Hello everyone! I’m Sheli, your go-to PR person and Community Manager of Toge Productions. If you have anything to say or discuss about our games, just hit me up. I’ll be happy to answer!

Now before we get into the topic, I want to share a little bit of nostalgia here. Before I joined Toge Productions, I have had the chance to try the demo of Coffee Talk in an event. At that time, I remember that I can’t wait to see more of the game; to hear the stories of all the characters. That is why I would like to dig deeper into the aspect that has got me intrigued since the first time I encountered this game, until today that I have the opportunity to be involved during the last part of development: Coffee Talk’s character design & development.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/914800/announcements/detail/1694929321637602438

For the case of story-driven games, it is fair to say that the characters play a vital role because they brought life to the game itself. The same goes to Coffee Talk. As the game relies heavily on narrative, the characters exist to play out the story. Through them, the players could immerse themselves into the story and chill vibe that is in the game.

To talk about character design in Coffee Talk, we’re going to need to call the expert: the game’s lead artist & character designer: Dio Mahesa!

Here in Indonesia, we have a famous proverb: “you can’t love what you don’t know” (or in this case, who you don’t know). So, here are some little trivia about our artist, to help you know him better: Dio started doing his job professionally in 2010 by taking freelance works. He was an IT student back then, but drawing has been his hobby for a long time. He then started doing pixel art since 2012 as he joined Toge Productions. You can check out his pixel artworks on his Instagram.

Well then, without further ado, let’s start our interview with Dio!


1. Who is the first character you worked on as Coffee Talk's character designer?

The very first character I made was definitely Freya, and the story behind Freya is quite unique. At the beginning of the development, besides creating environments and UIs and all other stuff, I'm also in charge of creating characters. What I did was doodling several random faces of female characters in various races, and Freya came up as my favorite character, and Fahmi (the Game Director) liked it too. After several discussions, we decided to continue developing that character based on the doodle. The development itself has been changed many times, so the first Freya looked entirely different from her current appearance, especially on her outfit and her hair color.


Concept sketch


Freya’s initial design

2. Is there any character that you're really fond of?

Jorji might be the one I like the most. I personally write the characteristics of Jorji (while others are written by Fahmi), where I wanted a character that pretty tired, worn-out policeman, which knows a lot of stuff and actually is a funny person. I imagined him being your go-to guy when it comes to the gossip around the corner.


Jorji the policeman

3. How long does it take to design a character in Coffee Talk, and what are the steps?

The first step was to look at the description written by Fahmi. Usually, I require descriptions as clear as possible, starting from the personalities, the costume, and overall appearance. After that, I started to create sketches. I usually throw the sketches on our closed group, waiting for feedback from the team. When everyone's cool with the design, I start to "render" the pixel art. It can take a day or two to turn the design into pixel art assets completely, depends on how complex the character's design and animation is. Then I will put them into Spine to create the animations, usually taking another day. So… It’ll take like 3-4 days a character?


Lua’s character progression

4. Which character has undergone many changes from their initial design?

Pretty simple answer, it would be Baileys. The Baileys we show in our build on itch.io is completely different compared to the current one. The former Baileys wasn't looked as douche as he should be back then, but the character development was being rushed due to our target to publish a vertical slice build, so the design itself wasn't designed well. After we finally published the vertical slice build, I revisit the design and he looked completely different now.


Baileys’ then


Baileys’ now

5. What inspires you to finally decide on the current art direction for the characters?

To be honest, it came from the team, not only from me. We all like 90s anime, thus we are trying to give the 90s vibe by referring Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. We make Coffee Talk's color scheme brown-ish, with low saturation tone. The design of the characters then follows the game’s vibe, including their color palette so that they could come together nicely.

Some part of the game, such as the intro cutscenes, also took some cues from PC-98 games art direction. Hence why some of the cutscenes in the game were showcased in a small frame with black background, giving some kind of nostalgia of how classic games show story cutscenes. But we tried to combine those direction with the color palette mentioned above and some technical art features that definitely were not available during the era of PC-98 games.


Ghost in the Shell’s environment & Coffee Talk’s (drawn by Hendry Roesly)


PC-98’s environment & Coffee Talk’s (also drawn by Hendry Roesly)

That concludes our interview with Dio!

Now we can say that character design is not just a walk in a park. Each character has its own complexity, and each can underwent different development. Until today, the design for all Coffee Talk characters is already complete. There are many more characters with exciting stories waiting for you there, so make sure to play the game; coming soon in 2019.

In the meantime, you can wishlist the game, and don’t forget to try the demo as well if you haven’t.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/914800/Coffee_Talk/

Thank you for your visit. Please come again!

Do you still remember the feeling of unfolding a story in a fairytale, when you eagerly anticipate what will happen next when you turn the page? Toge Productions, along with developer Mojiken Studio brings you She and the Light Bearer, a game that lets you experience that whimsical feeling with just a click. The game is available NOW on Steam for PC and Mac.

She and The Light Bearer is a blend of point-and-click adventure gameplay and a music album that utilizes hand-drawn art, poetry, dialogue, and an instrumental acoustic soundtrack to offer a relaxing foray into a mystical realm of wonder. The aesthetic came under the influence of the creator herself.



Follow the journey of The Little Firefly who wanders in an unknown forest, carrying a grand task with them. As the world has lost its balance since The Mother fell into a deep slumber, our Little Firefly is entrusted to find The Mother to bring back harmony upon the land. In the unknown forest, The Little Firefly will have to solve various riddles, challenges, and puzzles to prove their worth and earn the forest’s trust. Deeper into the forest, they will learn the sacrifice of the forest, the horror of the Devourer, and the secret to awaken Mother.

Find more details about the game in its official website here, or through its Steam page below:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/658590/She_and_the_Light_Bearer/

Hi everyone!

A quick update from us. We just uploaded a new demo for the game. The updated demo includes:

• New smartphone features
  
• Updated and more polished art
  
• A lot of new musics
  
• Japanese localization

Do check it out, and don't forget to wishlist the game!

Enjoy!

It was a cold rainy night. I was working on a press release while browsing in front of the computer in my room. Just like any other night, I made a cup of something warm to drink to calm my senses and relax my body. That night it was a cup of green tea latte. During one of my short breaks to take a sip and stare out the window, I thought, “this is such a nice calm experience, I wish there were a game that simulated this feeling.” Then the thought came. If I couldn’t find a game like that, I could make one. And thus was born the idea of a game known simply as “Coffee Talk.”

Before we go further, let me tell you a bit about us. My name is Mohammad Fahmi and I’m part of Toge Productions, an indie game developer and publisher based in Indonesia. We were founded in 2009 by two game-loving people (and have since grown to 14), and are mostly known for our hit title, Infectonator. I am the writer and designer of Coffee Talk, but my primary job at Toge is to handle the marketing and PR, and because we are also a publisher with a total of ten games we’re working on, the task is steep.

One of the best things about working at Toge is our annual game jam. At the end of the year, we hold a two week long internal game jam where anyone can make anything. A programmer wants to try making a GDD and concept art for a game? Please do! An artist wishes to take a break from using their drawing tablet and create a board game with traditional watercolor art? No one will stop you! A marketing and PR person wants to make a game about serving green tea latte or coffee to a freelance illustrator elf in the middle of the night? Just do it!

And that’s what happened during the game jam in the second week of December 2017. I pitched the idea that had been brewing in my mind for months prior. A game about serving warm drinks in a cafe that only opens at night, located in a metropolitan city where creatures like orcs become programmers, succubi become business development managers for trading companies, and humans…well, humans do the things we know they always do.

The main selling points of the game would be its story, its pixel art with 90s anime-inspired graphics, and its lo-fi chill-hop tunes that became so popular suddenly on YouTube that year. There was no title for the game yet, so we called it Project Green Tea Latte. During the two week game jam, prototypes were made, art was drawn, teams were changed, and in the end we had four prototypes. You can check out all of them here. After the game jam, the studio decided to work on two games at once, and one of them is Project Green Tea Latte.

Intermezzo: Before going with Coffee Talk, we came up with a lot of titles, and one that stood out the most was “Things We Talk About at Night.” We loved it, but the title was too long, and localizing it to other languages would be required to release in non-English speaking countries like China or Japan. A shorter title was needed. Thus “Coffee Talk” was born.

One of the things that worried us most through the first half of the development was gameplay. Toge has been making games for almost a decade, but all of them have been mechanics heavy. None of them play like Coffee Talk, which is primarily narrative based and text-driven.

Debates regarding how players should enjoy the game were frequent and plentiful. As the writer and designer of the game, I believed that story and vibe are the core experience that we needed to focus on.

But we also had our doubts. Can we call Coffee Talk a game when there’s no consequences or skills required to experience it? Categorizing the game as a visual novel was the most natural solution we could think of, but this proved problematic because our fans largely follow us due to the “gameplay” in our games.

We decided to change the game’s branching narrative and brewing mechanics to better quench these worries. The game jam version has very straightforward brewing and branching mechanics, where all the combinations are predetermined. The new version’s mechanics, however, will work differently. While every concoction will result in some kind of drink, the game will automatically generate the name, visuals, and stats of most beverages, which will be the key to the branching mechanism.

Each drink will have four stats: sweetness, bitterness, warmness, and coolness. You might think that it would be better to have only two stats, in which the value determines whether the drink is sweet or bitter, warm or cold - we thought of this, too - but as weird as it sounds, some drinks can give you that feeling of sweetness and bitterness at the same time, or the sensations of warmness and coolness split seconds apart.

Even with the changes mentioned above, we were still plagued with concerns. This changed when we went to BitSummit to showcase our other games and met the fine folks of Sukeban Games, the developer of VA-11 HALL-A.

During a party on a river bank in Kyoto, we talked about how Sukeban achieved what they have from VA-11 HALL-A. One thing they told me to keep in mind was not to add features just because you can or because you don’t think the gameplay is deep enough to be called a game. If it has achieved the messages you want to convey, then stop there. Focus on things that matter and don’t force in things that, in the end, will only reduce the quality of the experience you want to deliver.

Our interaction hit me hard. I never mentioned our anxiety about the lack of gameplay in Coffee Talk and yet here they were, telling me that the first thing I needed to make sure of was something we’d been thinking a lot about for the past few months. We didn’t even showcase Coffee Talk at BitSummit, but I have to say that amongst all of our games, it was one of the few that made the trip so worthwhile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmSBIyT0ih0
The discussion also triggered my memory of one of the best videos by Mark Brown, the six minute and fifty seconds essay about Ico and the “Design by Subtraction” philosophy coined by Fumito Ueda. In the video, Brown talks about how sometimes you don’t need to add more things to make your game feel more wholesome, taking examples not only from Ico itself, but also from how Ico inspired other popular games such as Fez, Journey, and even The Last of Us. So, while it may sound strange, it’s safe to say that Ico heavily inspired games like Coffee Talk.

Because it’s easy to add features that you think are cool or will increase the game length or give you another bullet point in your Steam description. Or is it just diluting the core message of your game, and hurting your ability to have your game be about something, to say something, to resonate.
- Mark Brown

We’ve been working on Coffee Talk for a few months now, and the warm and kind responses from the people who have played the demo have definitely boosted our motivation to finish the game and present you all with a full experience.

For now, we’re going to continue working on the game while giving you updates in the form of social media posts on our Twitter and devlog. In the meantime, take a sip of coffee and tell us what you like or don’t like about the demo.