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A Very Important Date [GxB/G][BxB][Otome | Fantasy | Commercial] - ~3 hours left on Kickstarter


naivesprites

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Here’s the link to the demo (Windows, Linux, and Mac): https://naivesprites.itch.io/a-very-important-date

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You’re invited to The Looking Glass, Mimsboro’s finest restaurant.
 
Join my four employees and myself as we take you on a wonderful journey through the café world.
 
New in town?  The Looking Glass is a grand place to start fresh. 
 
Troubling day?  Cleanse the nonsense of the world with one of our special herbal teas.
 
Looking to meet new people?  When the sun sets, The Looking Glass becomes the most vibrant hotspot in town.
 
But the heart of The Looking Glass isn’t the world class cuisine or nightlife, it’s our employees.  Take time to get to know each of us and you’ll make friends for life.  Our magical personalities are sure to relieve the doldrums of everyday life.
 
So mark your calendars, my new friend, you wouldn’t want to be late for this will be [A Very Important Date]!
 
- Gwyn Arkwright, Owner of The Looking Glass Cafe
 
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A Very Important Date is a café romance set in a strange, yet familiar world, with loose ties to Lewis Carroll's Alice stories.  But this isn’t the typical Alice in Wonderland styled story!  While A Very Important Date takes a few notes from the Carroll classics, you don't have to be a big fan of them to enjoy this game for its rich dialogue, witty humor, and unique art style!

Our story follows Alison Sunderlund, an average small town Ohio girl.  By day she can be found working as a server in a local café and by night she takes care of her house and family: her dad and younger brother.  Though she doesn't have a lot on her plate, the life she has gives her very little free time.  But Alison's life changes one morning when she wakes up sitting under a tree in a brand new world.

Confused, Alison sets out to discover more about her new surroundings, accidentally stumbling upon the Arkwright estate, home of Gwyn Arkwright and The Looking Glass Café.  With no place to go and a way back home seeming impossible, Gwyn, being the kind soul that he is, gives Alison a job and a place to stay for the time being.  Everything's peachy except... now Alison must choose which of The Looking Glass' five employees will train her!

Will Alison stick with what she knows and remain a server?  Will she a cut a new path as a cook's assistant?  Will she wipe away her past burdens as a low-level dishwasher?  Will Alison ever figure out what strange world she's in?  Will she ever return to her old life?

Will she want to?

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All stories* are written by Noëlle Hyzy, the winner of Voltage Inc.'s 4th Annual International Script Writing Contest for Romance Apps. The full finished release of A Very Important Date will feature:

* 5 suitors (with 4 more planned)
* Expressive animated characters
* 12 chapters for each Suitor's Main Story
* 3 possible endings per Main Story
* 3 chapter Epilogues for each Suitor
* 40+ hours of content across all stories
* ≈50,000 words per Main Story
* 300,000+ words across the whole game
* At least 6 CGs per Main Story
* Main character CG options
* 14 amazing tracks from Composer Geoff Moore
* 60+ beautiful backgrounds
* Episodic content 
* Will be available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android
 
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Naïve Sprites is an up-and-coming visual novel developer that makes games for iOS devices.  The company is housed in Franklin, Ohio, but it has six talented artisans from all across the world on its team.  Our mission is to provide visual novel readers with strong, female-led stories that are entertaining, engaging, and do away with "damsel in distress" cliché.
 
Chibi Subaru:  Project Director, Executive Producer, Writer, Conceptualizer
Justin V: Co-Writer, Editor, Art Editor, Background Concept Artist
Joe "Bonesy": Marketing & Advertising
kooriesque: Character Concept Artist
darkenmarr: Sprite and CG Arist
furude and lordless: BG Artist
IchBinJager and WolfBorg: Programmers
Geoff Moore: Composer
 
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Season 1: Main Stories
Current word count: ≈266,000

Gwyn FINALIZED
Outline: 100%
Writing: 100%
Editing: 100%

Emil FINALIZED
Outline: 100%
Writing: 95%
Editing: 95%

Rory
Outline: 70%
Writing: 60%
Editing: 10%

Harlan
Outline: 80%
Writing: 75%
Editing: 25%

Sven
Outline: 100%
Writing: 80%
Editing: 0%

Season 1: Epilogue

Gwyn
Outline: 50%
Writing: 10%
Editing: 0%

Season 1: Sequels

Gwyn
Outline: 20%
Writing: 0%
Editing: 0%

CGs: 5%
Sprites: ≈ 50% (For Demo: 95%) - Undergoing Redesign in Live2D
Backgrounds: 46/?? (For Demo: 100%)
Music: 5/14
In-Gameplay UI: 95%
Rest of GUI: 45%
Coding: ??%

 
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You can follow our progress and learn more about A Very Important Date by visiting the links below:
Edited by naivesprites
updating and organizing information.
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  • 4 months later...

Sorry I haven’t been posting in here with updates!  We have been working on fixing some things, re-organizing our departments, and trying to fight the never-ending barrage of schoolwork.

Some updates about our progress:

Sprites

First off we’d like to announce that our sprites are getting a complete overhaul courtesy of our new sprite artist, darkenmarr!  Don’t fret though, just because they’re getting some new looks, their overall design will stay the same.  Here’s a little preview of Gwyn and Connor (minus his eyepatch) sketches.

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Gwyn
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Connor (another employee at the Looking Glass Cafe)

We plan to update the sprites on here one by one as soon as they are completed.
 
Until we get all the sprites remade in darkenmarr’s style, the asks we do on the tumblr will still be using our old sprites for the sake of continuity.

Other Art
 
So far, we have 21 background pieces finished with our BG artists currently working on another three backgrounds at the moment.  We have all the backgrounds for our demo and most of the backgrounds for the first main story.

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Lordless' on the left and Furude's on the right

Because our original GUI concepts shared some similarities with another game that was released, Justin and I are re-sketching our GUI design.  We hope to show a mock of this very soon.
 
Writing
 
Writing wise, we have one main story completed and another that only needs choice commands and sprite changing notes.  We believe that this story is about 90% completed.  Justin is currently writing Gwyn’s epilogue while I’m fixing Rory’s main story as I found some issues in the plot.

Game Production Timeline

We currently have a timeline for our production, but this could change at any time due to any technical difficulties and life events with any of the team members.  Our demo should be out around March and then our Kickstarter will follow shortly after.  Our production schedule, unless changed at some point, looks like this:

  • End of October, 2015: Prototype Version
  • End of January, 2016: Playable Version
  • End of March, 2016: Alpha Version
  • End of May, 2016: Beta Version
  • End of August, 2016: Version 1.0

Music
 
The person we’ve been talking to about music samples has been having some issues with ideas for it, so he has dragged a friend into helping him.  We are hoping to get some sample work from them at some point.  If anyone is interested in doing our music, you can drop us a line since we haven’t locked anyone into this position yet.
 
Other
 
We’ve also started a Patreon to help with funding while giving back to our fans.  If people do want to help us out, please visit our tumblr for the link to our Patreon.
 
We are also in talks with our new sprite artist to sketch out our asks from our tumblr and loading them up on tapastic.  This is still in talks, but it is something we are excited about trying.

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It’s here! It’s here! Our First Very Important Demo is available for download! Again, just as a warning, this demo is very basic, but we wanted to show progress of some of what we have so far. The backgrounds are finalized pieces and the GUI design is finalized for the most part. As we’ve said before, our sprites are being redone, but the overall character design is staying the same. We are still working on the music department, so we apologize for there being no music or sound within this demo. Once we have more finalized, we plan to release another demo, which will feature Gwyn’s and Emil’s first three chapters.

So please enjoy! Any feedback is appreciated.

Here’s the link to the demo (Windows): http://www.mediafire.com/download/t1ngobmmw2y0m86/A+Very+Important+Date.rar

Here’s a link to our Patreon, if you would like to support us: https://www.patreon.com/naivesprites

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Programmer(s) Needed!

With the release of our first test demo we find ourselves in desperate need of programmers. We would like to find programmer(s) that can code for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac (for a future Steam release). We have plans for our game to follow the in-app/in-program purchase format and we plan to update the game once a month with new stories after it is released.


Other than the programming needed for the game itself, we would like someone to make a tool for us so we can make the updates ourselves. In doing that, we could update our game ourselves without having to always have to ask a programmer to update it for us.

I would like to mention that our budget is very small, but we are willing to do a profit share with our programmer(s) if your fee is too high for us. We are pretty flexible with our payment plans. 

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I'm certainly interested in how this one turns out after playing through the demo! The dialogue is well-written and I really like the artwork - in particular the route partition screens and the 'thank you for playing/credit' designs, which I thought were really nice. Little drawn Alison in the cup is pretty cute too!

I understand it's just a demo, but a function to go back through dialogue would be nice as I overshot one or two lines. The other thing I'd say is consider changing the font that is used in the dialogue, as the commas look almost identical to the full stops and this occasionally makes it seem like it's written clunkily, when it's really not.

I'm afraid I am unable to help with the programming, but I wish you the best of luck with the rest of production and I hope you're able to finish it! :sachi:

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Hello!  Chibi Subaru from Naive Sprites is here to respond....

Thank you for playing our demo and your review!  We're happy to hear that you enjoy it.  Chibi Alison in the tea cup is my favorite out of the chibis!  I was happy that our current sprite artist was able to make them in time for the demo.

We do plan to have a Log feature while playing the game when it's released so that people can read over the script.  I was using TyranoBuilder to make the demo and not knowing any coding, I wasn't able to make this function for this demo.

For the font, we didn't realize this issue so it's helpful when people point it out to us.  Justin and myself looked over the demo before releasing it, but since we know the story by heart at this point, we didn't notice the problems with the commas and periods looking the same.  We'll be changing the diagloue font for the next demo.

Luckily we found a new programmer and got the contract signed.  We don't know if this will push back our intended release date or not.  We hope not, but you never know.

Thank you ^_^

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It’s the end of 2015.  This has been a pretty bumpy year for us here at Naïve Sprites, but we wouldn’t trade it for anything.  We would like to thank everyone that has joined us in this crazy ride and those that have supported us in any way.  To those that have shared, reblogged, and retweeted any of our posts, we thank you.  To anyone that follows us on any form of social media, we thank you.  To any one who has messaged us or sent us an ask, we thank you.  It encourages us and gives us the strength to continue on this adventure, so thank you, everyone, so very much.

We hope that everyone everywhere has a wonderful New Year!

Now, onto the update.

Demo

First, we would like to thank everyone that has played our demo and left us feedback.  We’re looking into suggestions we have received to help make our game better.  This feedback showed us one big issue that we had overlooked, the dialogue font, and we will be changing it for any future releases.  We are currently looking for a friendlier font to use in our game.

We would love to get some more feedback, so if anyone that has played our first demo wants to let us know what they thought of it, send us a message.

When our next demo is made, we plan to release it on more than one platform.

Again, here’s the link for our demo (Windows only): https://www.patreon.com/posts/very-important-3926249

Programmer

We would also like to thank those that reblogged our Programmer(s) Needed post and everyone who responded wanting to work with us.  We would like to announce that our search is now over and we have a new programmer for our game, IchBinJager.  We will release new details on what that means for us at Naïve Sprites and A Very Important Date as soon as possible, but we expect only great things.

Backgrounds

At the moment, we currently have 24 backgrounds.  Lordless is currently working on our 25th background, while Justin is working on a sketch for furude's next background.

Sprites

On the sprite side of things, Darkenmarr is still hard at work on our sprites, but has been delayed a bit because of life situations and the holidays.  We do have a WIP of Gwyn that we can show you.  She’s currently working on coloring our top-hatted friend.

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So, here ends the first update of 2016.  Happy New Year, all you wonderful people!

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  • 2 months later...

The team has been very, very busy lately, both with the game and life situations.  We do apologize for not updating this thread lately.  Though we do have good news!  Our sprite artist has been working on remaking our sprites and recently we've re-introduced three of them on our social media pages: Emil, Harlan, and Rory.


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I tried to watch the stream but my connection is far too bad for it to be worthwhile :komari:

However, I managed to catch a few horribly jerky moments of what I think was Alice being drawn, so it's cool to see where that fits into the cover art! Love the work done on the dress in particular.

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

We're currently live streaming on our Twitch account with our sprite artist working on sketching out illustrations of Gwyn and MC together and then we plan on sketching Sven and MC together after that.  Anyone is welcomed to join in watching and talking to us as both our sprite artist and team lead are in the chat.

https://www.twitch.tv/naivesprites

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Okay, big update time!  The team has been very, very, very busy for the past few months.

Backgrounds

Lordless and Furude have been working hard on backgrounds.  We currently have a total of 42 backgrounds for our game!  Right now the two are currently working on another set of backgrounds for us.

Sprites

On the Sprite and Merch front, Darkenmarr will be taking a break for a bit to recoup from knee surgery that she had on Monday.  We wish her well during this time and hope she rests a lot.  Once she’s able to work again, we’ll be focusing on merchandise designs for San Japan and Kickstarter.  After that, it’ll be back to sprite work and CGs.

Writing

Justin V. and myself have been working hard editing Rory's and Harlan's main stories.  Currently I'm in Chapter 5 of Rory's route while Justin V. has edited up to Harlan's Chapter 6.  Right now he's going over the first four chapters again to re-edit them.

Programming

Our programmers are working on adding some of our GUI elements to our game and fixing any bugs that we're experiencing.  We're hoping to have a more finalized demo out soon.

Music

We would like to welcome the amazingly talented composer, Geoff Moore, to our Very Important project!  Geoff has created beautiful music for other games like Starlight Vega and Turtles of Destiny and it is an honor for us to have him work on A Very Important Date with us.  We know that with his help, Alison’s adventures in Mimsboro will be even more wonderful.  

Geoff has already created our theme song and the team loves it!  We would like to unveil “In Memory of a Golden Afternoon,” the beautifully charming, full-length main theme to A Very Important Date!  

You can listen to "In Memory of a Golden Afternoon" and more of Geoff’s music on Soundcloud.

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