Deathwish Bloom
Sharp Glass Games is a Belfast-based company formed in 2025 by Irina Kuksova, bringing together artists, musicians and programmers with 10+ years of experience in the film, music and video games industries. We teamed up through our shared love of art, mystery, romance, synth and cello, and a mission to create visual novels that explore the complexity of the human psyche.
Our first title Deathwish Bloom is being brought to life by Irina (art, writing, programming), Anaïs Chareyre-Méjan (music, art direction), Kacper Lewandowski (music and sound engineering) and Naoimh Murchan (programming).
The Starter Fund will help us develop the Deathwish Bloom demo while establishing foundations for Sharp Glass Games as a sustainable studio with a distinctive artistic identity. It is a key step towards our goal: creating delightfully hand-drawn visual novels that make players laugh and cry while experiencing life through the eyes and hearts of our characters.
Key features
- Deathwish Bloom is a hand-drawn romance-mystery visual novel set in a world fractured by earthquakes.
- A memory-driven mystery. The player assumes the identity of Sky Harlow, an imposter scientist whose life revolves around a lost cure: she remembers its formula but only shards of the circumstances surrounding its disappearance.
- Relationships without a visible score. Growing closer to characters whose obsessions can both aid and destroy Sky’s bid to recreate the cure will shape branches and multiple endings.
- Experimental foods. Daily specials lead to losing the ability to lie, mistaking strangers for Sky’s crush and other glitches.
- Pet love. A lab animal known as “GMOuse” chose Sky.
- The fractured world. The Quake Lands are waiting to be scavenged.
- 100% human art. Tens of thousands of hand-drawn strokes.
- Designed for PC, Deathwish Bloom is for lovers of story-rich, relationship-focused games. At its heart, it’s a story about connection after unbearable loss.
Check out the game trailer
Quote
I came across the Starter Fund opportunity after organising a prototype playtest for Sharp Glass Games’ first original IP ‘Deathwish Bloom’. The players’ feedback strongly indicated the need for a full demo. It was clear that the Fund could be key to moving a promising prototype towards production.
This funding period will grant time to further align the team’s creative vision and plan a sustainable Deathwish Bloom production pipeline. This includes testing production timelines, refining workflows, and defining realistic budgeting, skills and staffing requirements for the full game.
The Starter Fund is a much-needed runway for Sharp Glass Games to build a well-orchestrated production team and further establish ourselves as a boutique indie studio with a distinctive artistic identity, a validated IP concept, proven talent across art, music and games, and early industry recognition.
