“A romance game you’ve never seen before.” These words echoed through my mind time and time again as I delved deeper into the type of games Nochi Studios has put out, and continues to produce.

As a relatively new player (3 years) to the genre of romance games, I’m sure I haven’t seen everything out there, but I have managed to get more than a few games (>50) under my belt. I pride myself on exploring the many different styles that exist, from the Otomate VN formula, to linear storylines, to chatroom games, games with no wrong answers, games with grinds, and games with no happy endings. I’ve played across PC, mobile, PlayStation, and Nintendo platforms.

I’m certainly not a veteran. But I feel I’ve seen many different ideas and designs and can confidently claim that I have an understanding of otome games.

Then a studio comes along, unbeholden to share holders and CEOs and allowed the freedom to experiment with new features and new ideas, altering the status quo and breathing innovative life into what I thought I knew of otome games.

When I was offered the chance to sip and chat with the developers of Sweetcore Brews, I set the kettle on the front burner – watched pot be damned. I wanted to know the people that could come up with otome games that I have never seen before; I wasn’t about to wait for the proper steeping time.

What’s Brewing?

Millennium “Milly” Blythe is the bewitching new girl in town working hard at her new apprenticeship at Sweetcore Brews, a bustling tea shop managed by a shopkeeper who chats by cauldron, and where all teas aren’t just made with love… but with magic.

With the cauldrons bubbling and the customers lining up, it’s truly up to Milly to brew her way towards her dreams while stirring up plenty of romance along the way.

– Game Summary (KickStarter)

Nochi Studios currently has a Kickstarter running for Sweetcore Brews, their fourth game in production. It has already been funded, but there are stretch goals still to be obtained. Described as a witchy romantic comedy, Sweetcore Brews serves up two love interests who are big shots in the magical world, Zero and Kingsley. The game boasts 28+ hours of gameplay, minigames, and an interesting use of AR for mobile players.

The Kickstarter campaign will end on Friday, July 28th, but the demo will be available to play on Sweetcore Brews’ itch.io page. Full release is scheduled November 2023. You can follow along with development by backing the game on Kickstarter or following their Twitter account.

☆ Game Name: Sweetcore Brews
☆ Developers: Nochi Studios
☆ Platforms: Mobile, Steam
☆ Genres / Vibes: Romance, Comedy, Fantasy, Cozy
☆ More info: Kickstarter, Twitter, Website

Tea Time With Nochi Studios

Nochi Studios is proudly female-founded and female-run, based in the US with a diverse team dedicated to combining the creativity of indie developed games with the professionalism of a large studio. Their goal is to make romance games that players haven’t seen before, and to say they are dedicated to that goal feels almost underrepresenting their passion for new technology and innovative gameplay.

For each project, we have these two week bootcamps where we hole ourselves up in the office and crank out all sorts of details through design thinking, workshopping and brainstorming.

Natalie

Their first game, Sifting Thyme, released on mobile in 2020 with several other games following soon after. Somnium Eleven, and Untold Atlas were also released on mobile, and Untold Atlas will be releasing on PC later this year. Sweetcore Brews will be released on mobile and PC (Steam), but only the mobile version will have the AR technology available. You can see a video on their Kickstarter or read more about it here. Of course, we will also be talking about it in this interview, so you could also just stick around for some more info.

Nochi Studios’ team consists of three women with a passion for gaming.

Natalie Fang holds the title of Game Director and was my primary contact during this interview. She loves connecting with other female gamers, and fangirling about creative endeavors.

Alexandra Mejia is the Game Scenario Writer for the company, and was able to chime in for a few interview questions. Her favorite pastime is crying over 2D boys when she’s not writing about precious 2D boys.

Keira Damaska is the Game Programmer for Nochi Studios. Unfortunately, she was not available during our interview, but I look forward to getting another inside scoop for the next game from Nochi Studios where I might get to chat with her a bit.

I have been personally following you since your Somnium Eleven KickStarter. Back then I was new to otome and hadn’t branched out to many mobile games or OELVNs, not so much the case now. But I do wonder, why did you end up aiming your designs for mobile games rather than PC?

Natalie: I see a lot of this platform discourse in the otome community which is fascinating. But putting aside player preferences for otome format – mobile games are more accessible to players. Regardless of what country you’re in, almost everyone has a mobile phone but the same cannot be said for PC. We wanted to make games that if someone did not have the financial means of owning a PC or console, they would still be able to play an otome game on their phone.

And before Nochi became a full-time startup with employees, I had done research and entrepreneurial programs at the University of Michigan while I was a FTMBA candidate. After reviewing the data and working with many stakeholders including gamers, entrepreneurs, professors, investors, it made business sense as well to go mobile first. And that’s how Nochi was pitched to receive startup investment money.

Untold Atlas will be released to PC soon, and Sweetcore Brews will also be available on PC when released, what brought on the desire to stretch to another platform rather than stay on mobile?

Natalie: We’ve always wanted to expand to other channels (i.e. PC and consoles) and now that we have a solid tech stack for mobile development, we’re ready to tackle PC development! PC is a lot easier for us to take on compared to console so that was our natural next step for expansion. Consoles are still on our minds but we’ll see when we can get to it.

Your games have mini-games in them, increasing the complexity beyond simply making choices. Are you a fan of stat-raisers and VNs containing more gameplay elements?

Natalie: From a personal note, I play all sorts of games, including first person shooter, JRPGs, etc. Others on the team also play various genres of games including rhythm games or social simulation games. But the reason why we add in gameplay elements is because of our studio’s mission, “We are independently building a new genre of romance anime games [players] haven’t experienced before.”

And we really do take that to heart in experimenting with all sorts of formats. With Untold Atlas, we had this expedition mini-game of choosing party members to encounter all sorts of mission shenanigans. And with the new game, we have a match-3 game. We try to fold in these interactive mini-games to enhance the overall experience.

To follow that up, the PC version of Sweetcore Brews will have everything unlocked, does that mean the mini-games won’t need to be played in order to progress?

Natalie: The minigames will need to be played in order to progress for the PC version as well, but PC players get automatic Match 3 boosters compared to mobile players who download the game for free and would then have to make in-app purchases of boosters. The PC version will also have answer choices unlocked since PC players purchase the game upfront. But for Kickstarter mobile game backers, they get all the in-app currency they need to unlock answer choices and purchase the boosters they need to unlock collectibles – essentially the equivalent of PC players purchasing the game upfront.

You know I’m going to ask about this AR technology you have on the mobile version of Sweetcore Brews, how does it work?

Natalie: So how it works is that Kickstarter mobile backers will get two nice Augmented-Reality (AR) merch cards – basically a velvety-touch print of Kingsley and Zero. Mobile players will then be able to scan these cards to spawn an animated Kingsley or Zero – depending on which card you scan – into their real life space in front of them. Through the phone camera, you’ll be able to see the love interest and hear them speak, depending on which voice line you selected in the AR screen.

We really want to be able to give players a new way to interact with their favorite LIs. Many players have merch of fav LIs and we want to make that an even more special, novel experience. We know players – and a few of us on the team! – bring 2D/anime merch to real life events in various ways (i.e. plushies/figures and taking pics with them). Now, players can spawn the Sweetcore Brews LIs and hear the amazing voice lines in settings like at a coffee shop or even before going to bed if they want to be cheered up with a sweet voice line about how awesome our players are.

How intuitive is the AR feature?

Natalie: There’s a slight education piece where we’ll add instructions about scanning the AR merch to spawn the LI. The rest is pretty intuitive, but we are working through some development features so that it’ll be intuitive to players in how they can view and take pictures of the AR-Kingsley and AR-Zero.

The voice lines are pre-recorded voice pack lines. So for each AR merch, that specific AR-character will have a pack of voice lines that mobile players can play around with.

Your mission statement is right on the mark about making games players haven’t seen before, I certainly haven’t seen this in an otome. How did you come up with the idea?

Natalie: As a startup located in Ann Arbor, we’re in this amazing area with incredible technology and talent. The University of Michigan actually invested in our company and most of us are UofM graduates – or are current students in the case of our interns – so we’re very involved in the tech/digital ecosystem here. The University has an awesome AR/XR program so it just made sense for us to also invest in the technology and create an otome experience with it.

Do you have other innovative ideas simmering in the background that you can tell me about?

Natalie: While the current AR technology in Sweetcore Brews is basic right now, this game is our testing ground to develop it so that our future titles can have even more interactive elements with LIs in the future. We really hope that people enjoy this feature and come along for the AR ride that we’re building up. Maybe players will see the next iteration in a Sweetcore Brews DLC or in our next game title? We’ll see!

Nochi Studios has released three other games at this point, Sweetcore Brews being your fourth in development. Is it getting easier to come up with new stories or ideas?

Natalie: Since we develop with a holistic experience in mind for each new title, each game still has a time-consuming development or challenge despite having publishing experience. For example, the AR feature and Match 3 minigame in Sweetcore Brews is completely new for our team so we spent a lot of time figuring out how the technical meshes with the creative for a cohesive experience.

Since our mission is to develop things players haven’t experienced before in a romance anime game, we’re constantly challenging ourselves in an attempt to create something different. In a way, we purposefully make development difficult for ourselves, all in the name of being indie and experimental. But I’ll let Alexandra speak on the story aspect.

Alexandra: Every story comes with its own experience for sure, so in a sense, it can get easier after four games to know which aspects are our stronger suits than others. At the same time, the concept development for each game’s story is so unique because of how it has to work with the programming aspects, so from the creative side, each story will instinctively have its own challenges too. 

In terms of character development, it’s never exactly “easier” to write for certain characters than others because they each have their own way of organically developing with the story, but we do recognize that with the variety of personality types we’ve explored through our multiple titles, we do learn from those experiences to conceptualize which types of characters we’d like to write for next.

There is a female LI in Sweetcore Brews, and in Untold Atlas as well; do you have other ideas in the works, or desires for future games to have more options for inclusion, such as gender choice for MC or non-binary love interests?

Natalie: Our first game, “Sifting Thyme” actually has gender choice for MC! But we went way over our heads with it and the development for that game went above what we originally budgeted for. So with each successive title, we make decisions based on not only what game experience we’re envisioning but we unfortunately factor in a huge dose of reality as final decisions are based on available funding.

We’d love to include more love interests or diverse MC options, but it unfortunately comes down to money at the end of the day. As of today, we aren’t sustainable as a studio yet – which is why we heavily rely on Kickstarter funding to bring these games to life. Without the funding, we wouldn’t be able to develop games nor continue operations as a company.

We did try to include more diverse love interests and gender choice for MC in “Untold Atlas” as Kickstarter stretch goals. However, the funding we raised was just slightly above the campaign minimum so we weren’t able to afford those features unfortunately.

But we really want to have more player customization as we think it’ll just make the game experience so much better. So we’ll continue to try our best to raise funding to afford these options one day!

Are you already looking ahead to your next title? If so, can you tell us anything about it?

Natalie: We actually have a “bootcamp” coming up next month. For each project, we have these two week bootcamps where we hole ourselves up in the office and crank out all sorts of details through design thinking, workshopping and brainstorming. Eventually coming out of the bootcamp, we have a decent roadmap for the next game project.

Okay, here’s a tough one. Imagine you can send a text to your past self, the one that existed any time before the release of Sifting Thyme; what would you tell yourself?

Alexandra: Most likely I’d tell myself “Keep crying over those 2D boys and they just might finally notice you”.

I likely would’ve sent that to my high school self just before I’d gone into costume design instead because at the time, I had been told that being able to write for visual novels wasn’t a thing in this field, although it had been my dream. 

Even if I’d still gone to study costume first before game writing, I think just by assuring myself to keep trusting the process during those moments would’ve been always most welcomed.

Just between us and everyone reading this, which game was your favorite to work on? Everyone has a favorite.

Natalie: For sure Sweetcore Brews. We’re really upping our dev game with all the new features in it that didn’t exist in our prior games – match 3 minigame, AR technology, voice lines, and more. We’ve designed the game so that it’s great no matter what platform you play on. For mobile, you get this cool AR experience in spawning an LI into your real life space. For PC, there’s these fun mad lib minigames that I think will be great for playing/sharing the hilarious and probably cursed results with friends. And at the core of the game, it’s a delightful rom com title with spice options.

Alexandra: It’s hard to honestly say because they all have something special, working on Sweetcore Brews is honestly such a fun experience, especially as a huge lover of shoujo manga and magical girls. I also grew up bonding a lot with my family by watching sitcoms, and have always felt something artistic about the way they utilize that balance of humor and heartfelt writing to really think about the whimsical and touching aspects of our lives.

Getting to write Milly’s character also really sets the process apart, especially with developing her relationships with Zero and Kingsley. Magic realism is also such a fun genre, as there’s lots of opportunities to brainstorm from a variety of inspirations beyond the genre itself to come up with the scenarios, themes, and the teas themselves!

Could you tell me one moment where you knew this was it, that this was what you wanted to do and a company you wanted to be part of?

Alexandra: At the time I started with Nochi, the moment I had the opportunity to develop for the outlines for Sifting Thyme’s first chapters and storyboard, it really sunk in that I was already loving the process and it was exactly the kind that I’d been working towards for such a long time. The direction and collaboration of what I wanted with the characters and the story really aligned with Nochi’s values like a glove.

Also, on the day I graduated for game writing (virtually since it was 2020), I didn’t even flinch twice about celebrating it by doing a crazy long table read with the team till the late hours. I was just so excited to share my latest chapter script with them and for us to have that fun moment of highlighting various scenes and editing things together.

Just Desserts

While we mainly talked business during this interview, I feel I got a good idea of the type of people that are behind Nochi Studios. Natalie exuded kindness in every interaction, and she certainly did seem the type to fangirl about creative works. I enjoyed learning more about the studio and am looking forward to the future of otome games with additional features and technology implemented, only limited by our imaginations, and of course, funding.

We wanted to make games that if someone did not have the financial means of owning a PC or console, they would still be able to play an otome game on their phone.

Natalie

I am eternally grateful to have found otome games, and have the opportunity speak with developers, content creators, and fans that all share an undeniable love for love. I want to thank Nochi Studios for giving me their time and allowing me to share their story, and for readers who have given me their time and furthered my reach by sharing my articles.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Editor note: A part of the interview was incorrectly credited to Natalie, but has been fixed in an update on 7/25 to correctly reflect the original commenter, Alexandra.

Game Info

☆ Game Name: Sweetcore Brews
☆ Developers: Nochi Studios
☆ Platforms: Mobile, Steam
☆ Genres / Vibes: Romance, Comedy, Fantasy, Cozy
☆ More info: Kickstarter, Twitter, Website
☆ Age rating: 18+