Studio Terranova

🤬 new game on censorship and age verification 🤬

Welcome to the Family Friendly Online Museum, or F.F.O.A.M. for short.

We are a safe space for kids and advertisers alike to be free from CONTROVERSIAL ADULT CONTENT. To view any ADULT CONTENT, we ask all patrons undergo an age assurance test.

Welcome aboard and enjoy getting F.F.O.A.M.ED!

and big butts.

Get it on Steam | Get it on itch.io

WARNING: This game contains at least 80% butt puns.

Happy New Year! In case you missed it, our game Help! I've been cursed by a Bubble Butt is still 40% off on Steam until January 6th! Get it while it lasts—I promise you it'll be a fantasstic gift to usher in a well-rounded 2026!

🍑 Synopsis 🍑

Our non-binary protagonist, adrift in their life, is looking at online influencers to fill the void. They wish they could be more like them...and then, POOF—their wish is granted—but with a slight caveat...

Help them navigate a world filled with peril and problems as they search for purpose and self-love. Make impactful choices and guide our cheeked up hero to save the world… and themselves.

🍑 Features 🍑

laugh out loud dialog

extremely silly CGs

three unique endings

2,400 words / 10-15 minute playtime

copyright-free music that can be livestreamed

Perfect for streaming with friends or just accompanied by your left and right butt cheeks.

It's the holiday season once more, and in the spirit of the season we want to talk about one of the things we most value at Studio Terranova. The games we make are very dear to us, but how and why we make them is equally important as what we make.

We're a worker-owned cooperative because we believe the people who create games should be treated fairly—receive fair wages, share in the revenue, receive credit, work sustainable hours, and retain the rights to their own creative IP.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Yet the games industry is full of companies that burn out their staff with crunch, fail to credit the workers who contributed to games, and hoard both their creations and the profits they make from them. For example, the creative behind Koudelka and Shadow Hearts (one of CJ and Matt's favorite game series) had to make a spin-off of their own work because the characters and story were sold off to another company.

I have a strong desire to belong—belonging to myself, to someone, to the broader community. During the holidays we focus on this idea of belonging—do we feel like we belong with our blood relatives? In our chosen family? Who is coming to dinner? Do we have to trade a core part of ourselves for the feeling of belonging?

As a nonbinary game dev, this sense that I'm never quite where I'm supposed to be was a narrative that bound my experience for years.

Do I know enough programming to be called a game developer? Is my game "good enough?" Is my art? Is my writing? Do I belong here? When I am friendly with other game devs, do they see me as a fellow colleague or just a "dateable character?" This last one, I know, resonates with people who are femme-presenting and/or socialized as female.

Did you know the first draft of Terranova was written over two NaNoWriMos? CJ spent two National Novel Writing Months building about 100K plus words (which is A LOT!). Afterwards, they even doubled the size of that before finally cutting and cutting and cutting and editing down.

CJ always produces more than what we need, so we can pick and choose in the editing phase, which they said was one of the best parts about writing Terranova—that ability to come back and say, all right, we probably don't need this, or we need to add something that links into this.

With their extensive experience in mind, I decided to ask them and Matt for three tips for writers who are starting out, especially those who want to write games and interactive narratives. Here are their answers!

Made your avatars in Spooky Stylin’ yet? Totally missing out if you haven’t! Check it out here — we’d love to see your creations and hear your thoughts!

Originally, Spooky Stylin’ was a game that we wanted to put in Terranova as a minigame alongside Solitaire. Both of us liked playing dress-up games while we were waiting for the next roleplay to come in. Then we’d use them as our LiveJournal or AIM or MSN Messenger avatars.

Right now, this little game is part of Tomodachi 8-in-1, an experimental arcade composed of eight retro games in the spirit of the early 2000s. It has narrative games, mixtapes, things happening on old school cell phones, that sort of thing. We developed it in response to players saying that Terranova was a very long and involved game. So, complementary to that, we’ve developed something more casual and fun that you can play in one sitting.

Dress up your avatar like it’s the 00s: Spooky Stylin’ has been released!

This Halloween, we’re thrilled (pun intended) to announce the launch of our super special minigame, Spooky Stylin’ — available for free as part of Dollmaker Jam! 🎃

The sixth game in our Tomodachi 8-in-1 collection, this game will take you back to those late 90s, early 00s evenings spent meticulously crafting an avatar to use on LiveJournal, AIM, or MSN Messenger—but extra spooky!

- Mix and match your headgear, hairstyle, tops, and bottoms to dress up your avatar!

- 7 outfits to choose from, allowing for over 300 potential combinations!

- Really cute pixel art, if we do say so ourselves!

Take photos of your character and share them with us 🥰

Play Spooky Stylin’ for free

Pay for the Tomodachi 8in1 bundle

We’re super grateful for our community that’s always stuck around, and for their kind words of support for the little piece of universe we’ve created. As with other games in Tomodachi 8-in-1, this fun digital nostalgia is a glimpse of what Tourmaline, Ephemeral Smile, Cherry, and Sendaria would have enjoyed in their days, and we hope you, too, will enjoy it as much as they did.

We’re excited to see what you come up with.

We're a queer-owned (specifically, transmasc bisexual and cis-male bisexual) two person cooperative in Tokyo, Japan. We make retro nostalgic games like this and silly games about butts like this.

We work full time and do games. We'd like to work more on games, but we currently can't support ourselves on game income alone.

You might have noticed we've been posting back issues to links of our newsletter on Tumblr. That's where the majority of our updates are going nowadays—I'll try to be better about posting it to multiple channels!

We currently have two tiers; one free through Buttondown and the other $1.50 a month through Ko-Fi to support our work.

We're planning on adding higher tiers but we want to make sure people feel like they're getting something out of them. If you can afford $1.50 a month, please consider supporting our queer little 2-person game studio!

Subscribe to our newsletter (free)

On August 9-10th, I organized a weekend game jam for the PICO-8’ers, a group of game devs in Tokyo that love PICO-8 called PICOJAM. It took place in Kichijoji at Pico Pico Café, home of Lexaloffle Games.

This month, mabbees and I went to Kyoto and attended BitSummit, one of the biggest indie events in Japan. BitSummit is a “shop” conference—that is, a good way to meet and greet publishers, localization studios, and other devs, as well as diehard fans of indie games.

We showcased Terranova in 2023, and learned some valuable info about our fans (they are weird and lovable like us) and about Terranova’s publish-ability as a game (we are too weird for them to love us).

In short, we decided to both self-publish and translate our game. With no big publisher to rely on, are using our sales, our Ko-Fi, and our personal savings to pay our localizers.

A quick recap of our goals for 2025:

localize Terranova in Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese

finish Tomodachi 8in1

start The Frontier

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do all these things at once on top of our full-time contract work, but realistically, we can’t continue sustainably. mabbees has semi-stable employment, and I’m currently doing short-term contracts, looking for longer engagements.

I love the zine/doujin game scene so I'm extra-proud that this is our first COMITIA.

We’ll be at TOKYO BIG SIGHT, East Hall 2, Booth く40a.

We’re planning on selling…

Screen-printed USB sticks with the Terranova game

Terranova folders for your fanfic!

It’s almost 2025, so I thought I’d do some writing on how the year went.

In short, we…

Founded the legal entity for Studio Terranova

Collected funds to rehire Ogawa-san to make our Japanese demo of Terranova a full game, AND have the full game text in Russian

Released five games of Tomodachi 8in1

Released a prototype of The Frontier to positive reviews through YuriJam 2024

In 2025, we’ll be…

LQAing and importing game text into Terranova

Finishing up our three final Tomodachi 8in1 games

Posting some back issues of our newsletter to Tumblr because we forgot 🥲 We participated in Yuri Jam 2024 last year—our submission was The Frontier a game about post-capitalist hellscapes and girls kissing at the end of it all.

We do updates monthly! If you’re interested in following our progress as a super indie design and games cooperative, here’s some links:

- Check out our games

- Subscribe to our newsletter (free)