naivesprites

We’ve hit one of our stretch goals last night! Unless our Kickstarter goes below $4,500 before the campaign ends, we will have a Boys Love side story in A Very Important Date’s main game. This will be a three to four chapters short story that will feature our main game’s cast. If we remain above the goal before our Kickstarter ends, any backers that pledged at $30+ tiers will get the side story for free! (If a backer does not want this side story, it could be traded for a future side story instead.) We’re currently at 139% with 3 hours left to go!

My otome/visual novel team is doing a Kickstarter Live on tomorrow at 8PM EDT. We'll be answering questions and showing off some of the physical add-on rewards. Noelle and Justin will be answering questions. We plan to have some of our team members on-call to help answer questions.

Hello everyone, If you wonderful people have not yet heard, we’ve hit 104% on our second Kickstarter attempt! But this isn’t the end of our Kickstarter adventure! We have 11 days left on our new campaign and we have seven stretch goals to aim for. The first of these stretch goals is to have a Boys Love side story attached to A Very Important Date’s main game. This will be a three to four chapters short story that will feature our main game’s cast. If this goal is reached, any backer at a $30+ tier will get this side story for free! (If you do not want this side story, it could be traded for a future side story instead.) We would also like to let our previous backers know that we are going to do a Facebook live stream for our second Kickstarter backers on Thursday. Access to the live stream group starts at only $15! We hope to see you all there! Along with this, in our newest Backer Only post on the second Kickstarter and Facebook, we have posted our recent completed song by Geoff Moore, two new backgrounds, and WIPs of two characters for our Spin-Off visual novel. All of our previous backers who have returned to back us once again, we thank you so much for your continued support! For previous backers that have yet to follow us over there, time is running out! Please consider pledging to our second Kickstarter so we can meet our stretch goals! Remember our rewards start at just $1.

Hello all you wonderful people! Yesterday marked the third year since I started writing A Very Important Date! There have been a number of highs within this last year. We’ve picked up the amazingly talented Geoff Moore as our composer, who has already created nearly half of our soundtrack! Through Darkenmarr, we made the steps to move our sprites to Live2D! Our background artists created over 20 backgrounds! Through the hard work of our programmers, we got our visual novel’s engine to run smoothly! Justin, Darkenmarr, and I visited our first conventions under the Naïve Sprites name! We even dipped our toes into Kickstarter! But with the highs come the inevitable lows. This past year has been a really rough one for a lot of our team members. We’ve lost loved ones, new health situations have cropped up, and other unavoidable life events have affected the team, and these have been incredibly difficult for us. But from those we persevere. We press on. We’re still moving forward as best as we can. One of the main reasons for pressing forward is because of all of you. When I say that you’re wonderful people in my posts, it’s not just because I’m trying to make an Alice in Wonderland styled turn of phrase. It’s because that’s what all of you are; wonderful, amazing, understanding individuals that I cannot thank enough. Thank all of you for sticking with us, cheering us on, giving us feedback, sharing our links, and most of all, for giving this little upstart crew a try. Right now, after adding in the money from A-kon to Kickstarter, we’re sitting at 67% of our goal. Words cannot express how happy I am to be at this point. I want to extend my gratitude to my team, my boyfriend, my friends, my family, and all of our fans and backers for getting us to this point as we turn our eyes to the next year.

Hello everyone! We're happy to announce that A Very Important Date's demo has been updated! The Rory update includes the first 3 chapters of Rory's story which boosts the word count of the demo to over 45,000, and increases playtime by around two hours! The demo can be downloaded from our Itch.io page. Along with Rory's chapters, this demo also adds in the CG Eye Toggle feature and the ability to delete save files. The CG Eye Toggle feature will change our event illustrations to either show Alison's eyes or have them obscured. The CG Eye Toggle's effect can be seen in Gwyn's third chapter. Please keep in mind that this is still a demo, so there may still be bugs that haven't been worked out yet. In our next demo update, we hope to implement the fast forward, log, and name change capabilities. Along with the demo news, we are also happy to announce that we've reached 51% on Kickstarter! Thank you to everyone who has backed us so far and those who have shared our links! Our campaign runs until July 21st at 11:59PM EDT, so if you try our newer demo and enjoy the characters and story, please consider backing us on Kickstarter. If you're unable to back us, simply sharing our posts to help spread the word about A Very Important Date would help us immensely. Thank you all and we hope you enjoy Rory's update.

Our Kickstarter is LIVE!

We have setup our next Kickstarter attempt and here's the preview for it. Two days after we start the next Kickstarter attempt, we'll be at a convention in Fort Worth, TX, A-kon, and will be selling art and promoting the visual novel and the campaign.

Hello, everyone! We have some exciting news for you today! Our team plans to launch our next Kickstarter attempt on June 6th at 12PM eastern time. This time our initial goal will be set at $3,500 USD, which covers the remaining songs and backgrounds that we still need for the game. If we reach stretch goals, that money will help us pay for the character art and CGs along with additional objectives like additional poses and additional CGs. This Kickstarter will also include our Spin-Off game (title still in the works), which will be in the reward tiers. This spin-off game will have a male lead with four possible suitors: two males, one male-to-female transgender, and one female. This game will be released some time after Connor’s and Lowell’s first season stories. We’ll also be increasing the number of main stories and epilogues that backers can get as rewards from five possible suitors to all eight! So instead of only being rewarded with stories for Gwyn, Emil, Rory, Harlan, and Sven, backers could also get stories for Connor, Lowell, and Julianna as well! We’ll be adding more digital rewards this time and removing some physical rewards like the T-shirt. The remaining physical reward items will be changed into add-on items, except for the metal 2 inch key chain. Please, share this news to help build awareness for our Kickstarter and expect more information on the topic soon.

Hello, everyone, Noelle here. For those that didn't know, Justin’s mom (Leesa) went into the hospital on Jan 11th. After 10 weeks and three days, I am devastated to say that Justin’s mom passed away on March 25th around 9:05 P.M. with family around her. For me, Leesa was my second mom even though Justin and I aren’t married yet. She and Justin’s dad welcomed me into their home when my family was moving away after Justin and I have been together for two years. They allowed me to stay while going through school. She took care of me and listened to me. I am truly thankful for that. Even though her boys were old enough to handle things on their own, she still gave them advice and listened to their complaints, but she also listened to their girlfriends/wives. She told us how she felt and took the side she agreed with even if it wasn’t her sons. She liked what she liked no matter if someone else thought it was crap. For me, I will miss the bickering in the house between Justin and his mom. They liked getting on each others’ nerves in a teasing way and they knew it. Though they did this to each other, you knew how much the two loved each other. Leesa was always proud of Justin, encouraging him to make art or writing his career. She was our biggest fan and she was there from the very beginning when we started making the game, even before we mentioned it online to anyone. She was always encouraging Justin and myself along the way, especially when we felt defeated. She would be the first one that we went to to run ideas by or double check grammar or sentence structure issues. She really wanted to see something that Justin worked on get published because she knew he deserved it. She wanted to see us achieve something. After talking to Darkenmarr and Justin, the three of us have decided to dedicate A Very Important Date and its spin-off game in Leesa’s name. We will forever love and miss Leesa.

It’s been a week and a half since Kickstarter ended and the team is still working hard. But as funds are depleting, progress is starting to slow down. We recently added our new charm design as a preorder on Storenvy. The money we make from these charms will help pay for backgrounds, sprites, event illustrations, and music, and will also be used to lower our future Kickstarter goal. Along with buying a charm, you’ll get your name in our game’s credits for helping fund us. Now onto our progress! We believe we have our event illustration implementation working properly. We have a few more tests on it, then we’ll move onto putting in some additions to make our Save/Load menus more user-friendly. Classes have begun for Noelle so she’s once again balancing that along with game work. At the moment, she is running through Rory’s 4th Chapter so she can upload it into our review group. After that, the writers will go back to working on Sven’s first few chapters. Along with writing and dealing with a few pressing family situations, Justin is sketching and finding references for Lordless’ next background. In other news, we’ve created a new survey to help provide some feedback about our first Kickstarter attempt and hopefully give us some insight of how to improve on our next campaign. We’re thinking of replacing some rewards with new reward items, but want our fans’ opinions first before we finalize anything. One of our reward ideas is a fan disc/spin off game of A Very Important Date. This side game will be a common route style visual novel with a male lead and four potential suitors (2 males, 1 MtF, and Alison). The writing team has been playing around with this idea for a while now and have been working on it between AVID’s workload. This game will help to build the world of A Very Important Date beyond The Looking Glass and Mimsboro. The male lead also has deep connections to the twins, so fans can delve into their past even more. So that’ll do it for today’s update. See you soon with another. In the meantime, please spend a few minutes to take our survey!

We’re unable to meet our funding goal on Kickstarter. Well, what does that mean? Is A Very Important Date dead? Oh, by the Queen, no! The team still plans to continue on with the project, but production might slow down for awhile. We have learned quite a bit from Kickstarter and will plan better for our next attempt. We’re aiming for April, but might have to push it back to May or June because of life events during that time. Before we try Kickstarter again, we will refigure our budget, look into our rewards, and get more art and programming completed. Between now and our next attempt of Kickstarter, we’ve added some pre-order merchandise to our Storenvy to help with the current funding situation and to help lower our future Kickstarter goal. Depending on things, we might go to A-kon and/or San Japan this year if we can get tables at the artist alleys to help promote us. Before we wrap this post up, we want to thank everyone that backed us. It didn’t work out this time, but your support helped keep us motivated through this hectic Kickstarter process. With the help of our backers, our fans, and the steam community we were able to get Greenlit. This alone will help us out immensely in the future. We will keep everyone up-to-date as we move forward. You can follow us on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook for more information on the development of the game.

Happy New Year, everyone! With the new year comes a new song for our visual novel! Geoff Moore created the song "Smooth and Bright" for the warmer, happier moments of the story, when Alison and the suitors start to become better acquainted. You can listen to the new song on soundcloud.

Hello everyone! We have a special announcement today! Because of the holiday spirit, the team has decided to unlock TWO of our add-ons on Kickstarter. Today we’ll be unlocking our Digital OST, all songs created by Geoff Moore, and a newly designed poster by Darkenmarr. Our digital OST is $9 USD, so all you would need to do to add it in is adjust your pledge to include the $9 USD to you current pledge amount. The poster will be of a new design (TBD) by Darkenmarr and is set to $11 USD. If you don’t have a physical item tier, you will need to include shipping costs on to that. Please add $5 USD for US and Canada and $10 USD for the rest of the world on top of the $11 addition to your current pledge amount. We also would like to announce that we were Greenlit on Steam!

Hello everyone! With the spirit of the Holidays in full swing, we are happy to announce that because of popular requests we have added a new tier to our Kickstarter! Our new $75 Honeysuckle Tier gives our backers access to the Backer-Only updates, their names in our credits, 5 wallpapers, 2″ metal keychain, and 1 body pillowcase of their choice. All of our body pillowcases will be fully colored and double-sided! Gwyn's "sexy" side of his pillow case There have been a few computer issues this past week that have caused a bit of a delay, but we’re hoping to get the majority of the body pillowcases’ art done as soon as possible. To see the first sketches of our body pillow cases, check out this update on our Kickstarter! We would also like to remind every one of you wonderful people about Steam Greenlight! If you have not done so yet and you have a Steam Account, please vote for A Very Important Date. Every vote counts and the team would appreciate it greatly!

Hello all of our wonderful fans! Time for a quick update! This is final weeks for Noelle, so it has been a slow work week for her. Justin has been editing Rory’s first four chapters and we just uploaded his first chapter to our read and review group. Noelle and Justin will be working on editing Sven’s first four chapters once Noelle’s done with her final exams. In between studying for her exams, Noelle is currently working on a sort of “fanfic” type thing for A Very Important Date that revolves around Rory and Lowell. She’ll be posting this in her personal Tumblr account and is planning to make it three chapters long. Earlier in the week, Justin finished two background sketches and we sent them off to Lordless and Furude. We’re almost into the single digits on the number of backgrounds left. It’s so exciting! We’ve also heard our newest song and we absolutely love it! Geoff has made another beautiful piece for us and we hope to share it with you soon. Darkenmarr is currently working on finishing Gwyn’s body pillowcase design and then she’ll move onto the line art the other four guys’ pillowcases. Justin and Noelle will help flat color those while Darkenmarr starts on Emil’s Live2D sprite. On Steam Greenlight, we’re 48% of the way to the Top 100! We would really appreciate it if everyone could vote for us and share our Greenlight with others! On Kickstarter we have 64 Backers with $1,843 USD. Remember that once we hit 100 backers, we’ll be unlocking our first add-on, which is our super cute chibi charms that we posted about recently on Kickstarter and Tumblr. On top of that, if we hit 50% ($5,500 USD) funding by the 15th, all of our backers will get a seasonal image of our Very Important cast! If you’re unable to back us, we would really appreciate it if you could share our Kickstarter with others! That’s it for today's quick update! Check back in soon for more Very Important info!