June Diary: The Doll Shop is almost done!

The other day, we met a friend who asked us: “What exactly is The Doll Shop?” She’s been following us for many years now on Instagram but cannot clearly say what are our current projects. And we can understand that! Recently, we’ve been working on so many different things: illustration for a tramway, ukiyoe series for a Japanese traditional workshop, comic books, video games… It’s not easy to communicate clearly about all of them and it’s probably confusing for some of you.

In this newsletter, we’d like to clarify this problem and focus on our 2 main current projects: The Doll Shop and Tokyo Mystery Café.

The Doll Shop is an independent horror/romance video game set in the Japanese countryside. It’s coming on next October, right in time for Halloween!

We’re doing everything by ourselves. Olivier is in charge of the story, programming, sounds, art directing and part of the backgrounds. I am in charge of the music, characters, items and the other part of the backgrounds. The game is almost finished as you can see on the graphics below:

What remains is: communication and translations.

We’re doing our best to communicate on the game by contacting press and journalists but the game industry is very competitive and it’s hard to catch people’s attention on a small project like that. The game will be available on the Steam store, it means we need enough players to add the game to their wishlist if we want to appear on the store. People say we need to obtain at least 7000 wishlist before the game release, otherwise the game’s page won’t be visible. We currently a little more than 40000 wishlists, that’s a beginning!

By the way, if you want to support us, the best way to help is to add the game to your wishlist ! \^_^/

>> WISHLIST ON STEAM

About translations, since we are creating this game in our free time with absolutely no money (only our Patreon funds), we cannot afford to translate it in many languages. We have selected 4 languages: English, Japanese, Chinese and French. The Doll Shop is a game based on narration so we decided to work only with friends who have true writing skills. Let us introduce them briefly.

* Josh Tierney will be in charge of the English version. He is a Canadian comic book writer (Spera, Warm Blood). We’ve been friends for almost 20 years now and collaborated on several projects (comic books, short movie...). Our writing styles are very close and both are focused on the characters feelings.

* Mizuka Yagi will work on the Japanese translation. We met in Niigata university in 2009 and since then, she was our referent for each of our projects set in Japan, sending us documentation, answering all our questions… She still lives in Niigata, where the game takes place, so she knows very well about the winter atmosphere we tried to picture in this project.

* Jay Wong will take care of the Chinese version. We met him in Hong Kong in 2024. He is a comic book artist and writer and an animated movie director and storyboarder (Monsoon Blue). He focuses on very touching intimate stories with sensitive characters. This will be our first collaboration together and we feel very excited about it!

Our second project, Tokyo Mystery Café is a detective comic book series set in Tokyo. The first two volumes are already available in France at Dupuis publishing (volume 1 is digitally available in English too) and we are now working on the third and last volume to be released in Spring 2027.

Here again, we’re doing everything by ourselves: Olivier writes the story and we work together on the art. Working on a series requires a lot of endurance. We started working on it in 2023 at it will be finished next year. But it’s also a very special experience to be able to spend several years with our beloved characters.

Here is our progress graphic on volume 3.

We had a meeting with our editor Camille Grenier in Paris last month and she checked the first 27 pages of the story board so we can go on the pencils and inking of these pages.

Talking about events, we’ll be part of the following events to sign copies of our books. If you want to meet us and chat, we would be happy to see you there:

4/5 July : Haltya BD in Ustaritz. It’s a cominc book event taking place inside a beautiful castle in the Basque Country.

20/23 August: Cabaret Vert in Charleville-Mézière. It’s a huge music and comic book event. There will be amazing musicians like Nick Cave and Sebastien Tellier and around 70 comic book artists. This is going to be crazy!

We hope we managed to clarify a bit about our current projects. We’re often working on various things in the same time but maybe we should communicate only about one thing after another… We’d love to know your thoughts about it. Having feedback could help us to make improvements! ^_^