To talk about the start of Nozomu School Daze, we'd have to go back, back…
198x - Cass was born in the state of–
Okay, maybe not that far back.
What a lot of people don’t know is that Nozomu School Daze is based on a Webtoon manga, Nozomu, written by our producer and sprite artist, DaCeroNine.
Nozomu follows one of our male leads, Seki Fujury, as he returns to the Port of Rabban to reconnect with his childhood friend, Iris.
So the actual timeline of development starts like this:
Aug 16, 2022 - Cero posts the first chapter of Nozomu on Webtoon
Nov 16, 2024 - Mari begins posting on Discord about Fond Familiar, her own otome game
Jan 29, 2026 - Mari brings on Cass to help write FonFa LET’S GOOOO
Jan 31 - Mari and Cass create Maroon Ink Studio
Feb 4th - Two friends, Cero and Caitlin, are curious about FonFa, so Cass and Mari create a group Discord DM
Feb 12 - Cass proposes that MIS make a shorter game based on Nozomu, Cero’s IP; Cero joins the team as producer and sprite artist, and Caitlin joins as art director
Mar 11 - Cass creates the studio website (and then debugs it forever more)
Mar 20 - The beta build (Nozomu School Daze 0.1) is complete, but it includes copyrighted materials we intend to scrub, oops. Cero also created the NSD logo, which Caitlin reviewed and improved as our art director
Mar 30 - We release beta build 0.1.2, including an almost-complete common route, a gallery, and speech bubbles to make the game look more like a comic! Heck yeah
Apr 7 - We post the key art on social media by revealing the four characters one at a time, a marketing beat that works out better than we’d expected
Apr 28 - Mari encourages us to join the Otome and Josei Jams (game-creating challenges) in ALL CAPS. Also, Cero completes our first official trailer!
Apr 30 - We release a pre-alpha build with a common route and all extra features (gallery, achievements, intro video based on the trailer) complete. At this point, we had a fully functioning game that we could play, so we were psyched!
May 26th - Mari grinds the paperwork and financial details for the Steam page, submitting them to Valve for review YASSSS QUEEN
Jun 2 - We can finally access the Steam page dashboard. Cass goes on her 3-day social media bender as detailed here. Basically, she embarrassed the team by addressing the heckin’ CEO of Valve as his meme name, among other ridiculousities, but we still love her (whew)
Jun 22 - Alpha build complete! We finish and code Julius’s route for the game jams. A playtester refers to Sari as “my distrustful queen”
Jun 23 - Mari grinds the Itchio page (bless). We release our first build on Itch.io at midnight PST. Clearly, nothing will go wrong, right? Right
Jun 24 - After multiple build releases due to bug fixes (including one where the game didn’t upload properly, making it 0 bytes for an indeterminate number of downloads), we submit our game to the Otome and Josei jams
Jun 25 - With support from the Otome Dev Discord server, Cass screws around with the game’s code until she figures out how to create a web browser playable version, which she uploads, once again, at midnight PST
Jun 26 - Cass completes coding on Seth’s route, meaning Sari can now be called an idiot by an arrogant cat man!
Jun 28 - NSD earns 100+ Itchio browser plays and 200+ downloads
Jul 4 - We playtested the game with our friends on Discord, where we laughed our butts off for three solid hours
Next up, Cass will complete the writing and scripting of Seki’s route, which includes two distinct branches at roughly 10k words as of this writing.
Caitlin will be hard at work illustrating the CGs and reviewing/improving the rest of our 145 sprites as our art director.
Our background artist, Mari, has finished all 11 backgrounds and has drawn several “extra” sprites, including a rose, jars of salve, a locket, etc.
And Cero, our sprite artist and producer, is giving Seki and the rest of our male leads a glow-up.
Even though Nozomu School Daze’s development has been compressed into five months, the time has flown by for us.
We’d always intended to polish up and replace the sprites for the game, and since the writing and scripting are almost complete, polishing is what we have left.
We have a few friends willing to provide voice lines, and we hope to release a fully voiced version of the game after its initial release on Steam.
Thank you all for being a part of this journey. <3
- Maroon Ink Studio