Sep 17, 2023

Afterlove EP - Major Update on our Progress, Platforms and Launch Timing

Afterlove EP - Fellow Traveller Ben K

Hi everyone,

We’ve been quiet for a long time but today we’d like to give a major update on Afterlove EP; what’s been happening with the development since the tragic passing of our beloved Fahmi; where we’re at in development and when to expect the release. We’re also very pleased to share some new screenshots and give you a look at how far the game has progressed.

This is a big update (you may want to grab a cup of coffee or tea) but we wanted to be as transparent and share as much as we can considering we have been quiet for so long.

But before we get into it, we’d first like to thank you all. It has been a tough journey for us over the last 18 months and we really appreciate your patience and support.

Who is Pikselnesia?

Firstly, we thought it would be a good idea to introduce ourselves a little more and tell you who Pikselnesia is.

Pikselnesia is a fully remote indie games studio based in Indonesia. The team was established by Fahmi in 2020, specifically for the Afterlove EP project.

All together there are nine of us in the Pikselnesia team, located in various places around Indonesia. We are all indie game developers and most of us have been working on the game part time alongside other jobs. In addition we have support on Audio from three of the team at Monkey Melody, an audio post-production studio & audio localization company for multimedia products. Monkey Melody Composed BGM and SFX for ALEP.

Many of us had worked with Fahmi on his previous project, What Comes After, and we’ve also worked on other games like A Space for the Unbound, and Hello Good Boy.

Development for the last 18 months

When Fahmi passed away in March 2022 it hit the team extremely hard. It was most of all the loss of a beloved friend.

After some time to grieve we came together to talk about the question of what to do about the game. The decision of the team was unanimous - we all committed to bring Fahmi’s vision for Afterlove EP to fruition.

At this point we were quite a long way into pre-production. However, Fahmi was both the Creative Director and narrative lead and so the task of working out how to carry on without him was not a simple matter.

Whilst we were able to get back into production of some areas such as art and coding quite soon, we had big shoes to fill on the narrative side of things and that took much more time to work through.

We had the core of the story, characters and narrative design and so Fahmi’s vision was clear, but the work to bring that all into the game was still in its early stages.

Our biggest challenge would be staying true to Fahmi’s vision whilst still going through the same approach you need for a high quality narrative game, namely changing things that aren’t working, iterating and polishing.

This was not something we could rush into so we took some time to determine the best way forward.

Our decision was for Sasha Ariana from our team to step up as lead narrative designer and to bring in Sweet Baby Inc, a narrative development and consultation studio to support on the narrative design and writing.

Sasha had been working hand in hand with Fahmi on the narrative of Afterlove EP and was also part of the team on his previous game, What Comes After. She intimately understands his vision and style as well as how to ensure the authentic Indonesian culture and vibe remains at the heart of the project. Besides her work on Afterlove EP, and What Comes After, Sasha was heavily involved in the narrative design and writing for A Space for the Unbound.

Sweet Baby are a team of writers and narrative designers lead by Kim Belair and have worked on 25+ projects including an extensive collaboration on Playdate games, indies like Sable, and AAA games like God of War: Ragnarok, South of Midnight and Alan Wake II. Fahmi had been talking with Sweet Baby about joining the project as consultants shortly before he passed and they have been extremely supportive and a huge help in taking on this larger role.

Where are we now?

Whilst this all took some time, we’re pleased to say that we recently completed the first draft of the writing for the whole game and can now play it from start to finish. This is a very exciting moment for us as it’s the point where we can start to see what is working and what isn’t and begin the crucial iteration phase.

Meanwhile, most of the rest of the development is at the final stages with all the coding complete and almost all the art in place. The audio and music is also almost all in place with just a couple of last bits to do on the soundtrack and Cinta’s VO to be recorded once the script is final.

We’re delighted to share a new batch of screenshots today to give you a look at the game as it is today including some new locations and characters we’ve not shown before.

And if you’d like to check out the soundtrack early, L’Alphaalpha have just released the album they recorded for the game and you can listen right now.

What’s next?

Now that we can play the whole game we’re focused on playing, testing, reviewing and updating and repeating this process until the game is at the quality we want to achieve.

We are aiming to have this complete by the end of this year and from there we will go into localisation and console porting alongside a final phase of bug fixing and polish.

Talking of consoles, we’re very pleased to reveal that we have a console porting partner onboard in Pocket Sized Hands. We will be handling the Nintendo Switch version ourselves and Pocket Sized Hands will be working on the PlayStation versions we already announced and we are very excited to announce that they will also be working on Xbox versions, meaning we will now release on PC and all of the consoles.

This localisation and porting will take a while and releasing on so many platforms means there is a lot more coordination and planning to do for the launch. We now expect to launch the game in Q3 2024.

Now that we have things moving along so well we finally feel comfortable starting to talk about the game again and to have some confidence in giving this new release date.

You can expect to hear more from us and our publisher, Fellow Traveller, in the coming months and, most excitingly, we are looking forward to bringing you a playable demo in early 2024.

The best way to stay across news on Afterlove EP is to subscribe to the Fellow Traveller newsletter and join the Fellow Traveller discord.

You can also wishlist the game on the platform of your choice and of course follow Pikselnesia on twitter.

Thank you again for your patience and for reading all the way to the bottom of this post! We can’t wait to show you more of Afterlove EP soon.

The Pikselnesia Team

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1599780/Afterlove_EP/