Long time, no see
Sorry we dropped off there for a bit. In truth, most of mabbees’ and my time has been spent doing the client work that supports our games, volunteer work and re-orienting ourselves amidst an increasingly noxious atmosphere in the tech industry. Fun times.
A quick recap of our goals for 2025:
localize Terranova in Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese
finish Tomodachi 8in1
start The Frontier
We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do all these things at once on top of our full-time contract work, but realistically, we can’t continue sustainably. mabbees has semi-stable employment, and I’m currently doing short-term contracts, looking for longer engagements.
My short-term contracts ended in April, but rather than dig in on games, I made the decision to hustle for more clients. Though I have some promising leads, still no paying work on my end, which makes funding much harder.
For Terranova, if we don’t pay ourselves for the development work (as in, our salary is $0), we made enough money in 2022-2023 to pay our artists who contributed to the game a fair wage.
Since 2023, all revenue has been going to pay our localizers (Russian/Brazilian Portuguese/Japanese) fairly. The last part of localization is importing the text into the game, and we don’t have the wiggle room financially for mabbees to take time off work.
So here’s the ask
I’m trying to get mabbees to take some time off to import all the shiny translations we have into Terranova. It’s going to be a significant amount of work, and if we compensate him for the first time in the history of making our game we’re looking at 240,000 yen (1,664 USD).
If you think we’re silly for investing in localizing a text-heavy game, I understand. But how I wish you could have seen our Japanese fans at BitSummit! The people who held their head and cringed, laughed out loud, and muttered, “holy crap…this is so nostalgic…”
I wish you could have read the reviews and emails we got from bilingual Brazilian fans telling us if the game was in PTBR they’d be showing it to all their friends. We want to share that feeling with more than just an English-speaking audience.
We don’t have a lot extra offer right now, but if you’d consider donating to our Ko-Fi or becoming a supporter for 200 yen a month (about the price of a konbini coffee), it would help us reach our goal of being more self-sufficient and also, soon, paying ourselves.
You’ll get:
our gratitude
a “Supporter” role in our Discord
access to all back issues of our newsletter
The back issues are ones you can already access for free since I didn’t want to paywall this content. But if you’d like to support two indie devs making games and help us meet our goal, we’d be ever grateful. If we get requests for higher tiers, we’ll consider it, provided we feel confident we can reasonably deliver the perks.
Thank you so much for your continued support. Please look forward to the next update!
Your friendly neighborhood devs,
CJ & mabbees
Some other news from in our circles…
CJ co-published a game with Ceren and Kyle, and more on CJ’s volunteer work for Citrus Con!
Help! I've Been Cursed with a Bubble Butt Released on Steam and itch.io
We’ve released a new collab game on Steam!
Take control of a bountifully cursed nonbinary protagonist as they navigate a world filled with peril and problems as they search for purpose and self-love. In our fun queer visual novel, you can…
🍑 Romance your crush~
🍑 Help the elderly~
🍑 Save the world with your perky posterior~
Consider throwing us a few bucks for a cheeky game!
Ceren, Kyle and I teamed up during Global Game Jam this year to make this, and thought it was funny enough to release. It’s been a new experience working as a lead dev on this project rather than the lead designer. I wrote about some of my learnings on my blog here.
Thank you Ceren for making our snazzy trailer video and to Kyle for helping with PR! 🥰
Calling queer media & BL creators! Applications for Citrus Con co-op bundle until June 11th
This year, I had the pleasure of organizing a co-op indie bundle of 18+ games for Citrus Con’s Gayme Gasm event in March that made over $1,700 for indie creators.
Now, I’m pleased to announce another bundle for Citrus Con in June.
Share our itch.io bundle application with your friends! Here's the summary 👇👇
REVENUE: Even split between creators
ACCEPTING WORKS: novels, comics, video games, TTRPGs
PRICE: Minimum $15, pay what you want
FREE WORKS: Yes
18+ OK: Welcomed but not required
DEADLINE: June 11th— CJ // Studio Terranova (@illuminesce.net) May 29, 2025 at 4:44 PM
We are accepting novels, zines, comics, and games. All revenue is split evenly across participants.