and English translation.

For marketing assistance, Ume and Olivia helped out! Since mid-2025, Ume helped us part-time on-and-off with influencer outreach and other marketing stuff in Japan. And Olivia helped us for a few months part-time in 2025 with influencer outreach as well as shortform video content, and both helped us this year with a lot of internal playtesting! It was a HUGE help having some dedicated workers help with playtesting and building out our influencer list.

This game was published by Analgesic Productions, meaning we handled logistical release stuff, as well as passing down all the knowledge about doing a Steam release and making a game, and funding a big chunk of development.

Directors

"Co-director" means sandy and I started brainstorming in August 2023, and we'd talk through any core decisions about the game's design and schedule, and we would generally both sign off on anything making it into the game whether it was ours (e.g. my music) or someone else's. Pretty much the whole story and script are sandy's, while I was something of a "story assistant" role for giving feedback or discussing anything she was stuck on across many meetings.

Game Design

Design is always tricky to explain who did what since it's so collaborative.

For sandy, "Junior game designer" means that while I generally led the game's design, because Danchi Days's design is so intertwined with the writing, it was up to sandy to make the final calls on quest hinting and structure at the writing level. She also designed some of the things you find on the internet which I won't spoil!

We would discuss each character's quest or placement and structure beforehand, and then after the script was done I would put it in the game, design the level that contains it, and make sure things generally seemed okay. sandy was also the first point of feedback for all level design and sense games and other things. Things like level design, level layout, screen size, area art and tiles, Sense Game and Internet functionality, character placement around levels, etc, were left up to me.

Something that was a huge aspect of the game this time was cutscene direction, which I handled - basically deciding who goes where and when do they move for every interaction in the game. This is something that exists at an intersection of design, art, and coding. I generally do this for my other games, but it's not generally a huge part of the development time, while on Danchi Days this was definitely the biggest task.

Art

mogumu joined in May 2024 after our initial prototyping and planning. Her roles included doing the character designs based on sandy's descriptions and moodboards, handling their expressions, as well as the game's many props, background art, animations, in-game internet UI elements, and more. Her background is a professional illustrator, and this was her first game and time doing pixel art! If you're curious about her experience doing the art, she made a zine about it you can buy here: https://analgesicproductions.bigcartel.com/product/danchi-days-art-zine

For art, our workflow was generally sandy or I drawing up a list of art we needed. For some props, the in-game cutscene illustrations, or character designs and expressions, sandy would draw up the specs, while for everything else, I would. So for example if we needed to depict the danchi's building through tiles, I would sketch out the building on grid paper and then mogumu would have to interpret that and make it work through tile pixel art. If we needed a new character sandy would draw up a moodboard and describe the character. After mogumu finished the initial drawing, we'd give feedback if needed before incorporating it into the game.

Ultimately, the art direction of the whole game is in mogumu's hands, so give her a shoutout or follow if you like the characters or spritework!

Special thanks to Marina Kittaka for some early thoughts on pixel art which were helpful for deciding things like visual perspective, character proportions, and style. Anodyne 1 and 2's pixel art were helpful references throughout dev.

Translation

The game is originally written in Japanese. I did the English localization with some assistance by sandy. Although I can read Japanese I'm not a professional translator and occasionally make meaning errors when doing the initial JP to EN translation pass, so we found it was faster/more accurate if she did the rough translations for me (as she is multilingual.)

Then, I could compare this against the Japanese and edit and revise the rough translation into polished and localized English that works well for the English-reading audience! I have more thoughts on this, but I'll leave it at this for now.

Programming and Music

I don't have too much to mention here in terms of credits, but for two songs I collaborated with sandy and troppo (a Japanese v-tuber and singer). Keep an ear out for the songs! sandy wrote the Japanese lyrics as well as gave some feedback through the songwriting process. troppo sang the songs based on my placeholder vocals lol.

I guess I do want to shout out Angeline Era - I created a RPG Maker-like cutscene editor tool for Angeline Era, which got refined in Danchi Days' 2024/5 demos, further refined in Angeline Era's release, before being refined even more for the hundreds of cutscenes made for Danchi Days! Yay tools!

Producer

What's this role? It varies from team to team, but for me I felt it encompassed the coaching I did for sandy and mogumu, as it was their first game ever! With a game under our belt, mogumu is now a strong 2D game artist, sandy's an experienced designer and writer, as well as game marketer, privy to the business landscape of the indie game world.

Producer also includes some things like trying to make calls on scope and schedule, like getting sandy to cut down from 151 to 51 neighbors, as well as setting release deadlines and deciding what people should work on next. Some of this was more collaborative, like with schedule and writing, but for the art I was scheduling in tasks each week with an eye on our deadlines.

Other Credits

After the above core staff, we have support from many others!

First, our dozens of demo and beta playtesters. We did a lot more playtesting rounds with Danchi Days than in any other game before and it really helped with gathering feedback and finding bugs, so thanks, everyone!

Next, our localizers. For the demo we worked with Puchun Hsueh (JUN) for an excellent Taiwanese Traditional Chinese translation, and flankoi for the Simplified.

For the final game, we worked with JUN for Traditional and Dragonbaby for the Simplified Chinese localization. Dragonbaby's localization was led by Carrick Lomas, translated by Yating Chen, sen, and Isabel Wang. Some additional managerial help was from Sam Burton and Joe Dart. LQA was handled by Alan Chui and overseen by Evan Shulgold. This was a pretty big undertaking given the game's script size, so thank you to everyone involved!

Next, marketing assistance. Dawn Wood has been helping us with Chinese marketing, including in-person showings in China, some translation, consultation, and influencer outreach and press releases! For the demo we also worked with Mooncat Games for some assistance. Neon Noroshi helped with some press release outreach in Japan.

Ryo Adidharma helped us with a few shortform videos in 2025, and blunemone interned with us to produce some illustrations we've posted on social media!

Thanks to ChevyRay for the licensed pixel font we used in-game for english.

Thanks to Indie Life Streamers, a Japanese streaming collective, and fei CHANNEL, a Japanese gaming Youtuber.

Danchi Days also has cameos of itemLabel and yogurts.net plushies, and a character from DOUKUTSU PENGUIN CLUB's game A Tiny Wander.

I also utilized a few free sound effects from Otologic, soundeffect-lab, dova-syndrome, Zapsplat, T.K.’s Free SFX, pocket-se, and freesound.

And that's it. Thanks for reading and we hope you'll enjoy the first game by gingham games!