We would love your nomination for Labor of Love. Hanako: Honor & Blade started as a tribute to my late mother, who passed away from cancer. The game's backstory of samurai lore serves as a metaphor for al lost loved ones battle against disease.
Over the course of our journey, many of our dev team have lost a parent to cancer and our game expanded as a growing tribute to many of our lost.
We worked on this game after hours, after our jobs, late at night, through college in 2008; through a gruelingly long Early Access period from 2017 to 2021; and finally released in September 2021!
Our team is still hard at work making the game better, working on new features, fixing bugs, making new cosmetic items and doing so with $0 budget, as we always have, in our free time. Even though our launch wasn't as big as we hoped, we still love our game, think we made something very high quality and deserving of Labor of Love, as one of the longest in development Indie Games in history.