Dancing TreeSTUDIO

Indie game studio · Japan

Small studio, a lot of ideas, games made with care.

Dancing Tree Studio is me, one developer in Japan, plus a small group of friends and family who play everything before anyone else does. Some of my ideas take months to turn into something playable, some take years. The studio is official now, and the plan is simple: keep finishing games and keep releasing them.

See the games How I make them
The Dancing Tree Studio logo: a smiling tree spirit dancing, leaves flying around it

Games

The catalogue

One game so far. Every new one will be added here.

Bone Parish

  • Roguelike deckbuilder
  • Pixel art
  • Closed alpha

You wake up at the bottom of a tower as a heap of old bones, and you climb. Every floor is a door the tower picks for you, every fight is played with cards, and every card costs you bones.

  • Your skeleton changes with how you play. Arm, ribs and skull each grow down their own path, so no two climbs end with the same body.
  • The fallen stay. Players who died in the tower come back as enemies near where they fell, still holding their cards.
  • Enemies talk. They notice what you've been doing on the climb and they say so.
Visit Bone Parish
SteamComing soon AndroidComing soon

More ideas are waiting their turn. When the next one is playable, it shows up here.

About

Who's behind it

  • One developerCode, design, art pipeline, sound and the occasional bug report to myself.
  • Based in JapanBone Parish, and every game after it, is made here.
  • Friends and family testersThey play every build and tell me when something isn't fun.

I'm a software engineer with a computer science background. I've always had more game ideas than I could ever build, and for a long time most of them stayed in notebooks. Programming was never the problem. Art was: I can sketch an idea, but I can't paint it.

So I did what a programmer does and built tools. I wrote my own art engine: I draw a rough sketch, AI turns it into a detailed picture, and a pixel art converter I wrote myself turns that into a sprite that fits the rest of the game. It doesn't replace deciding what things should look like. It just means the ideas don't have to wait for a skill I don't have.

None of this happens alone, either. A small group of friends and family plays Bone Parish build after build, and a lot of what works in it comes from their honest notes.

Dancing Tree Studio is official now. Bone Parish is the first game, Steam and Android versions are on the way, and after it I want to keep a steady pace: one game at a time, each one finished properly.

Read the whole dev journey, with how the art gets made →