Love, Ghostie
New Demo is Available Now!
The NEW Love, Ghostie demo is available to play NOW!
We've added a lot since the last demo - all the residents are available to play, which means 60+ combinations of couples to choose from!
If you’d like to give feedback, you can do so through the survey provided in the demo, but you can also find it here: https://forms.gle/sBJaNdEJjoxHVDZw5
We're so excited to share with you all! Hope you enjoy!
- Jennifer
New Demo Available on May 20th!
It’s almost been a year since the first alpha demo went public, and we’ve gotten so much amazing feedback from it. Since then, we’ve worked hard the past year and added so much more to Love, Ghostie thanks to everyone’s feedback and responses!
In the updated demo, ALL the residents will be available to choose from, so ALL 66 combinations of couples will also be available to preview.
We’re so excited for you all to see the new characters, new relationships, new minigames, and ghostie hats! Make sure to wishlist Love, Ghostie if you haven’t already and follow on socials for updates regarding the demo!
TikTok
Thanks for all your support and hope you enjoy the new demo!
- Jennifer
Ghostie Songs and Demo Update
We were inspired by Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time where you can play different songs that have different effects!
Here is the “happy song”:
Here’s a link to the original video on Twitter where you can hear it with sound: https://twitter.com/janbehchanbeh/status/1772714975485735338
This was so fun to design and our composer, Sam, did an amazing job coming up with 4 very different songs with only 4 notes!
In other news, we’ve finished the ending of Love, Ghostie and added New Game+. It’s all coming together and it’s a mix of feeling excited, scared, and relieved that we’re getting closer to the finish line!
As a heads up, I’ll be taking down the demo starting early next week! But don’t worry, we’ll be back with an updated demo soon. It’ll (most likely) feature all the characters available and will allow you to try out some of the new upgrades!
Thanks so much for your patience and for reading!
- Jennifer
Ghostie Hats!
We have so many hats available for Ghostie, which can be unlocked via Ghostina’s upgrade shop. We even have hats that you can wear to match residents in your manor:
We’ve been hard at work and wrapping up features and finishing more art! We finished all the resident rooms and we’ve been adding lots of quality-of-life features. Our playtests have been going well and we’re very excited with the progress made so far and excited to share a lot more soon :)
Thank you for your patience and all your support!
- Jennifer
Minigame Updates + New Resident Room
I've been heads down on finishing up the minigames, so sorry for the lack of updates on socials! I'm so excited to say that I'm really happy with the minigames. I think I prototyped ~6 different minigames and unfortunately some ended up not being very fun. But, now I’ve finalized 3 new minigames + 1 pseudo minigame that I'm happy with!
We’re planning on doing some internal playtesting soon, and I hope to share the new minigames once we’ve polished them up!
A lot of development time is currently being used for polishing and adding quality-of-life features! Unfortunately, that means I don’t have as much “fun” stuff to show off, but I know that all this polish time will help create a better experience overall. I’ve also gotten a lot better at designing UI over time, so I have been going back to older menus to fix those up! I know some of the menus in the current demo aren’t the best, but don’t worry - they’re fixed up now 🙂
I also plan to have an updated demo out before the release, so stay tuned for that!
Here's a sneak peek of Apollo’s room:
It also features decoration mode, if you haven’t seen it yet! It allows you to switch which items the residents put up in their room. You’ll also be able to decorate the common rooms with items from your inventory if you’d like.
Thanks for your patience and for all your support!
- Jennifer
Storyteller's Festival 2024
We'll be broadcasting the developer playthrough of the Love, Ghostie demo, where I give behind-the-scenes commentary!
Hope you enjoy the event!
- Jennifer
2023: An Un-boo-lievable Year!
Originally, we wanted the demo to be publicly released in January/February 2023, but we ended up delaying it to the end of May to address player feedback (which was a really good decision!).
At the beginning of 2023, we did external playtests and some “big” issues came up. Originally, the demo started off with only two residents in a house, which was supposed to be the tutorial. However, playtest feedback showed that this pacing was too slow and felt too limited, since you are forced into starting with only one couple. The fun of matchmaking is being able to choose the couples you want and the original tutorial prevented that. There were also some issues with the gifting mechanic, so we decided to push back on the demo release and fix these before releasing it to the general public.
And what a great decision that was! Not only did we fix all these issues, we also had time to slot in another character for the demo. We were originally going to include only 4 characters (Mina, Gerard, Noir, and Calathea), but the extra time we took meant we could also include Ollin in the demo.
Here’s a screenshot of the manor with only 2 residents, which was in the original tutorial but we ended up cutting from the game.
In April, we did more external playtests and we were told how much better it was than the previous build, so we decided to open up playtests to a larger group of people. In May, we continued to do lots of playtests, with friends of friends, strangers, fans of the game, etc. We got super positive feedback and only had minor issues to address. By mid May, we felt very confident in what we had for a public demo and were preparing for the public release.
Fast forward to when the demo was publicly released - people were posting videos of Love, Ghostie and streaming it. We tuned into every stream we could possibly watch. We were so nervous and weren't sure how the demo would be received. Would people find it funny? Would they think it’s boring? What if they didn’t like the residents? So many anxious thoughts ran through our minds, but they all went away as soon as we saw people play through the demo. The genuine enjoyment and laughter that we saw eased all our anxieties. We started to get so excited knowing that people actually enjoyed what we had made.
I cannot explain the relief I felt, seeing all the demo feedback and how much people enjoyed it. I know it’s not a perfect game, but with such a small team, I’m super proud of what we’ve accomplished. So huge thank you to everyone who’s talked about Love, Ghostie, who’s played the demo, who’s streamed it, who’s made content, who’s recommended it, etc! Honestly, whenever I lose motivation or feel like I’m in a slump (because game dev is so draining and such a long process!) I think of all the people’s smiles and laughter and “awwwww”s, which make me want to keep doing this. At this time, over 8,000 people have played the demo and have spent way longer on it than I imagined! Our wishlists have more than tripled since we released the demo and it's all thanks to you!
Since the demo has released, we’ve been very heads down on finishing the major features for the game. In case you didn’t know, the demo is only an alpha demo! We got lots of feedback and mentions about how there wasn’t much content past day 20+ in the demo, but honestly, there isn’t SUPPOSED to be! We expected people to stop immediately after getting that end of demo popup, but it's so validating to see people wanting to play more anyway.
We haven’t shown off too much of the new features yet, because 1. there’s placeholder art, 2. they're subject to change based on playtesting and 3. the UI isn’t quite complete yet either. But, you should know that we’ve added more mini-games, re-decoration of resident rooms, and decoration of common rooms / Ghostie’s attic! We’ve been working on a lot of quality-of-life features, like being able to rewatch relationship talks and dates, better menu flows, and logs for reviewing dialogue.
Here is the Memories Board, where you'll be able to rewatch relationship talks and dates, but also you'll be able to view and collect unique art per couple!
I haven’t been as active on socials, but that’s because these last couple months have been a lot of polish to get ready for another set of internal playtests, starting in early 2024. If all goes well, we’ll be spending LOTS of time, playtesting, addressing feedback, bug fixing, and polishing - just like we did in early 2023.
We haven’t updated the alpha demo in a while, but we plan to do an updated demo before the full release. We are planning to release in 2024, so we hope you’ll be a little more patient with us. Just like with the alpha demo, we want to make sure the game has its time to address player feedback, bug fix, and polish before the full release is out. We’ve put so much love into the game and we really can’t wait for you to see it all.
Thank you all so much for reading and we hope you have a great holiday season! See you in 2024!
Sneak Peek at Manor Upgrades
We’ve been working on adding minigames and more mechanics as part of the upgrade shop, and some of the most important ones are being able to upgrade the manor itself!
The manor starts out with 4 residents, but you’ll be able to upgrade to manors that hold 6 and 8 residents.
To put things in perspective, when there are only 4 residents in the manor, there are 6 combinations of couples.
When there are 6 residents in the manor at a time, there are 15 possible combinations of couples!
When there are 8 residents in the manor at a time, there are 28 possible combinations of couples!!! 😱
We’ve been doing some internal playtesting with the large manor and the additional minigames, and I’m really excited for where Love, Ghostie is. The additional features aren’t quite polished yet, but I hope to share more information on those soon!
Thank you as always for reading and supporting Love, Ghostie!
Happy Halloween + Final Residents!
If you haven’t played the demo yet, now’s the perfect time! It’s Halloween and instead of scaring people, why not try matchmaking instead? 💘 We’re still taking lots of feedback and addressing it for the final release!
As for the final two residents that you may have missed - here's Apollo and Felix!
Apollo
He's the most friendly and sociable of the group and you may have seen a sneak peek of him on the cover art 👀
Felix
He's a bit of an oddball and sees the world a bit differently than everyone else.
He's one of my favorite residents, and I can't help but laugh at his lines from his relationship talks:
There will be a total of 12 residents available in the full release:
We’re progressing quite nicely on the game and excited to start sharing more soon:
TikTok
Make sure to wishlist Love, Ghostie if you haven’t yet! It helps us out a ton!
Announcing Two New Residents!
If you follow me on social media, I’ve been a bit quiet on updates, but that really means I’m VERY busy and productive on the game itself! Things are going really well and I’m really happy with how the full game is shaping up.
Now, onto the character introductions - Ami and BEEP0!
Ami
Ami is a hamster that aspires to be the world’s first flying hamster! She loves tinkering with projects and her experiments. However, they don’t ALWAYS go according to plan…
I fell in love with Ami as soon as I saw all her expressions!
You can see the full video of Ami’s expressions here!
BEEP0
BEEP0 is a cute robot trying to understand the world! They love photography and documenting all the new things that they are experiencing!
BEEP0’s facial expressions are some of the most unique of the residents. I love how different each one is (♡ ‿ ♡)
You can see the full video of BEEP0’s expressions here!
There will be a total of 12 residents available:
That means two more that are still to be announced! Stay tuned on socials:
TikTok
Make sure to wishlist Love, Ghostie if you haven’t yet! It helps us out a ton!