Japanese multimedia creator, VTuber, author and developer Uka Todoki, alongside publisher Artodria, recently announced that they would be launching an official development blog on Pixiv Fanbox in order to collect funds for their upcoming visual novel Girlfailure Art Club. Aside from details on how the project is going to be funded, Todoki also confirmed that the team is making plans for a localized release of the game, as well as hiring voice actors.
Girlfailure Art Club is a visual novel following the story of a teenage boy who mistakenly ends up enrolling in his high school’s art club. As the protagonist, you’ll spend your days in the club surrounded by four quirky otaku girls looking for your attention. The project was started by Todoki, who wanted to create a game that would fill the dorky girl niche, and apparently, a part of it was based on their personal experience being a long-time art club attendee. Introducing the heroines Rinne, Shoko, Kana and Yurie, who are all slightly different flavors of otaku, the game’s announcement gained a lot of buzz on X, both from Japanese and international fans.
In response to such strong support, the developers decided to launch the fundraising blog as a way to expand the scope of the project, which was originally self-funded by Todoki.
“Since we’ve already got so much support, instead of trying to cut costs in a weird way, we want to go all out and create something huge and amazing,” Todoki wrote. In order to meet the expectations of both domestic and international fans, as well as expand the game’s content, have been in talks with translators, localization companies, as well as voice actor agencies. However, according to Todoki, including the hypothetical localization and voice acting costs, they need an estimated budget of several million yen to proceed with development.
Originally, the title was a self-funded hobby project which Todoki worked on when they were not busy with their main job as a designer, and the Pixiv Fanbox was used for personal diary entries and casual updates on the game’s progress. But now that they’ve become a full-time freelance indie game creator and are planning to expand their passion project into something bigger, the development blog was revamped into a platform for raising funds for Girlfailure Art Club.
There are currently five different game support plans, the cheapest one being 500 yen (around $3 USD) a month, and the highest one being 10,000 yen (around $63 USD) a month. Those who decide to support the project will get access to Girlfailure Art Club development logs and other exclusive art by Todoki themselves. According to the website, all of the funds collected will be used for developing the game.
Finally, Todoki and Artodria made an open call for creators who would like to be involved with the development of Girlfailure Art Club or any of the devs’ future endeavors. Artodria has already received numerous inquiries from illustrations, musicians, video editors, translators, Unity engineers, voice actors, etc., and some of them are already on board the project. However, despite a limit on how many people they can welcome to the Girlfailure Art Club project at the moment, it seems like Artodria is planning to further expand their creative team in the long term.
Girlfailure Art Club is currently in development for PC (Steam).
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