It is here! The start of Early Access for BABELOMANIA! Are you ready to dive back into the horror?!

Thank you so much for your patience, everyone, although I'm shocked at how quickly we managed to put this out, all things considered! After releasing the Demo for the Spooktober VNJam at the end of September, we took the month of the competition to pause, do some small fixer-uppers here and there, but not actually going into further production. We wanted to gather as much feedback as possible before continuing, and I'm still surprised at how positive the reception was!

And with that came expectations and no small amount of pressure, especially considering how many people seem to have become pretty enamoured with Tabitha, the Android. I mean, it was my idea making her the face of the game. She features pretty heavily on all social media and marketing material, she's literally the first character you lay eyes on when you start a new game and even in just the Vertical Slice we made for the Jam she features in 80% of the CGs. What I did not expect was the Lady D factor (from Resident Evil 8 in case you're not familiar). How naïve and innocent I was...! D:

I hope we do not disappoint with what we've prepared for this first Early Access. Tabitha is back but before getting to her, you will be introduced to a number of new features and a couple new characters...

What is new in BABELOMANIA EARLY ACCESS 01?

New Protagonist, More Story

In the Vertical Slice, more than one person started wondering: 'they keep mentioning the bride, where is she?' Well, wonder no more: Delphine is here to slay as the deuteragonist of BABELOMANIA, in the tradition of the original Resident Evil games on the Playstation.

She will have her own locations to explore, her own challenges to overcome, her own version of the codex and even her own different brand of gameplay. And there may be something else that reminds people of Resident Evil, in her scenario...

Voice-Acting (sort of)

You may have seen that we've recently concluded a Casting Call for Tabitha! We don't have the budget to add full voice acting so we had to get creative... You'll see what we have in store for Tabitha and her barks soon enough. In the meantime, you can spruce up your gameplay session with some beeps!

When first starting the game you will be presented with the choice between No Voice Acting and Beeps, where the latter will have procedurally generated noises accompany the display of text in game. There are three different sets added so far and each character is fully customizable!

New GUI Elements, Fixes

With the addition of Delphine's scenario, there's a number of new addition to the code gameplay and visual wise, and also some hotfixes of bugs we've found laying around. I also discovered a brand new way of making exploratory screens in Ren'py while keeping the flashlight system from breaking apart... :)

New Music, New CGs!

And all of it added to the Gallery and Music Room in the Extras submenu! Nailik and OddTillTheEnd have delivered some amazing new tracks for this Early Access update! What is your favourite music track so far?!

What should I keep in mind going into BABELOMANIA Early Access #01?

Early Access Means In-Development

Eventually, inevitably, someone will find bugs for us to fix. That's to be expected of an in-development game so we ask for your patience when dealing with them! There shouldn't be anything game-breaking but, whatever bug you may encounter, please copy the text of the Crash Report and create a Bug Report thread in our Discord Community!

Also: DEMO SAVE FILES AREN'T COMPATIBLE! You need to start a new game!

French Later

This Early Access comes without the French Translation, for now. The team is hard at work updating the translation and it will come in a subsequent general update.

Support Now, Get it Forever!

The price of the game will increase as development progresses! The earlier you support the team, the less you pay! ;) Hint hint!

Tell your Friends!

In this overwhelmingly saturated market, slowly building a fanbase through word of mouth is the only sure way of getting people to know a game even exists! Please share word about BABELOMANIA and its amazing Android girl to all of your friends, favourite streams, social media shitposters, etc! You have no idea how much that helps!

ONE LAST THING - HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

2024 has been a tough years for me but at the same time I had so many satisfying moments, and the team has been trucking along and only getting better! I couldn't be more proud!

Be sure to follow us here on Itch or on Bluesky for updates on all our projects! Patreon and Kofi are other ways how you can show your support and, if you like learning Japanese or how to GameDev, I stream on Twitch!

Hope you spend a great holiday season with your family and friends! See you in 2025 for more BABELOMANIA, JPDE2 and JPDE1REFRAIN!