Hey everyone!
First off, we really have to thank itch.io for doing this. It's really hard to bring attraction to our games in today’s indie climate where all of us have to be constantly struggling for attention. Therefor an initiative like this on a time where everyone’s eyes is peeled on GDC is a great motivator. So, first things off, thanks a lot for doing this!
We are Whales And Games, an indie development designing mindlessly fun games full of what we call whalistic personality, meaning that we want players to remind our games and our team by its fun-positive and often exaggerated attitudes. We work remotely as we’re a multinational team with people from Brazil, Mexico, Portugal and the UK.
Some of us tried our luck this year and applied for scholarships in attempts to going to GDC, as everyone of our friends and contacts who previously set foot on the conference told us that the conference expands your horizons and vision in a way that you can’t really find anywhere else.
Unfortunately, none of us made the cut. We’re going to continue doing our best in order to try and set foot on the event one of these days, but for now, we have to celebrate every middle-way victory that we’ve gotten so far.
Last month we tried to do something completely out of left-field, deviating from what’s usual for our team. For a month, we crunched and participated on the Strawberry Jam 3 jam here on itch, a game jam dedicated to creating and developing adult-themed and adult games.Just the last phrase alone makes this the sort of game that possibly would never be shown on a GDC showfloor.
But before you’re shocked at it, read us out. During this one month experiment tackling a completely alien thematic for us, we developed Cosplay Café, an adult-themed character-focused, management and dating-sim crossover. In a nutshell, the game is about the day-to-day of our a stoic protagonist (Caffie) that finds herself having to handle and manage a cosplay-centric café on a town where adult-media has taken the world by storm.
Caffie has to decide what items and decorations the café will have up per day, see those decisions reflected on sales, and have the chance at meeting some very special customers at the end of the day. Will she end up understanding their attachment to their media, or bat an eye at it? You’ll have to play to find out!
While the game has adult-themes, we wanted to find a bit of our own footing and space, and tried to strive a bit differently from other adult games, leaving the adult-themes on the Suggestive dial rather than the full Explicit. We want to make sure our games is about creating connections with the characters, more than striving to see them fully-naked. Not that you can do both, and while we don’t have the latter (even if we had some people already asking us for it), we do have some suggestive lookouts at the characters, but hopefully our point here is understandable.
For the best and the worst, this has kind of given us an imposter-syndrome these past weeks. While we want to try and go through a different path from other games of the genre, we’re still worried that we might be stepping foot on a market that wants something completely different from what we’re offering. Likewise, we’re also afraid that the general market is put off by the adult-themes of the game as some sort of stigma, and this has been noticeable by the absence of features and videos from other sources that we’d normally get with our other projects. It's a double-edged sword. Too NSFW to market traditionally, but not risque enough to appeal to some of the adult audience.
Yet, at the same time, with the jam victory and support from our friends (some of who have made us fantastic fanart), we’re reinvigorated to keep moving forward. Even if we’re not featured, we want to continue expanding this wild and out-there universe that we’ve built, and push these characters even further. It's going to be a time-consuming and arduous task, but we’re extremely excited to start working on the expansions for this game.
Sorry for the long post, but we also took the chance to vent out some of our worries as developers with it. If you get to give the game a try, or if it ends up getting featured, we’re very much thankful for it. We’d love to read what people have to say about it, and the ways we can make it better as we continue building it. We've also got our team Twitter over here. Thanks, and Cheers! 🐳