November – December 2025: IndieDev Finale & Prototype tests

Was it you who left your notes everywhere or was it your pet's doing?

News, so many news!

We have just wrapped the educational part of the IndieDev 2025, an all-Ireland initiative that selected 8 teams to support throughout a new game prototype development. The initiative that put us face to face with the industry professionals, publishers and funding organisations. It bought us time to develop the game prototype full-time.

'Deathwish Bloom' got its very own pull-up poster for the IndieDev Finale event in Galway

For someone working on their very first game – this is an exceptional honour and the best thing that could have happened to us this year. The confidence, the skill and the support boost that Deathwish Bloom received is beyond anything we could have imagined only a few months ago.

We can gush about being grateful forever, as Deathwish Bloom is our baby and we care about it a lot. Yet when we asked one of the IndieDev panel bosses, why did they vote for Deathwish Bloom, the answer was simple. ’I saw you have the technical ability to do it; and there’s a market for such games.’

So, we gonna talk about those two: the technical ability and the market, and what we did in that regard over the last few weeks.

The technical ability:

– we promised a complex relationship system with the 5 main characters. We set up an 8-variable one akin to the one in the Scarlet Hollow. While testing, we realised that 10 variables make more sense. And we need another 5000-7000 words to test it. This is work in progress but our progress is working!

This is your pet, the 'Used-to-be-a-mouse'. No lab claimed this fugitive, but you can.

– we promised that the MC can opt to have a pet, and have successfully tested a wee pet animation known as ‘Used-to-be-a-mouse’. Adorable and loved by all.

– the game intro is now a basic animation instead of being static, which got positive feedback. We are learning how to add animated bits without diving nose-first into overscoping.

The market:

Prototype testing

We are finally at the stage where we ask people who are not familiar with the Deathwish Bloom story to test the Prototype (I’m looking at you, Srusti, you were the first!).

Our understanding is that DWB is ‘a game for tired women and LGBT+’, given the self-pacing, intrinsic to visual novels, and the androgynous beauty of our characters. Yet, many a lad at the IndieDev Finale event played the Prototype too, which we appreciate!

It was scary initially, as any first time can be. Be it that our testers are also creatives, who know how much work goes into anything that makes it to the screen. Or be it that we genuinely have a good Prototype. Testing went well, and we got valuable feedback on what worked well, and what can be changed to make the story roll better.

There’s still a question of whether the dev should be sitting next to the player or leave them be as to not influence the player’s experience. We’ll figure it out.

The most soul-soothing feedback was about the writing. That it doesn’t focus on describing the actions, but on the MC’s perception of the events, and is very truthful to the experience of someone in the MC’s position.

The game writer’s aim is to tell the MC’s story as truthfully as possible, so that her experience can be witnessed, felt and shared. It is so gratifying when another living person really sees the MC and can relate to her.

The opposite kind of feedback was that there is nothing to do in the game, not even a map to choose where to go etc. and that the choices don’t seem to matter.

This is where our description of DWB being ‘a game for tired women’ comes in. This is not an action game. Not having maps or time-limited actions was a conscious choice: we (lady devs) be tired. We want to be taken on an emotional journey that we have some power over via self-paced choices on screen. It is not for everyone.

There are two types of choices in DWB:

– choices with emotional consequences (affect your relationship with the characters, and therefore the mood of the scene, but not the events);

– choices with plot consequences (change the branch or/and the ending; a critical sum of choices with emotional consequences lead to the plot change as well; sometimes it’s just one action that affects everything).

The player will only see how the game was affected by choices if they replay the game and make different choices, which was not possible within a 10-minute testing window.

Both types of feedback are valuable in helping us define what our game is and isn’t. We want to present the game exactly as it is, so that those who will love it can find it.

Which leads us to the third topic of….

Talking about the game:

Talking about the game has been our, in corporate speak, ‘growth area’. We don’t really have a winning strategy on how to do it yet. Thankfully, the Northern Ireland Screen organised an extremely helpful workshop by David Stevenson. It helped us to boil down the game description to a few sentences and tease without giving too much away. This is now on the main website page.

We will pick up on this in 2 months, in February 2026.

Currently on the to-do list:

– music mixing and new content for the Prototype testing end of December;

– prototype polishing for the Annual General Meeting of IMIRT Irish Game Makers Association in Dublin in January 2026.

Ok, we better get to it.

Thank you for reading! 🌸🐁❤️