#artificial nexus

[toomanyteethstudios]

Yeah, it's nothing super fancy, but we're pretty pleased with the main menu for Artificial Nexus - it's very matrix-y and sets the tone of the game well!

Did you catch that not all of the text is randomly generated?

[toomanyteethstudios]

So, we've created a Tumblr

Greetings and hello! If you've never heard of us, we're Too Many Teeth Studios, an independent visual novel development team based in Melbourne/Naarm, Australia. We've got two commercially released games - The Many Deaths of Lily Kosen, a horror game about trying to survive a demon that's hunting you, and Artificial Nexus, a sci-fi mystery game where the protagonist, Susan, tries to find out who exactly she is. Beyond those two we've also got some free games on itch.io, and we're currently hard at work on a new game, which we'll hopefully be announcing soon.

So, why exactly have we set up a Tumblr, and why now? Long story short: while we're already pretty active on Bluesky, and do a lot of long-form posts on our website, we want to be a bit more present and active on the internet. Most other social networking sites are owned by gross billionaires who care more about their profits than their users, and while there are probably a few skeletons in Tumblr's closets if you go digging for long enough, we feel a bit more comfortable posting here on Tumblr. Time will tell how this works out, but for now at least, we're excited and happy to be here!

Our initial posts over the next few weeks will probably mostly consist of sharing some art and features from our games, but over time we'd like to do a bit of crossposting with devlogs, reviews, tutorials, and all other sorts of content!

This post hasn't gone too deeply into who we are and what we're about, so if you'd like to know more about us:

We have a website! It's got further information on our games, devlogs, and lots more content to browse!

If you're interested in checking out our games, you can find them at Steam or itch.io.

Outside of Tumblr, we've also got a Discord, and a Bluesky. If you search around a bit further you can probably find our Facebook and Instagram pages too, but they're pretty thoroughly dead at this stage, and were never really where we primarily posted.

That's probably enough for an introductory post, so we'll finish this off by simply saying: thanks for having us, Tumblr, we're looking forwards to it!

[toomanyteethstudios]

Devlog - April 2026

Welcome to our monthly devlog, covering what we’ve been up to throughout the month of March. In non-development news, I read the entirety of the Dan Slott/Mike Allred Silver Surfer series (it was crazy good), played the entirety of the 2025 rerelease of OFF (it was very good), and saw the play Clue at the theatre (it was alright). In development news: read onwards!

Firstly, let’s talk a bit about the mysterious-still-unannounced-game which has been teased about on our main site for a few months now. We’ve had some new sprites and music tracks created, and finished some large updates to the game’s presentation. A large amount of feedback from beta testing has been addressed, too.

More importantly, we’re nearly at the stage where we'll be looking for voice acting for the demo, and are hoping that we'll have ads up with the requirements by this time next week. The easiest way to know when we have ads up will be to follow us on Bluesky. Something to be aware of, too, is that the game is only looking to utilise partial voice acting for now.

While it’s still a little early to say for certain, I’m hoping that we’ll be able to make a formal announcement about this game this month, once we have a few more assets produced. If you’ve been intrigued by the game’s teasing throughout the dev logs on our main site over the past few months, I hope that your curiosity will be sated soon (temper your expectations, though!)

Elsewhere and elsewhen, as of earlier this month, we’ve now got a Tumblr for the studio! (Which is what you're reading this on, duh!) Why exactly, you ask? In a nutshell: we’d like to expand our social media presence a bit more and Tumblr is one of the less-ick sites out there. If you have a Tumblr, please follow us here, and if you can recommend some more blogs to follow that discuss/cover indie gaming and/or visual novel development, please send us some recs! At present we’ve mostly been sharing some details about our existing games, but down the track we’ll probably be cross-posting blogs and development updates (although don’t count out the possibility of it turning entirely into shitposts).

Finally, this month marks the one-year anniversary of Artificial Nexus! In some ways it feels entirely natural, in others it feels like way too much has happened in that timespan and it’s pretty crazy to look at everything that we’ve done since then. To celebrate the anniversary, we’ve reached out to a bunch of streamers to cover the game. Most of them will be playing the game in the week of its anniversary, so please go and support the streamers if you’ve got the time to do so. (And if you’re a streamer who plays visual novels and would like to be part of this, please reach out and let’s see what we can work out).

As mentioned above, I’m hoping that this month we’ll be able to make a formal announcement about our new game, so most of our efforts will be expended there. Even if things fall apart though, you can rest assured that we’ll have some work to do - and you can read about it at the same time next month. As always, you can reach out to us via our contact page or our Discord. See you in thirty!

[toomanyteethstudios]

One of the inspirations for Artificial Nexus was the classic Hideo Kojima game Snatcher - playing it through really got our minds thinking about how to integrate actions like exploring a world, interacting with items in a location, and working with a partner could work in a visual novel, and how they could be modernised a bit from Snatcher's often-clunky interface.

[toomanyteethstudios]

The demo of Artificial Nexus ends on Susan unlocking the networking room door and encountering...something...outside it. Although she's already been told that the facility is under attack, she's not quite prepared for who - or rather, what - is attacking it...

[toomanyteethstudios]

Hank Emmerich is the main supporting character in Artificial Nexus, and while he can get pretty surly and demanding of Susan, he genuinely means well - he just wants to get out of the facility with Susan, after all. But will he achieve his goal by the end of the game?

VA: Shaun Mendum

[toomanyteethstudios]

Meet Susan, the protagonist of Artificial Nexus! She's curious, bubbly, and perky, and is very keen to find out who she is and how she ended up in a mysterious facility. But will she be happy with the answers she discovers?

VA: Bree Frankel

[toomanyteethstudios]

Devlog - May 2026

It’s the first of May today, so you know what that means: a new devlog for the month, covering what new updates and changes occurred throughout April. Outside of game development, I saw the Book of Mormon at the theatre, got some comics signed by their visiting creators, and saw several shows at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. 

Most of the big things that happened this month revolved around Artificial Nexus, as you’ll know if you’ve been paying attention to any of our social media. To celebrate its one-year anniversary, we had a bunch of streamers play the game, the majority of whom really enjoyed it and had great things to say about it! If you haven’t played the game yet and are interested in it, please try and catch one of their VODs when you can - you should be able to find them easily enough with a search. If you have played the game - whether because of a streamer, or for some other reason - and haven’t left a review, please consider doing so - every bit really helps.

Thanks to some feedback from streamers, Artificial Nexus also got a few updates. Some of these were for minor things such as typos and bugs, but changes based on the latest round of feedback were large enough that it was worth updating the game’s version to 1.2. You can read about these larger changes in the official notes for further details, but to give a quick summary of them, the notes functionality now integrates with the rest of the gameplay much more gracefully.

“But wait,” I hear you say, “didn’t you say in last month’s post that you were hoping to make a formal announcement about your still-in-development game? What’s going on with that?” Well, it should be obvious that no announcement was made last month - unfortunately some assets for the game are still being created, and I’d like to have more things to show before revealing anything official. Things are still moving along, however:

Nearly all of the initial music tracks have been created

Jobs for voice actors were placed last month, and we’ve gone through all of the submissions. The successful applicants will be contacted soon

Most of the backgrounds have been finished

The prototype has had some visuals updated, as well as some new functionality added in

So, does this mean that this month will be the one where things are formally announced? Maybe! As things are, I feel a bit bad to be constantly mentioning updates but not having anything particularly concrete to present, but I also don’t see the need to keep silent about what progress is happening at this stage. Hopefully there’ll be something to announce sooner rather than later, but if I’m making a similar post this time next month, you can at the very least expect a similar summary to the above.

Either way, I’ll be here again this time next month. If you can’t wait that long, remember that we’ve always got our contact page and Discord available if you want to reach out. If not, then see you in a month!