You've survived the first half of junior year...think you can tackle the last few months??
High School Daze: Junior Year 2 is a direct sequel that continues where you left off in the first game. Make your relationship official with your boyfriend/girlfriend and finally say the L word OR forego romance completely in favor of kicking it with friends in this slice-of-life visual novel.
(There's no shortage of drama, school hijinks, or a deep appreciation for discounted sushi served all day on Wednesdays.)
This game is currently rated 16+ for language, underage drinking, and suggestive humor/situations. The following topics are found in some routes and treated with the upmost care: internalized homophobia, racism/microaggressions, possessive/manipulative romantic relationships, and sexism in gaming spaces. Player discretion advised.
Summer is HERE. And, like I promised last devlog, I have exciting news for this one.
Alaris: Full Release Approaches Very Soon
Why? You Ask? Well, because this month, Crescence finished ALL THE CGS FOR THE GAME (*HORNS START BLARING IN THE BG*). That means All 54 (FIFTY-FOUR!!!) CGs are in the game YEAAAAA.
I'm pretty happy with how everything looks together now, especially in the gallery! While I won't show too much, here are some sneak peeks of some of the CGs you can look forward to!
look how all my kids look together
I ALSO finished all the sprites, along with Aisa & Kuna'a's updated expressions, so they can emote fully (well, as much as they're able to), just like the rest of our LIs. While I do need to get some base expressions in for the NPCs, all sprite bases are DONE and ready to be added into the game \o/
That makes all art assets FINISHED. All we really have left are some minor additions, like NPC sprite expressions, the last of Aisa's edits, and voice acting, to put into the game.
WHICH LEAVES US LOOKIN A LITTLE LIKE THIS.....
Writing: 100% Complete
Editing: 95% Complete
Art: 99% Complete
Coding: 99% Complete
Voice Acting: 80% Complete
If you're interested in playtesting the game and getting early sneak peeks at the full build, it's available on Patreon. Right now, the build has all routes and all CGs but doesn't include all NPC sprites/updated sprite expressions.
I'll be rolling updates for that out in the coming weeks! The roadmap I have outlined is currently as follows, but subject to change pending development progress:
Full Build Playtesting Roadmap
June 4: All Routes & CGs Released
June 19: All Sprites & Updated Sprite Expressions (i.e., Kuna'a & Aisa) Released
July 3: All Voice Lines Released
Full Build Public Release: It's a Secret
As always, the builds are available on Patreon at the Hydra tier!
Get more from Crescence Studio on Patreon. Creating a Silly, Little Game called Alaris. Support Crescence Studio and get exclusive access to
That's all for this devlog. We are genuinely nearing The End after spending so long in development. I really can't thank you all enough for sticking around for this long. If all goes well, this will be our last devlog ever. And in its stead, I will have an Exciting Announcement for you all next month instead.
There are no words that can capture my excitement for how close we are, so I'll just say Until Next Time!
So those of you who know me (AlwaysJmB), know I've been busy in content creation and not very public about Tuff Mallow game development. I'm still alive, and not at all giving up on game dev- but I've been struggling to make my way back to sharing this journey via social media.
Hooboy, it's not easy. As a dev, there are expectations gamers/potential consumers have for communication about games in development, and generally studio direction. But what happens when the "studio" is a solo developer?
Speaking with some of my fellow solo developers that began our journey about the same time- before the pandemic- we all set out to make longer visual novels. Epic sprawls that were the kinds of games we took great interest in. For some of us, we made the hurdle to release in a quick and timely fashion. It wasn't easy for them, but they made that transition from a game in development to a released IP. I look up to those peers and remain proud of their accomplishments. But for quite a few of us, the struggle to complete the project and release it has been the greatest challenge we have faced in the greater part of this last decade.
You'd be surprised to know I'm only one of many of my peers doggedly trudging towards the finish line with only our own motivation to spur us on, even though our IPs have been in development long enough to lose that initial electric hype that sparked our journey in the beginning.
Honestly, for me, it feels good to know I'm not alone in this.
Just knowing that there are other devs like me, people I consider friends, that didn't give up on our works, even as the world became a really hard place to create in... I find it inspiring. WE GOT THIS!
But anyway, I just want to let you know I'm back and trying to figure out an update schedule so I can share all the things that have been happening with Tuff Mallow and most recently with The Closet Door. I'm very proud of the way this game is shaping up, and I'll be excited to share more about it in the coming weeks! So keep a lookout because we are so back!
A short update!! Because I have things to share but not tooo much and I'm afraid I'll convince myself not to post later.
As of writing this devlog, I am doggedly trying my BEST to get some more headway on HSD 2. Billie and April's routes are in the prom section of the story--I mentioned previously that game 2 is split into months. In my outline, I have smaller sections for where the script will split up if I'm writing large variations of shared scenes i.e. the college fair, the weightlifting meet, and prom!
With Langston and Ryan under my belt, getting to and through the prom scene is where shit starts to congeal and I'm truly in the home stretch. So, I won't celebrate just yet, but if we all cross our fingers, I'll be posting a "____ ROUTE IS DONE" maybe, hopefully, possibly next month?
I think I'll also start commissioning art assets again this summer so 1) I can resume plugging things into ren'py and 2) start teasing scene again bc they'll finally have the sprites AND backgrounds lol.
I have no idea what now and December will look like however, I've decided that it's okay to voice this goal here: I'd like to have Billie, Ryan, and Langston's routes in early access state by March 2027 and a finished HSD 2 either by Q4 2027 or Q1 2028.
Like...I think I can do it. I've taken lots of breaks in between writing this, battled a lot of internal and external demons, stressed over the storylines, and worried that I wasn't producing my best work. But, I really am proud of this game and I REALLY want y'all to play it and I REALLY am feral to hear feedback and reactions. I'm tired of my own echo chamber LOL!
Here's a scene from someone's prom scene (any guesses??) and I hope everyone has a good week! 🤧
A little, casual update about the process with Cupid's Bargain! (I'm, like, very bad at using social media consistently, so… let's see if this devlog will ever reach #2, lmao.) If you are not aware, Cupid's Bargain is a satirical, horror romcom starring a teenage matchmaker who summons two devilish deities to understand love and revitalize her high school business — all in a Catholic school, no less!
It was released last year for Otome Jam 2025, and I've w/ my team been working on it since then! It's been my longest project both word-count wise and production-length, which has been a crazy fun experience.
We had some bumps on the road, but all is turning out so incredibly well that I'm so stoked to show you what we have! Here's breakdown of our progress:
Writing — I still need to polish a bunch of stuff, but it looks like this game is gonna be up to around 140k words! Which is so much, my gosh. I don't know how people do it. Editing is my friend because, as we all know, typos are a bane of my existence.
Programming — I've programmed most of the GUI already and re-coded a couple scenes in the opening. I'm waiting to get all my assets in before I start trucking along!
GUI — The GUI has been completely revamped as I started to not like the old one I made for the jam initially. I really like this one as it branches away from what Ren'py normally looks like, giving the game a fresh new paint.
Art — All the CGs actually have been finished, what. And let me tell you, they all look so good! Spritework is still working strong, getting all the expressions and poses down!
The goal, the ideal goal, is for an extended demo to come out for Otome/Josei Jam 2026! (Did you see that we were featured on its main page!? I still can't believe it!) This extended demo will cover the full route for one of the LIs. I'm already set on which of the boys, but I am curious as to which one are you most interested in: the "angelic" Ily or the "demonic" Eins? I'll do a reveal later when the jam gets going!
I wanted to close this devlog off with dev's fun fact!
Fun Fact #1 — Did you realize that every design choice for the LIs is to reflect the idea of an angel and devil sitting on your shoulder? Of course, the obvious is the wings and devil horns. But, to the viewer, Ily will always be on the right of MC and Eins on her left (since left is known as being the "evil" direction). And pieces of their design are funnily enough flipped, like their cape and scars, to showcase an imbalance of their roles.
Too young to carry authority, and too young to be insecure about it. A glimpse of freedom, framed in a window of doubt. Sauntering up to the listening counter, easing in the cd (you break it, you buy it); picking up the disintegrating headphones (spongy, peeling), placing them gingerly over ears, and pressing the control buttons.
Play. Then skip—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Track eight.
...I found it.
Because Track Eight isn’t in that record store: it is two years earlier, a passenger secretary taking musical dictation, memorizing only the things that matter in the moment: a long piano intro, the track number and preceding song—Friday I’m in Love—and my first love in the driver’s seat. Light chasing shadow across the dashboard. Aftermarket stereo system. The scent of eucalyptus and secondhand clove cigarettes and late night burrito stops. Fumbling innocence, first kisses, bruises and bandages.
Something well remembered, even after the passage of years.
It's been three and a half years since I touched on music for my second Marginalia post—then still nine months away from releasing the demo for Bright Oak, scrambling to outthink and outplan my own extreme greenness as a game dev. Now that I have the benefit of more experience—and am far more comfortable in my own process!—I think I'd like to revisit the topic.
I regard music as a crucial part of the storytelling body: if the overall narrative comprises the heart and mind—dialogue the mouth, art the eyes, and sound design the ears—then what is music, if not the nervous system? That which prompts us to share in the experience of a character's feelings: pain, pleasure, fear, hope, connection. Music is the wordless cue to feel, and a well-considered soundtrack gives a story backbone.
Music was the backbone of several first loves of mine. “First love" is a funny sort of title, because it can be applied at will across a spectrum of individuals both real and imagined, from celebrities to blorbos to friends to near-strangers. One of my own earliest childhood “crushes" was on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—or rather, the figure I imagined was behind the music I was dutifully learning at my weekly piano lessons (spoiler: pretty well nothing like the documented historical figure, as evidenced by my rejection of Beethoven at the time as too mercurial a personality). And as I grew, I learned I could weather any social event, so long as there was a piano to befriend: I could dutifully play Gershwin and Rogers and Kenton and Rachmaninov and Mussorgsky and Debussy—but I couldn't compose.
I used to perceive that as a shortcoming. I’ve since learned that it served to whet a different skill: after all, I am intimately familiar with my own feelings, the shape and perimeters they create—figuring out how that ought to sound is merely a vocabulary to be honed over years.
And introspection has taught me well that songs are spells which carry the rare magic of time travel.
Memories are fossils encased in sensory experience: for me, near-drowning tastes like salt and fear and strawberry ice cream, escaping death and embracing the sweetness of summer and survival. And in a world where mighty quests exist in literature alone, hearing a song that meant something to me at a fixed point in time served as a save-state for that emotion, as well as a quest prompt.
The Cure. Track 8. Follows Friday I’m in Love. Tastes like late summer, and a love you know won’t work out—an earnest emotion, where failure feels like tragedy, even if it is inevitable.
It took me two years to find the right song, the right album. And to this day, I smile whenever I hear The Cure, and I remember that absurd, self-imposed quest. The one that tastes like the sun filtering through eucalyptus trees during the fleeting months of summer break, and lukewarm, oversweetened boba tea, and secondhand clove smoke, and first loves; and while I do not have the same hair-trigger sentimentality I did as a teenager first hearing it--now, now I have a story around it, which includes all those elements, and that setting, and it amounts to time travel.
That absurd, drawn-out process is a cornerstone shaping how I think of songs in storytelling. It's one piece of many--for example, learning that while I loathe Shostakovich in recordings, I also cry listening to Shostakovich's work live--but the practical application and experience of music is one that guides me.
I am myself, of course, An Old Elder Fae, and will show my years in stating this, but: I believe music being more effortless to find makes people more inclined to second-guess their own connection to it--the mechanization / sterilization of the human experience can sometimes make us feel so terribly alone and disconnected, when the reality is, a ten year old can definitely still harbor a (awfully misguided) crush on Mozart; bad songs can still carry good memories by association; and however annoying it may be when the mix tape or cd you were given has a flaw or scratch in the recording, it can transform into part of the music--and the clean version becomes apostasy.
I think I kept my core values intact when it came to commissioning tracks for Bright Oak; I believe what the intervening years have taught me is how I want implement music in my games as an active aspect of the storytelling, rather than treating it as a sort of omnipresent, passive wallpaper. Because in life, it isn't. In the same way that scent can transport us back to a childhood memory, specific songs, and even musical genres, can immediately form a channel taking us back years, even decades.
And thanks to those bittersweet, fondly remembered, inevitably doomed first loves of mine--I've learned to actively think about how music informs my personal storytelling. Just as I furiously memorized the mood, the instrumentation, the context, and the follow-up to Trust, game music is most impactful in context.
Because soundtracks tell the story as much as backgrounds or character sprites do, and deserve equal consideration.
Music has memory association, and by extension, it is full to the brim of stories.
That ill-advised kiss under a supposedly haunted bridge, the one that lead to calamity? Will always sound like Miles Davis, at his most plaintive.
The first time playing hooky on a field trip because a friend could drive, stopping to get coffee during school hours? Will always sound like New Order. Rebellious, a generation older; safe-rebellious.
High school prom, college road trips, interstate moves, traumas, joys, COVID--all of them have distinct soundscapes and fingerprints for me.
Let us take up space in our soundtracks, be it as devs or as listeners; let us get personal. Let's be specific and considerate in how our stories sound: let's cultivate our moods, and also cultivate where there is silence.
It doesn't require being able to read music to recognize the emotional language of mood and memory which music commands and speaks with fluency. And harnessing my understanding of it has reshaped and enriched how I think of game dev.
Because Sound needs a medium to travel: and one of the best conductors I've found is storytelling.
Now we have the special songs in WebConfessional! :3
This one was simply a lot of fun to make while simultaneously being a bit nerve-wracking due to WANTING to make it dark and just wondering the whole way through if I was succeeding! XD Still! The team liked it and I got to experiment with tone and lots of effects, so total success!
The 2026 edition of Colorful love jam is now live !
Have you noticed the lack of romance game focusing on love interests of color ? Well let's make our own games ! This is the second edition of a beginner friendly, visual novel jam aimed at making more diverse romance focused stories.
A game jam from 2026-07-01 to 2026-11-14 hosted by Dreamty. Have you noticed the lack of romance game focusing on love interests of color ?
The last devlog being in January is unfortunately on brand for this development year. And me.
But we'll get to that in a second!
Let's chat about HSD 2 first and my progress since we last spoke.
HSD 2 Progress
We have two finished routes in ren'py: Langston and Ryan's. Everyone cheer because you don't understand how many times I've decided not to finish this game and then changed my mind because *I* would be upset.
We have progress on April and the friendship routes: The game is structured into months (have I shared that with y'all yet??) and April's is written up to April, and friendship route is written up to March. I've hit a teeny-tiny wall with both so writing has stalled!!!
I really, really, really want to finish out the friendship route. I know the majority of players won't even play it, but as someone who purposefully made it a point to make this route back in game 1? It needs to be on point.
#VNsWithBlackLIs
My series concluded on Tumblr and Bluesky back in February! It was fun! I hope to do it again next year with a new batch of games.
Other Hummingbird Games tingz
BIG apologies if I already said this (not in the mood to go digging) but I finished a draft of I'm a Lover, You're the Fighter! I was previously undecided on what would become of the project, but I'm leaning strongly towards pushing it into production (Ace jam 2026 anybody??). Anyhoo, I've been noodling around with the second draft and been mentally preparing myself to reach out to character artists LOL.
But friendly reminder to me this is a WRITING year so we need to stick with WRITING.
#DevotedVN is still in outline hell™️, thanks for asking. I haven't shared much of the process, mostly because I don't share my outlining (it's either quick or boring) but I guess I can share...
I forgot to change the number (y'all see my maddess??) so that's really like 20 attempts. On the outline. The OUTLINE. I thought Jacob was bad...
I'm sure all will be reviewed in the future post mortem, but right now Keegan's story hasn't gotten to that "this is the direction" feeling I get when I write something.
And now a word from our game developer
I won't lie y'all, ever since I started making games it's always been something personally, historically, culturally, and or socially going on in the background that has affected my ability to be creative, to concentrate, and be present. I joke about how I'm going to turn a traumatic experience into a game but said game requires being able to be creative, present, and to concentrate 😂
I didn't even want to write this devlog even though I purposefully hit the gas last month in order to have stuff to talk about in the devlog. That might have been a mistake LOL.
I can't promise monthly devlogs at this point. My plans are more than triple my available energy and I'm not in a place where I can stop the thing that's adding stress to my life, so my hobbies are taking a bit of a hit.
But to everyone who has reached out to me or commented on game pages and shared kind words and reviewed my projects, it truly means the world.
Special Edition - 2026 Amare Games Festival Bulletin
Welcome to the Amare Games Festival Bulletin! 🎉
This special edition of the Amare Bulletin is dedicated to Amare Games Festival, highlighting all the incredible games submitted during the event!
With 68 total entries, this year’s festival showcases a vibrant and diverse range of Amare experiences, including:
✨ Fully released games – complete experiences across fantasy, slice-of-life and more
✨ On-going & episodic projects – including visual novels and interactive fiction still unfolding
✨ Updates & expansions – new content for existing favourites
✨ Demos & prototypes – early looks at upcoming indie titles
This bulletin is a free download, so take your time exploring! Be sure to check out the games, support developers by playing and rating their work, and dive into everything the Amare community has created this festival. 💖
~ The Amare Bulletin Team
A special edition showcasing all the recent releases and updates from Amare Games Festival from the 2026 event!
after much heming and hawing or however that's spelled, I've decided to resume the devlogs in April. I'll have stuff to report and we'll just go from there??
(there's big headway in a HSD 2 route I'm making and I'm toying around with something I want to do for y'all concerning the game, so the month break will give me time to think it over and decide if it's feasible.)
I had BIG ASS plans to do something showy, make cool graphics, and just queue them up so I'd be able to enjoy the fruits of my labor, but fuck that, I'm so tired and I'm like this was my idea I can change it and make it be whatever I need it to be.
in another timeline, I had more energy, more creativity, & less manic energy coursing through my body. But we're in this timeline!!! it's Black History Month and once a day here and over on Bluesky, I'll be linking the itch.io or steam page for the next 28 days and shouting out visual novels that have unambiguous Black love interests.
Taking my games out of the running, I struggled a little too hard to come up with at least 28 and that's a problem. I can't make the industry progress faster and I can't make current American society reckon with it's evil past, but I sure as hell can make be annoying and make it everyone's problem!!!!
“A Century of Black History Commemorations” — invites communities to reflect not only on the history itself, but on how the rituals of remembering have helped shape culture, identity, and national understanding of Black life.
If you're seeing this post, my series has come to an end and you can scroll back to find 28 visual novels with romanceable Black characters!
I started off frustrated and having something to prove, and I'm slightly less frustrated, as well as excited at the new-to-me games that popped up. I hope to tackle those recommendations this year.
Happy Last Day of Black History Month and I hope to see y'all next year for this series with a brand new crop of games 🤎
