Start small
It's April 1996. You have a desk in your parents' house in an outer Tokyo ward, ¥300,000 for printing and one very loyal assistant with enormous twintails.
Your manga career starts at home
Draw your first doujin in your parents' spare room in 1996 Tokyo. Sell it, pitch it to a magazine, survive the reader survey and hire your first assistant.
A cosy manga career and studio sim where every chapter, deadline and cancellation has real numbers behind it.
Made with help from AI tools for the art, music, Helper-Chan's voice and code. See how we use AI.
Every chapter is real work
Name, Pencils, Inks, Backgrounds, Tones. A weekly chapter barely fits in a week on your own, and the editor wants to see the Name first.
Survive the reader survey
Get serialized and you're ranked every issue. Slip below the line and the warnings start. Cancellation hurts, but your career carries on.
Build a studio
Hire assistants, move out, incorporate, chase awards and an anime deal, and keep going for decades.
Follow along
Screenshots, progress updates and news as the game heads to Steam.
Press and business: press@mangakadays.com
How we used AI
Some of Mangaka Days was made with generative AI tools. Here is exactly where.
- Art
- NovelAI, for the logo, the title screen and the store artwork.
- Music
- Suno, for the soundtrack.
- 3D characters
- Tripo, for some of the character models.
- Voice
- ElevenLabs, for Helper-Chan's voice.
- Code and text
- An AI coding assistant wrote most of the code and much of the in-game text, under the developer's direction.
- Not AI
- The game design, the sound effects (free CC0 recordings) and the screenshots, which are real gameplay. Nothing is generated by AI while you play.