After School Afterlife is finally OUT! Check out our game set in a haunted Peranakan mansion that where you travel through its halls befriending hungry ghosts, appeasing unreasonable immortals, and discovering delicious foods. This has been a real passion project for us and we hope others take delight in seeing this fantasy world we made with culture ties to Singapore and SEA.
Growing up in Singapore, my sister and I have always been fans of fantasy. Stories of sword and sorcery absolutely dominated our bookshelves at home. Western media was the majority of media that we consumed and I grew up believing that it was very normal in American high schools to be shoved into a locker.
What local media did we consume then?
Ghost stories.
Local fantasy is ghost stories. One of the most popular local book series that kids would devour at school was called True Singapore Ghost Stories. Children would grow up being told stories of pontianaks and hauntings. It was this haunted childhood we had that planted the seed that After School Afterlife grew from. That, and also a desire to explore what a non-Western fantasy setting might be like. Perhaps others would also find that interesting though admittedly a lot of it was for our own interest in exploring what that could look like.
During covid, my sister and I joined a game jam called GM48 (where you have to make a game in 48 hours). That was when we made the first iteration of After School Afterlife. This was five years ago.
The next five years were spent with trying to work on the game while also having a full-time job. At one point, the development went into a hiatus that lasted more than a year as my sister and I also began working on another game called Rusted Moss.
We've also gone through multiple programmers due to life just catching up like friends getting jobs and going back to school. Life stuff. It ended up with me finally learning programming and we also managed to loop in one of our other unemployed friends to join our team (Thanks Riuku for bearing through my terrible code and thanks Hokori for playtesting our extremely stupid jokes).
Anyway, with lots of ups and downs, I'm happy we were able to finish our game. My brother described it as an extremely dumb game when he played it and I hope you all feel the same.
- Happysquared