#studio terranova

[studioterranova]

🤬 new game on censorship and age verification 🤬

Welcome to the Family Friendly Online Museum, or F.F.O.A.M. for short.

We are a safe space for kids and advertisers alike to be free from CONTROVERSIAL ADULT CONTENT. To view any ADULT CONTENT, we ask all patrons undergo an age assurance test.

Welcome aboard and enjoy getting F.F.O.A.M.ED!

[play for free on itch.io]

[studioterranova]

Dress up your avatar like it’s the 00s: Spooky Stylin’ has been released!

This Halloween, we’re thrilled (pun intended) to announce the launch of our super special minigame, Spooky Stylin’ — available for free as part of Dollmaker Jam! 🎃

The sixth game in our Tomodachi 8-in-1 collection, this game will take you back to those late 90s, early 00s evenings spent meticulously crafting an avatar to use on LiveJournal, AIM, or MSN Messenger—but extra spooky!

- Mix and match your headgear, hairstyle, tops, and bottoms to dress up your avatar!

- 7 outfits to choose from, allowing for over 300 potential combinations!

- Really cute pixel art, if we do say so ourselves!

Take photos of your character and share them with us 🥰

Play Spooky Stylin’ for free

Pay for the Tomodachi 8in1 bundle

We’re super grateful for our community that’s always stuck around, and for their kind words of support for the little piece of universe we’ve created. As with other games in Tomodachi 8-in-1, this fun digital nostalgia is a glimpse of what Tourmaline, Ephemeral Smile, Cherry, and Sendaria would have enjoyed in their days, and we hope you, too, will enjoy it as much as they did.

We’re excited to see what you come up with.

As always, the conversation continues on our Discord.

[studioterranova]

New Release: Tomodachi 8in1

Last year we still had Terranova on our minds. After all, we showcased at BitSummit and released a Japanese demo version—and was featured in

Did you know????

We still make games!!! YES!!!!!

[studioterranova]

Holidays and Cooperative Families

It's the holiday season once more, and in the spirit of the season we want to talk about one of the things we most value at Studio Terranova. The games we make are very dear to us, but how and why we make them is equally important as what we make.

We're a worker-owned cooperative because we believe the people who create games should be treated fairly—receive fair wages, share in the revenue, receive credit, work sustainable hours, and retain the rights to their own creative IP.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Yet the games industry is full of companies that burn out their staff with crunch, fail to credit the workers who contributed to games, and hoard both their creations and the profits they make from them. For example, the creative behind Koudelka and Shadow Hearts (one of CJ and Matt's favorite game series) had to make a spin-off of their own work because the characters and story were sold off to another company.

We practice solidarity. This includes mentioning all the people who contributed to Terranova in the credits, including our translators. You'd be surprised how often games don't credit their translators by name. We always make sure to use art, music, writing, and any other creative work made by people, not AI. We showcase them on our website.

Speaking of translators, thanks to a mix of Ko-Fi subscriptions (!!!) and new client work, we have the funds to pay our localizers and are moving forward slowly with making multiple language versions of Terranova. We have made the first full alpha build of Terranova in Japanese for QA testing. If things go well, we're planning to release the Japanese version in the spring of next year.

We're in the process of balancing client work with game-making, and although we currently have a lot on our plate, our subscribers give us hope that we might be able to make games full time.

Photo taken back in April 2022, when the studio first released Terranova. Having supporters like you is the best present we could ever hope for, then and now 💝

If you want to support us even more, please consider subscribing to our Ko-Fi. Thank you for believing in us, and cheers to a wonderful holiday season and bright 2026! 🎉🥂🎆

***

Thanks for reading! For late January, we'll be organizing mentor talks on making video games which you'll be able to stream, for free on our Twitch. We'll post the schedule sometime in early January. For our local community, we're currently organizing Let's Games! Tokyo, a Global Game Jam site in Tokyo. If you're in Tokyo from Jan 30th-Feb 2nd, we hope you'll join us for a three day game hackathon!

[studioterranova]

Dress-ups, Minigames, and More from Tourmaline, Effie, Cherry, and Sendaria

Made your avatars in Spooky Stylin’ yet? Totally missing out if you haven’t! Check it out here — we’d love to see your creations and hear your thoughts!

Originally, Spooky Stylin’ was a game that we wanted to put in Terranova as a minigame alongside Solitaire. Both of us liked playing dress-up games while we were waiting for the next roleplay to come in. Then we’d use them as our LiveJournal or AIM or MSN Messenger avatars.

Right now, this little game is part of Tomodachi 8-in-1, an experimental arcade composed of eight retro games in the spirit of the early 2000s. It has narrative games, mixtapes, things happening on old school cell phones, that sort of thing. We developed it in response to players saying that Terranova was a very long and involved game. So, complementary to that, we’ve developed something more casual and fun that you can play in one sitting.

Tomodachi 8-in-1 takes place in the same universe as Terranova, but here the games are a lot more focused on the characters and their friendship instead of deep roleplay lore. All of the characters that are in Tomodachi 8-1, especially in the narrative games, are the same characters that are in Terranova—Tourmaline, Cherry, Ephemeral Smile, and Sendaria. You can play as each of them, and one game will be focused around a particular issue or subject that they're having difficulty with.

In one of the narrative games, Shall We Dance, Effie is worried about a Valentine's Day dance. She is talking with her friend Sendaria about how much personal responsibility she holds to her family versus to herself. 

INFRARED is from Sendaria's point of view: it’s the feeling that you feel when you make a friend that you think you're going to have a really fun time with but they're also weirded out by your excitement and energy.

Each of the narrative games has somewhere between two to three endings, so you can replay them multiple times.

We also currently have two mixtape games where you can just kind of play mixtapes that your friends have given you. Even though it's not outright said in the mixtapes lore-wise, these are mixtapes passed between friends—made by Cherry for EphemeralSmile, made by Sendaria for Tourmaline. Like love letters from friends.

What do you miss most?

Tourmaline, Cherry, Effie, and Sendaria 💌

Sending mixtapes 📼

Everything about the 90s & 00s 💾

Voting ended onNov 19, 2025

Go check all these games here, and don’t forget to try out Spooky Stylin’ here.

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Thank you for reading this far! While we’re busy developing the final two games for Tomodachi 8-in-1, we’re also fundraising to localize Terranova to Russian, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Please help us achieve our goal!

[studioterranova]

An after-report of our time at BitSummit playing funky lil games

This month, mabbees and I went to Kyoto and attended BitSummit, one of the biggest indie events in Japan. BitSummit is a “shop” conference—that is, a good way to meet and greet publishers, localization studios, and other devs, as well as diehard fans of indie games.

We showcased Terranova in 2023, and learned some valuable info about our fans (they are weird and lovable like us) and about Terranova’s publish-ability as a game (we are too weird for them to love us).

In short, we decided to both self-publish and translate our game. With no big publisher to rely on, are using our sales, our Ko-Fi, and our personal savings to pay our localizers.

Read on for how we're going about localizing + BitSummit....

[studioterranova]

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, v

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.

[studioterranova]

Doujin event on 2/16 + our work on Terranova

Whew! This month has gone by fast, hasn’t it? I'm trying to keep everyone more in the loop about what mabbees and I are doing as Studio Terr

I love the zine/doujin game scene so I'm extra-proud that this is our first COMITIA.

We’ll be at TOKYO BIG SIGHT, East Hall 2, Booth く40a.

We’re planning on selling…

Screen-printed USB sticks with the Terranova game

Terranova folders for your fanfic!

Limited-quantity postcards of Eytan, Dominique, Isaiah and Hikaru