Hello everyone! 

It's been 1 week since the release of HEART À LA MODE, and we've been really heartened and overwhelmed by your support and interest in the game! 

Honestly "1 week since release" is really just a silly milestone that we are creating as an excuse to write this post. From the bottom of our hearts, we'd just really like to say an enormous THANK YOU to everyone who clicked and gave this game a chance. Every comment and rating not only makes us smile like idiots, it also inspires us to do even better for the future releases. If you have any feedback on what we should change or how to improve it, we'd really love to hear from you- either in the comments section or over on Twitter at https://twitter.com/yapperu_otome if you'd prefer to DM us instead. 

 With that being said, we thought we'd share some snippets from the start of our development journey with you today! 

The game's concept came about because we are both huge fans of characters like Coco (if that is not obvious enough lol). We wanted to create a character that not only looked cute, but also had some sort of silly personality trait (his obsession with ice cream). In the world of the game, he's supposed to be a Hello Kitty/ Rilakkuma level superstar, so we're really glad to hear that people find him cute or would buy merch of him (and who knows we might be working on bringing that to a reality near you!) (AFTER WE FINISH NICO AND VIVIAN'S ROUTES, THAT IS.)

One of Coco's initial design concepts. If he was a Japanese character his tagline would be にゃいて  (which is supposed to be a pun on 泣いて which means crying and にゃ which means meow) which I am not really sure how to translate, so it didn't make it into the final game haha. (If you have any ideas for a good translation or a tagline we'd love to hear from you!) 

As for our main characters, this was our initial draft of them! As you can see, their occupations/ relationship to Maya have changed quite a bit from what we first planned for them to be, but we hope they're still enjoyable! Stylistic choices for the game also underwent some changes thanks to our talented artist, who experimented with loads of different styles to finally bring you the cute and soft imagery of the current game. 

(If you're wondering about the spoiler, make sure to get more than 20 affection points for Vivian while you're on Robin's route!)

That's all we have for today but thank you for reading up until here! Do let us know if you'd like to see more of such posts going forward, we'll do our best to update you regularly if so. And once again, thank you so much for downloading and we hope you'll enjoy the game!