itch.io

Thanks for the follow-up message! You're right that it's hard to read tone for text comments, we definitely missed the tongue-in-cheek since we actually get the question often about why we can't have more features/assets in our games 😅 It's unfortunate to hear that our use of "respectfully" came off as testy and defensive because that was not our intention. For us, we thought we were stating unemotional facts of how we operate. From our perspective, it could've been misread even if we didn't include the word "respectfully" 🙈 So in attempts to avoid misinterpreting text, we're trying to use emojis this time to help convey tone 😆

In regards to being bigger than our description, we're not sure how that interpretation came about? 😵‍💫 Our studio is a team of only three women working on our games full-time and we show our office space & faces in behind-the-scenes content we release. While we do rotate in and out 1-2 interns during key periods like paid summer internships with a local university, they're not full-time employees though. Either way, we mentioned the financial situation because we hope it helps explain why we scope our games the way we do because of our employees being on W2s. Factoring in cost of living for the number of people we have on our team, one can do a back of the envelope estimate of how much it costs to make a game - which one can see that a $10-13K Kickstarter won't even cover minimum wage for our team’s project that started development since 2023 😅

Anyways, we appreciate you backing the Kickstarter! ✨ It makes sense why you prefer downloading demos given your internet situation!

Respectfully, game dev is not free - especially not for our indie team as we officially operate as a company because we have investors on our cap table. Every hour spent on game dev should be compensated as our employees are on W2s. The reason why we say we're not making minimum wage is because our Director and one part-time intern are doing uncompensated work and living off of savings as we're bootstrapping the business as much as possible to retain operational freedom. We're atypical from other indie otome studios in that not only do we operate as a company, but also our employees work on this full-time. It's not a part-time hobby for our team so game dev is not free. Our employees need to make wages to afford cost of living since they're working on this fulltime.

Also, if you've played the demo in full for all scene possibilities, Arden doesn't show up in other demo scenes outside of the intro scene and two other scenes. The demo has a total of 14 scenes for the demo. The full game is planned for around 44+ with similar treatment in that he doesn't show up often, so Arden is really an NPC in the entire context of the game.

Thank you for the feedback!

We wish we could afford more character art in our games but it's very costly and we're paying for most of the development out of pocket right now. We're atypical from other indie developers in that we're a tiny team of three women working on our games full-time without another source of income. So currently, we're unfortunately not even making minimum wage across the team and are paying for things out of pocket to afford creating our games right now 💀 Because of that, we have to scope down our projects to fit our budget to make sure we can keep our doors open as a studio, hence the decision to not illustrate Arden and Lorelei since they're side characters and they won't show up in many scenes after the intro. We could add them as a stretch goal though if enough people express interest! 

Thank you for sharing your thoughts about Mikael's preferred pronouns! We'll update our Kickstarter to include their pronouns in their character profiles :)

Thank you for playing our games 💖

You should not need to! Your Google Play account should have record that you already purchased it

Hi there! We're currently running a Kickstarter campaign and partial voice acting is one of the stretch goals! Hopefully we can raise enough funding to afford voice acting as our tiny team of three women would love to be able to make that happen if we had the funds to do so 🙏

Hello! The game was brought to life with Kickstarter funding from many backers for mobile game development. Because of that,  a PC build does not exist as it would require making the game from scratch for PC - a bit difficult for our team at this time as we're a small team of three women and we're working on another project at the moment 💦

We hope we'll be able to raise enough money someday through ko-fi / other channels to cover the cost of porting to PC 🙏

Hi there! We're a small indie team of 3 women making our games full-time. This is a paid game as we'd like to be able to have the chance to make more games - and maybe eventually pay ourselves minimum wage 😅 

Purchasing it in the app store for the one time cost actually unlocks ALL content for the game so it's much cheaper than Nintendo Switch otome games! We appreciate your understanding in this as we hope that we're able to afford making more game titles for players.

Thank you so much!! 💖💖💖

Hi there! Google unfortunately requires the game to be updated to match current android OS so we're in the process of reconverting the game. However, we don't have a date for that yet since we're a small team of just three women and we're currently working on "Untold Atlas" which will be released on Steam in July. And are in middle of a Kickstarter fundraising campaign for "Sweetcore Brews" - our newest title that is slated to release in November if the campaign is successful. Unfortunately, our hands are a bit tied right now with the two active projects as the Google requirement was a surprise to us so we hadn't allocated time to address that 😅

We hope that we can update Sifting Thyme in the next few months!

Hi there! Did you also send us an email yesterday? If yes, could you check our email response to you (sent yesterday as well)? Because if the phone model is correct, we'd appreciate the confirmation because it looks like we have 17 other current active players who have the app downloaded on the same phone model. So we want to double check if this might be potentially another issue so we can help look into it for you :)

Thank you for sharing your feedback! We appreciate it and have logged your comment as we continue to keep an eye on the general public interest 😊

Hello! Thank you so much for checking out the game 💖

We did have exclusive guides for our Kickstarter backers as they paid $15-18 USD for each character's guide. To be honest, we're not sure if players would be interested in us selling the same walkthroughs at $20-25+ USD since we need to honor our Kickstarter Backers for funding our project to life - as they took a risk on us so we don't feel that it is right to offer the same pricing to the public when it was meant to be a special Kickstarter reward for them.

If there is an interest for this though, we would love to know!

hello! Most likely it is not as we developed it to meet Google Play Store requirements, which their minimum is arm64-v8a

We really appreciate your understanding~ 💞 Good news is that we already switched over to the new game engine for Somnium Eleven so we've already finished developing the skip functionality for the upcoming game. And so far through all of the play testing, it's working smoothly so we hope you'll enjoy that feature once the new game is released 😉

Hello! The game's serialization ended in March 2021 with an epilogue that was released at that time. There are 13 full chapters with 4 romanceable routes and an epilogue for each route with a good or neutral ending that is included in the game. (Please see the below screenshot of the game that shows the last few chapters)

We recommend updating your app through the official Apple App Store and or Google Play Store to ensure your app is most up-to-date from the March 2021 release. Any outside apps from third parties are not supported by Nochi and are not endorsed for safety reasons including malware. Please ensure to download the official published version from Google or Apple.

Thank you for your interest and support!

Hello there! Thank you for your comment and we're very happy to hear that you like the Sifting Thyme characters ~ ✨

Unfortunately we're not sure when we will be able to publish the skip function. The function has been on our list for a while and we've made a slot for the capability in the "phone menu" button where you will see a missing button in the group of four on the right - that blank spot was intended for the skip button. 

However, we had so much issues with Renpy since it's not completely mobile friendly - especially with our modification -  so we haven't been able to figure out a bug-free skip solution yet. Currently, the fix would require us to completely remake Sifting Thyme in a new game engine. But unfortunately we have only one programmer on the Nochi team so we're not able to tackle everything in the time that we wish we could as we're also working on our upcoming game Somnium Eleven as well 😔 Many apologies!!! We hope that we can get support to hopefully get to the skip function 🙏

This is super delayed, but THANK YOU! We really appreciate your ratings and your comment as we're a small team of three so this means a lot to us 💞 Every positive feedback really helps our team!

As for the skip / auto function, this feature has been on our list for a while. We've made a slot for the capability in the "phone menu" button where you will see a missing button in the group of four on the right - that blank spot was the intended skip function. However, we had so much issues with Renpy since it's not completely mobile friendly - especially with our modification -  so we haven't been able to figure out a bug-free skip solution yet. Currently, the fix would require us to completely remake Sifting Thyme in a new game engine. But unfortunately we have only one programmer on the Nochi team so we're not able to tackle everything in the time that we wish we could as we're also working on our upcoming game Somnium Eleven as well 😔 Many apologies!!! We hope that we can get support to hopefully get to the skip function 🙏

We're so glad that it worked! And no inconvenience at all, feel free to reach out to our support email or message us here if there is anything else :)

That is correct~ you will get full access to the core storyline! The game is currently a monthly serialization with one chapter released every month - we are currently on Ch 10. But we anticipate that the core story should be wrapped up a few months into 2021.

Thanks for your interest in Sifting Thyme!

Thank you so much for your support on ko-fi!! ❤️

Could you please contact us at support@nochistudios.com with some screenshots and let us know where you are located? We will try our best to help you!

Ahh! Don't be sorry! It's an excellent question and we really appreciate your interest and support 💖

Hello! Thank you for your support and checking out our game :)

The year 2 button was intentional upon the game launch back in April 2020. Since the game is a monthly serialization - similar to shoujo manga format - we didn't have a clear timeline of when the storyline would end so we had a placeholder for the 2nd year for potential future content.

At this time, you should be able to see Chapter 0 through Chapter 8 on your iphone, accessible via Year 1. In the next update (sometime this week), Chapter 9 will be released and we will actually be removing the 2nd year placeholder as Ch 9 will have romantic routes locked down.

Hope that helps :)

Thanks,

Nochi

Unfortunately the way the game was developed is causing issues to get it embedded as a downloadable. However, the game is still an on-going story and we would like to port it one day to non-mobile platforms once completed!

The original intention was to have the game demo available when the itch.io page was made. The game ended up being redeveloped and it wouldn’t work as an embedded downloadable. But we wanted to keep the profile with all the game and character info. However, the game is still an on-going story and we would like to port it one day to non-mobile platforms once completed!