Heartbeat Highschool ♥

Steady Progress
7 months ago – Fri, Aug 01, 2025 at 03:10:16 PM

Hey folks! 

July was Artfight, so the artists got a little break from work to participate. That said, we talked a lot and the workload of designing 16 dateable characters from scratch has been getting to all of us, and we decided that we need a little more help. 

As a result, we've enlisted Escher to help with some preliminary designs for the remaining characters. These will be mostly first-pass designs that apricot and Dyo will then refine further. Sometimes you just need that first bolt of inspiration! I've already got the preliminary design for Mariah and I'm super excited!

Meanwhile, I was having problems keeping all the characters "in my head" across various states of completion, so I created this. Seeing all the designs together like this helps me see the big picture; things we might be missing, things we might have too much of, names and ideas, etc. This isn't rigorously updated, so there is already some more updated art that isn't on here.

Some of the characters, we wait until we have some more visual ideas to figure out their full identity. We have ideas for every character right now, but they get expanded on or change based on what the visual design ends up like. This is the creative process!

Elsewhere I'm juggling a lot of other projects. I'm finishing layout on and fulfillment on Ratcatcher Magazine for MCDM's Draw Steel, and in late August I'm launching the Kickstarter for my next old school roleplaying dungeon, Monster Condo. These projects don't interfere with the work for HBHS, since I'm the only one working on all the projects (and my ADHD wouldn't enable me to be fully productive on just one project at a time anyway), so everything is still going smoothly.

Until next time: Take care of yourselves; take care of each other. Black Lives Matter. Trans Rights are Human Rights. ACAB. Live your life so that people celebrate you like when Ozzy Osbourne died, and not when Hulk Hogan died. 

And stay gold,
--Onslaught

Design Process + Dani & Mark Pages!
9 months ago – Mon, Jun 23, 2025 at 02:16:56 AM

Hey folks. It's time for an update!

We had planned on sharing updates as dating partners get finished--the idea is that we would drop a sort of "full profile" featuring a finished spread with final art, backgrounds, and then a bunch of cool concept sketches alongside that. It turns out that isn't working out like we'd planned! The asynchronous nature of how we are all working means parts get done before others; multiple concept sketches come in at once before final artworks do, final artwork comes before writing is finished for some characters, etc. It's all steadily being worked on, just not in the way that we had planned to show everything. (For example, we currently have 8 of the 16 characters with finished or semi-finished character designs.)

That said: I can show off some near final spreads for Dani and Mark! (While the artwork and 90% of the text is final, the backgrounds & colours are still subject to change.) Slyllama helped a little with the new layout by providing a bunch of new ideas when I was stuck and didn't really like where we were in the Kickstarter preview. We're all MUCH happier with the way it looks now!

I'm gonna turn the rest of the update over to apricot, who's got a lot to say about the character design process!

Until next time: Take care of yourselves; take care of each other. Black Lives Matter. Trans Rights are Human Rights. ACAB. Keep your eye on the donut, not on the hole.

And stay gold,
--Onslaught

Hello, Backers! It's your resident art director, apricot, here with an update! I've got some art and a bit of insight into our character design process to share with you.

My job as art director has been to come up with the original drafts for each character based on the stats and qualities we all contributed to during group design meetings. Sometimes I do this from scratch and just draw up the entire character, but I also have a very simple template that I made back when we first designed the three mascot love interests you're already familiar with: Mark, Sam, and Dani.

(at this stage we haven't incorporated some of the inclusivity principles that come to define our published work, but it gets the basics down when I don't know where to go with the rest of the design yet.)

They get a lovely glow up over time as Dyo works to translate the characters into more of the 90's style we're going for. There's a lot of back and forth during this where I redline his work and we do multiple iterations of each character to work out the specifics of their appearance. It can be the most fun part of design, especially when you finally nail exactly what you've been after, but I also feel sorry for poor Dyo when I keep hitting him with new revisions.

For some beginning to end insight, I'll introduce you to Deckard, one of our other completed designs. Here's the original concept, using my template:

Dyo's first pass of Deckard came out pretty cute. We started discussing accessories and color swaps around this time, and shared different versions back and forth while brainstorming. Dyo wanted to go with something kind of ghosty, because Deckard is an oddball weirdo, but in the end the colors remained largely similar to the first draft. Instead, their outfit as a whole got some edits.

From there, Dyo went on to do a final version of Deckard's fully realized concept. This isn't the art that will appear in the book, it's more for our internal uses as we continue work. If we need to reference Deckard or grab colors from the design, this is the art we'll pull from. I'm excited for you to see what we have cooking up for Deckard's final art-- that's something Dyo and I have been back and forth on the last few days.

We've been going through this process with every character so far, and this was just a peek into one of them. We've simultaneously been working on more partners you're sure to love, like Geoff, Chloe, Roxxie, and Josh...

See you next time!

Backerkit Smoke Test
10 months ago – Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 03:58:37 AM

Hey folks! Quick update today to say that the Backerkit Smoke Test has gone out. This means that about 5% of you will receive an email to give your address and payment info for shipping. You'll also be able to add additional items to your order. This information can be freely changed at a later date--we won't be locking addresses or cards until way later in the year or very early next year, but filling it in now helps us figure out what our budgeting is like! If you have any issues, feel free to contact us and we'll get it sorted out.

Once everything looks good with the smoke test, we'll be hitting the big button for the Backerkit launch to everyone, plus the open preorders.

As a note: A lot of you have probably heard scary bad news about tariffs this year. Here's the good news: All of our books and products are sourced in the US, so we won't be suspect to any tariffs. The pricing of everything will remain the same for you.

We're still working hard on tightening up the layout. We've got a great new layout for the dating partner pages. apricot is working hard on designing new characters (inbetween trying to rebuild the Kattabolt buffer) and our big spreadsheet is filling up with information and names. I've also started experimenting with background images for the final artwork. We're so excited and we can't wait to start showing you finished pages!

Until next time: Take care of yourselves; take care of each other. Black Lives Matter. Trans Rights are Human Rights. ACAB. Keep your eye on the donut, not on the hole.

And stay gold,
--Onslaught

The Journey Begins!
11 months ago – Thu, Apr 03, 2025 at 12:36:44 AM

Hey folks! Here's our first production update. We all took a month off to get refreshed and refocused on the project. The other day we had our first major character design meeting since the Kickstarter, where we started to hash out all 16 dating partners. We've obviously got 3 done already so that leaves 13 that we got to work on. It was very productive and we filled out almost all of the spreadsheet with "definitely yes this" character bits and ideas, and the rest with "yes something like this" bits. 
 
We've got an internal schedule that we'll be trying our best to follow through on, although many of us have lots of complications going on (babies, fur babies, partner health issues, etc.) so we are hoping to be as flexible as we can be. But! We have decided, unlike past Tidal Wave Games projects, that we will be sharing a lot of the content *with you* as we finish it. We'll be previewing our dating partners as we complete final art. If you consider this spoilers and would rather wait until the finished game to see, we'll be putting these at the end of Kickstarter updates so you don't have to see it if you don't want to. 
 
Lastly: Backerkit will be opening soon. I have a few things to correct before we can do that. When it opens, it'll ask for your address and credit card number, but you can freely change these up until the charge and shipping dates which are planned to be early 2026. We'll have more detail on this as we get closer. You'll also have the opportunity to add new merch to your order!

Until next time: Take care of yourselves; take care of each other. Black Lives Matter. Trans Rights are Human Rights. ACAB. Keep your eye on the donut, not on the hole. 

And stay gold,
--Onslaught

THANK YOU!
about 1 year ago – Sat, Mar 01, 2025 at 04:04:23 AM

Wow!!! Thanks to all of you guys, we were able to gather $3202, over $200 more than our final stretch goal. That means we're gonna have all 16 of the dating partners, and I promise I'm gonna find some room for the minigames!

The team and I are going to take a well-deserved month off, while I take care of finishing the Castle Gygar Kickstarter, apricot goes back to building a Kattabolt buffer, Panda takes care of her new baby son (!!!), and I force Dyo to watch Hackers (1995). Then in early April we'll reconvene and start working on every character!

Thanks so much for your support during the last 2 weeks. It feels like way longer than that with everything thats happened in our personal lives, but now that it's over and we know we'll have the budget to do the best version of this, it's a weight off all our shoulders. 

Until next time: Take care of yourselves; take care of each other. Black Lives Matter. Trans Rights are Human Rights. ACAB. Don't kill the part of you that's cringe, kill the part of you that cringes. 

And stay gold,

--Onslaught