Two Years, New Stories, and a Whole New Academy — Team Tinybill's Future!
What a day it's been!
With the First Love Visual Novel Showcase now behind us, and Team Tinybill officially celebrating its second birthday, we wanted to take a moment to sit down, reflect, and talk about some of the exciting things we've been working on behind the scenes.
If you managed to catch the showcase, you'll already know that we had quite a few surprises up our sleeves. From new announcements to familiar faces making their return, today marks another exciting chapter for our little studio.
For those who couldn't tune in, don't worry! We've got plenty to talk about, and we're going to break down some of our biggest announcements, what they mean for our upcoming projects, and what you can expect from us moving forward.
So, grab yourself a drink, get comfortable, and let's get into it!
Static Hearts — Meet Our First Three Voice Actors!
We're incredibly excited to finally confirm that Static Hearts has officially secured its first three voice actors!
For those unfamiliar with the project, Static Hearts is our upcoming girls' love (GL) romance visual novel, following the lives of Emi Hayashi and Kira Thompson as they navigate university, relationships, grief, music, and everything that comes with learning to open your heart to someone new.
It's one of our most ambitious projects to date, and bringing these characters to life has been something we've been looking forward to for quite some time.
Today, we're delighted to introduce the first three voices joining the world of Static Hearts!
Witchy Tea Cup as Kira Thompson!
First up, we're incredibly happy to welcome Witchy Tea Cup as the voice of our rebellious rocker, Kira Thompson!
Witchy is a streamer, content creator, and a familiar face within the Team Tinybill community, having worked alongside us as one of our partnered creators.
Kira is a character with a lot of personality. She's outspoken, stubborn, fiercely independent, and someone who often hides her vulnerabilities behind a confident, sometimes confrontational exterior. Beneath that tough attitude, however, is someone still trying to find her place in the world.
We're incredibly excited to have Witchy joining the cast and can't wait for everyone to hear her interpretation of Kira!
Michaela Tapia as Emi Hayashi
Next, we're delighted to welcome back a familiar voice to the Team Tinybill family!
Michaela Tapia, whom some of you may recognise as the voice of Akemi from The Cooking Club, will officially be taking on the role of Emi Hayashi, one of our two protagonists.
Emi is a quiet, thoughtful university student who finds comfort in writing, music, and the little moments that often go unnoticed. Having experienced significant loss in her life, she struggles to express her emotions and connect with the people around her.
Her story is one of healing, rediscovery, and learning that opening yourself up to someone else doesn't mean forgetting the people you've lost.
Having previously worked with Michaela on The Cooking Club, we're incredibly excited to collaborate with her once again and welcome her into another chapter of Team Tinybill's growing collection of stories.
Michaela Laws as Jesse Carter
And finally, we're absolutely thrilled to announce that Michaela Laws will be joining Static Hearts as the voice of Jesse Carter!
Jesse is Emi's outgoing, energetic, and occasionally chaotic best friend. A journalism student with a love for nightlife and socialising, Jesse often acts as the complete opposite of Emi's reserved personality.
But behind that bubbly exterior is someone who has her own insecurities, particularly when the arrival of Kira begins to change the friendship she's grown so comfortable with.
We're incredibly excited to have Michaela joining the project.
With an established background in voice acting and independent game development, she brings a wealth of experience to the role.
Her credits include voicing Ln'eta in Sucker for Love: First Date and Sucker for Love: Date to Die For, Diana in Seduce Me, Sylvanna in Aphmau's MyStreet series, and Frankie in Knights of Guinevere. She has also contributed to games including Class of '09 and Card-en-Ciel.
Having someone with such an extensive portfolio joining our little studio is genuinely exciting, and we're incredibly grateful to have her bringing Jesse to life.
We hope you'll join us in giving all three of our wonderful voice actors a very warm welcome to Team Tinybill!
So, When Can We Play Static Hearts?
Now, we know what some of you are probably thinking.
"That's great and all, Tinybill... but when can we actually play it?!"
And the answer is... not quite yet!
As much as we'd love to give everyone a release date, Static Hearts is still very much a work in progress.
This is a considerably larger project than some of our previous work, both in terms of its narrative ambitions and the amount of artwork, writing, music, and development required to bring everything together.
We want to make sure that when you finally get to experience Emi and Kira's story, it's something we're genuinely proud to put our name on.
That means taking our time, refining the story, working closely with our talented contributors, and making sure the finished experience receives the attention it deserves.
We don't want to rush something simply for the sake of meeting a date.
So, for now, we're asking everyone to give us a little more time to cook!
A Little Something to Take Home — Static Hearts Merchandise!
While we're not quite ready to show off everything we've been working on, we do have something rather exciting to share!
As part of our preparations for the upcoming Static Hearts Kickstarter campaign, we've been developing a selection of merchandise inspired by the game and its characters.
Today, we're delighted to give you an early look at some of those designs!
These designs are being developed with our Kickstarter campaign in mind, where we'll be offering a selection of physical rewards for supporters who want to help bring Static Hearts to life.
And don't worry if Kickstarter rewards aren't your thing!
We're also planning to make selected merchandise available through the official Team Tinybill store at a later date, giving everyone an opportunity to pick up something from the world of Static Hearts.
Please keep in mind that these are early previews, so some designs, products, and details may change before their final release.
We'll have more information about the Kickstarter campaign, its rewards, and how you can support the project when we're ready to share it.
For now, though, we hope you enjoy this little sneak peek!
A Familiar Face Returns...
Now then.
Before we move on, we'd like to talk about something else that you might have noticed during today's showcase.
A certain familiar face.
A certain childhood friend.
And perhaps a certain girl who has spent a little too much time waiting for her story to continue.
Yes. We're talking about Daisy.
For those of you who played The Cooking Club, you'll already be familiar with Daisy and the rest of the students who made up our original visual novel.
The Cooking Club was an incredibly important project for Team Tinybill. It was one of our earliest opportunities to introduce players to the stories, characters, and worlds we wanted to create.
And while the game received its fair share of positive feedback, it also came with criticism, challenges, and plenty of lessons for us as developers.
We've spent a considerable amount of time looking back at that feedback, discussing what worked, what didn't, and what we could do differently if we ever had the opportunity to revisit the project.
For a while, the future of The Cooking Club was uncertain.
But we never quite stopped thinking about it.
About Daisy, Evelyn, Isabella, Akemi, and the little cooking club that brought them together.
About the stories we hadn't finished telling.
And about the potential we felt the original game had never quite reached.
So, today, we're incredibly proud to finally confirm something that we've been keeping close to our hearts.
The Cooking Club is coming back.
And this time, we're doing things a little differently.
The Cooking Club — Reimagined!
We're returning to the drawing board and rebuilding The Cooking Club with everything we've learned over the past two years. This isn't simply a small update, a handful of bug fixes, or a fresh coat of paint.
We're talking about a substantial reimagining of the original experience.
That includes completely redesigned character artwork, brand-new CG illustrations, a fully in-house-produced original soundtrack, rewritten dialogue, expanded storylines, and plenty of additional content that we weren't able to explore in the original release.
We want to give these characters the opportunity to shine in ways they couldn't before, with stronger storytelling, more meaningful interactions, and a world that feels much more alive.
Our goal isn't to erase what made The Cooking Club special.
It's to take those original ideas, preserve the heart of the experience, and build something much more ambitious around them.
But there's just one little thing we haven't told you yet.
You see...
It's not just the Cooking Club that's coming back.
In fact, we've been thinking about something much, much bigger.
What if there were more stories to tell?
What if there were more students to meet?
More friendships to form? More romances to discover? More secrets hidden behind classroom doors?
And what if the Cooking Club was only the beginning?
Well...
Are you ready to visit the many clubs of Ashridge Academy?
Introducing Ashridge Academy!
One Academy. Countless Stories. Which Club Will You Join?
That's right!
We're incredibly excited to officially introduce Ashridge Academy, our newly reimagined visual novel project that takes the foundations of The Cooking Club and expands them into a much larger, interconnected world!
What originally began as a relatively simple romance visual novel centred around a group of students in a cooking club has evolved into something we believe has the potential to become one of Team Tinybill's most exciting projects yet.
Rather than limiting ourselves to telling just one story, we wanted to explore the wider world surrounding these characters.
After all, Ashridge Academy is a school filled with students, each with their own personalities, ambitions, relationships, and experiences.
Surely the Cooking Club isn't the only place where interesting things happen?
And that's exactly the idea behind Ashridge Academy.
Welcome to Ashridge Academy!
At Ashridge Academy, every student has a story to tell.
From unlikely friendships and messy romances to hidden secrets and unforgettable moments, discover the clubs, characters, and choices that shape life beyond the classroom.
For some students, the academy is a place to make friends, fall in love, and discover who they want to become. For others, it's somewhere to escape the pressures of home, chase a lifelong dream, or simply find somewhere they finally feel they belong.
Behind the classrooms, corridors, and school gates are countless stories waiting to be told.
And every club offers a different way to experience them.
A School Full of Stories
At the heart of Ashridge Academy is the idea that no two students experience school in quite the same way.
Each club will introduce players to a different group of characters, with their own storylines, relationships, conflicts, and choices to make.
Of course, The Cooking Club will remain an important part of this world, bringing back familiar faces such as Daisy, Evelyn, Isabella, and Akemi in a completely reimagined experience.
But that's only the beginning.
Perhaps you'd rather explore the competitive world of The E-Sports Club, where friendships and rivalries can be made or broken over the course of a single match.
Maybe The Swimming Club is more your style, where the pressure to succeed and the expectations placed upon young athletes can be just as challenging as the competition itself.
Or perhaps you'll find yourself drawn towards The Art Club, where creativity, self-expression, and the desire to be understood take centre stage.
Each story will explore different themes, tones, and experiences.
Some might be funny, light-hearted, and filled with the sort of chaotic moments that make school life memorable.
Others may explore more personal subjects such as identity, friendship, loss, ambition, romance, and the struggles that students sometimes keep hidden behind closed doors.
And while every club will have its own story to tell, they'll all exist within the same shared world.
That means familiar faces may appear across different stories, characters may reference events happening elsewhere in the academy, and players will gradually discover just how interconnected the lives of these students really are.
Your Choices. Your Relationships. Your Story.
Just as with our previous visual novels, player choice will remain an important part of the experience.
Throughout your time at Ashridge Academy, you'll have opportunities to make decisions, build relationships, discover secrets, and influence the direction of the stories you experience.
But we also want each club to feel distinct.
The experiences, challenges, and relationships you'll encounter in one club won't necessarily be the same as those waiting for you in another. We want players to feel like they're discovering different sides of the same school, rather than simply repeating the same story with a different cast.
And as the world of Ashridge Academy continues to grow, we hope to introduce even more stories through future downloadable content and standalone experiences, opening the doors to additional clubs, characters, and corners of the academy.
There's an entire school waiting to be explored.
And we've barely scratched the surface.
What Happens to The Original Cooking Club?
Naturally, we imagine some of you will have questions about what this means for the original game. As mentioned earlier, we're currently undertaking a substantial redevelopment of The Cooking Club as part of this new direction.
We're redesigning the original cast, rewriting and expanding the narrative, producing new artwork and CGs, and developing a brand-new soundtrack created entirely in-house.
We're also reviewing the structure of the original game and how its story fits into the larger world we're building. This is a considerable undertaking, especially when you consider that we're no longer developing just one isolated story.
We're creating the foundations for an entire collection of interconnected experiences.
That means there's a lot of planning, writing, designing, and development ahead of us.
We also want to be transparent about something.
We cannot currently provide a release date for Ashridge Academy.
And while we understand that may be disappointing for those who've been waiting to see the Cooking Club return, we would much rather take the time necessary to get things right than rush out something that doesn't live up to its potential.
We've learned a great deal from our previous releases, and we want those lessons to be reflected in everything we create moving forward. We're not expecting everyone to forget the shortcomings of the original game, nor are we pretending that simply announcing a reimagining makes those criticisms disappear. Instead, we want to show you through our work that we've listened, learned, and are committed to doing better.
This is a fresh opportunity for us to revisit something that means a great deal to our team, and we're determined to make the most of it.
We ask for your patience while we continue working behind the scenes.
The following screenshots are VERY early in the draft! - The following scenes have changed the way Mister K is integrated in the main characters story (referred to as 'Jordan') alongside the way Daisy is more involved being the "girl next door" and opening the door to future clubs down the line when time can be dedicated to including more clubs.
Oh. And yes! You're probably wondering why MC is called "Jordan" now..
Well - alot of people - I mean - ALOT of people- really wanted the main character to also be female.. so we went with a gender-neutral name and will include the options to alter pronouns within the game!
The doors to Ashridge Academy aren't quite open yet. But when they are, we hope you'll be there to walk through them with us.
Two Years of Tinybill — And We're Only Getting Started!
With all these announcements, it almost feels strange to remember that today also marks our second anniversary.
Two years ago, Team Tinybill began as a small idea with some rather big dreams.
Since then, we've experienced plenty of ups and downs, met some incredible people, welcomed talented creators into our team, and had opportunities we never could have imagined when we first started.
From our earliest visual novel projects to the creation of New Game+, its evolution into the First Love Visual Novel Festival, and now the continued development of Static Hearts and Ashridge Academy, it's been quite the journey.
And none of it would have been possible without the people who've supported us along the way.
To our community, our partners, our voice actors, artists, writers, composers, moderators, and everyone else who's contributed to Team Tinybill over the past two years, thank you.
We're still a small independent studio.
We still have plenty to learn.
And we know that the road ahead won't always be easy.
But we're incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to keep creating, to keep improving, and to share these little worlds with all of you. We hope today's announcements have given you a glimpse of what we're working towards and why we're so excited about the future.
There's plenty more we want to share when the time is right, and we're looking forward to bringing you along for the journey.
For now, though, we're going to get back to doing what we do best.
Cooking up stories, building worlds, and dreaming a little bigger than we probably should for a studio with a limited budget!
But hey! That's the Tinybill way.
Built small. Dreamt big.
Thank you for two wonderful years. Thank you for joining us at First Love. And thank you for continuing to believe in this little studio.
With love,
The Team Tinybill Team
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