Taking place in the vibrant city of Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, Afterlove EP is a blend of visual novel, narrative adventure and rhythm game elements from the creator of Coffee Talk and What Comes After.

Step into the shoes of Rama, a young musician struggling to move on with life after the death of their girlfriend, Cinta. Whilst his close friends and bandmates are all determined to help him move on, Rama has been stuck for more than a year. He’s neglecting his music, his mental health and his relationships.

Making things harder, he’s hearing Cinta’s voice inside his head, unsure if she is a spirit or part of his imagination. Rama’s band has a critical gig in one month’s time. Either he gets serious about his music and delivers the new songs he has been promising or the band will move on without him.

Over twenty-eight days and nights it will be your choices that determine the path Rama takes. Explore the city, choose which relationships to repair and which new ones to pursue. Come to terms with the past, rediscover your creative voice and help Rama shape a future for himself.

Discover modern day Jakarta through side-scrolling exploration, engage in deep and meaningful conversations with the characters of your choosing and jam with your band in rhythm game sections.

Afterlove EP is the final project from renowned narrative designer, writer and developer, Mohammad Fahmi, who sadly passed away at the age of 32.

When Fahmi passed away in March 2022 it hit the team extremely hard. It was most of all the loss of a beloved friend.

After some time to grieve we came together to talk about the question of what to do about the game. The decision of the team was unanimous - we all committed to bring Fahmi’s vision for Afterlove EP to fruition.

At this point we were quite a long way into pre-production. However, Fahmi was both the Creative Director and narrative lead and so the task of working out how to carry on without him was not a simple matter.

Whilst we were able to get back into production of some areas such as art and coding quite soon, we had big shoes to fill on the narrative side of things and that took much more time to work through.

We had the core of the story, characters and narrative design and so Fahmi’s vision was clear, but the work to bring that all into the game was still in its early stages.

Our biggest challenge would be staying true to Fahmi’s vision whilst still going through the same approach you need for a high quality narrative game, namely changing things that aren’t working, iterating and polishing.  

This was not something we could rush into so we took some time to determine the best way forward.

Our decision was for Sasha Ariana from our team to step up as lead narrative designer and to bring in Sweet Baby Inc, a narrative development and consultation studio to support on the narrative design and writing.

Sasha had been working hand in hand with Fahmi on the narrative of Afterlove EP and was also part of the team on his previous game, What Comes After. She intimately understands his vision and style as well as how to ensure the authentic Indonesian culture and vibe remains at the heart of the project. Besides her work on Afterlove EP, and What Comes After, Sasha was heavily involved in the narrative design and writing for A Space for the Unbound.

Sweet Baby are a team of writers and narrative designers lead by Kim Belair and have worked on 25+ projects including an extensive collaboration on Playdate games, indies like Sable, and AAA games like God of War: Ragnarok, South of Midnight and Alan Wake II. Fahmi had been talking with Sweet Baby about joining the project as consultants shortly before he passed and they have been extremely supportive and a huge help in taking on this larger role.

Whilst this all took some time, we’re pleased to say that we recently completed the first draft of the writing for the whole game and can now play it from start to finish. This is a very exciting moment for us as it’s the point where we can start to see what is working and what isn’t and begin the crucial iteration phase.

Meanwhile, most of the rest of the development is at the final stages with all the coding complete and almost all the art and music in place. The audio and music is also almost all in place with just a couple of last bits to do on the soundtrack and Cinta’s VO to be recorded once the script is final.

Now that we can play the whole game we’re focused on playing, testing, reviewing and updating and repeating this process until the game is at the quality we want to achieve.

We are aiming to have this complete by the end of this year and from there we will go into localisation and console porting alongside a final phase of bug fixing and polish.

Talking of consoles, we’re very pleased to reveal that we have a console porting partner onboard in Pocket Sized Hands. We will be handling the Nintendo Switch version ourselves and Pocket Sized Hands will be working on the PlayStation versions we already announced and we are very excited to announce that they will also be working on Xbox versions, meaning we will now release on PC and all of the consoles.

This localisation and porting will take a while and releasing on so many platforms means there is a lot more coordination and planning to do for the launch. We now expect to launch the game in Q3 2024.

Now that we have things moving along so well we finally feel comfortable starting to talk about the game again and to have some confidence in giving this new release date.

You can expect to hear more from us and our publisher, Fellow Traveller, in the coming months and, most excitingly, we are looking forward to bringing you a playable demo in early 2024.

Afterlove EP is coming to Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PC (Steam) in Q3 2024.