Update 06/01/21 - Life Situations, Moving, and New Art Progress Soon

Hi, everyone!

We’re still plugging away at AVID.  Currently, Kimilyn has completed the line art of Sven’s nude and is currently working on his clothes. We’re without a colorist as we haven’t heard from Parallelpie since December. The plan right now is for Justin and me to flat color the sprites until we find a colorist, which might not happen until all sprites are done so we don’t go through similar issues again.

For the past few months, Justin and I have been working on renovating his dad’s house. The house hasn’t been updated since the ’70s, so there’s a lot that needs to be done. Not only are we painting, but we’re also replacing flooring, walls, doors, baseboards, and windows, fixing plumbing and electrical, remodeling bathrooms and the kitchen, and more.  We’re trying to get a lot of it done before we move back into the house this summer so the house is safe for our two kittens. We’re working on AVID during our breaks of working on the house.

I’m still adjusting to my new body and some issues have arisen.  To avoid getting into too many details, I’ll say that crucial medication for me keeps getting recalled, leaving me incredibly lethargic all of the time and puts me in an almost constant state of brain fog.  This makes it difficult to work on AVID and the house for long stretches because I need frequent naps and can’t think straight.  It’s actually taken me about two weeks to type this post because of that last point.  Second, I’m also having some of the same intestinal problems that led me to get checked out in Cleveland in the first place, which is worrying because of the cancer chances that could come with that.  So sometime in the near future, I’ll have to go back to Cleveland to get looked into again, and I’m sort of dreading the possibility.

I do plan to make another post for Backers with art progress images in 2 weeks, but because of the issues above, that could end up being delayed.

Our composer will be working on a new song soon, which will be one with a more serious tone.

Our Dev Discord Server is open.  You can join it by clicking here.

I know this post has been mostly about our life situation, but I wanted to make sure everyone knows the current issues we’re facing and know that we’re still working on the project.

Update 10/19/20 - Health, Family, Life Update; Artists Found and Somnium Eleven

Hi, everyone!  I did not realize how long ago we made our May 15th post.  Life has truly been insane these last few months.

5/15/20 - Health and Family Update; Looking for Artist

Hello everyone,

It seems every time I want to make an update post, something comes up that I need to see play out first.

So far Justin, his dad, and I are safe from the virus.  We’re doing everything we can to protect ourselves.  Masks, hand sanitizer, frequent hand washing, quarantining in the house since before the call to do so, the whole nine yards.

A lot has happened in a relatively short period of time.  Originally my surgery was going to be on April 8th, but at the beginning of that week our dog started to develop a few problems that needed to be investigated that instant.  After getting him to the vet, we learned that he suddenly has developed diabetes.  His diet has been fine his whole life and apparently this is just some sort of freak happenstance.  However, this sudden onset of diabetes pretty much caused him to go blind from cataracts practically overnight.  So a lot of our days are spent helping him get adjusted to his blindness.  We’re hoping to get his levels in range soon so he can have eye surgery to fix the cataracts, but we’re still unsure when/if that will be possible.

After another appointment shift, my surgery is on May 27th, so Justin and I have been cleaning and preparing the house so I can have an easier time getting around while healing.

For roughly six years, Justin’s brother, Willy, has been dealing with stage 4 cancer and the last few months have been exceptionally difficult.  Within less than a month’s time he had to go to the hospital for severe dehydration, which led to pancreatitis, which led to bacterial pneumonia.  Just three days ago, he dealt with the dehydration again along with a 102 degree fever.  This was during their hospice intake appointment and pretty much made their choice to go into hospice for them.  They’ve looked into clinical trials for practically his entire cancer battle, but because of COVID those trails have been closed.  One of the trials they had been waiting for, reopened its application services but looked over Willy’s file and said he would not survive the trial in the first place.  This has been incredibly hard on everyone.  With the two person limit per day at the hospice, everyone is forced to visit at such a slow pace that everyone might not get to see him before the end.  Justin managed to see him yesterday and I’m hoping to visit from the window (bypassing the two person rule) sometime this weekend between other people’s visits.

In between cleaning, family stuff, and my own health, Justin and I have been looking for new artist(s) for sprites, CG, and Kickstarter rewards.  A few of my friends have started to look for people that might be interested in working with us.  With everything that’s going on it’s making it really hard for us to search as much as we’d like to, but we are still searching.

If anyone knows of an artist that might be interested in working with us, please let them know to reach out to us either through Twitter, Facebook, or Kickstarter.  It would help us out greatly and we’d really appreciate it.

Update 11/24/2019 - Major Health Concerns

Hey all, we’ve got some icky news.

On November 18th I had my second colonoscopy. It turned out they only took one large polyp (that seemed sorta dangerous) because they felt it was pointless to remove the 100's of smaller ones. They said they wouldn't be able to keep up with the growth of them and they can only keep me under for so long.

Due to all of this, I’ll have to have ALL of my colon removed VERY soon. My doctor sent a referral to the Cleveland Clinic for a surgeon as they do a LOT of colon removal surgeries and our area doesn't really have anyone my two doctors would suggest to go to. The other problem we run into is that I'll have to be in the hospital for 2-4 days and will have 2-3 surgeries over the course of a couple months, so I'm not sure how much work I'll be able to get done on the game during those time periods. My first appointment will be on November 29th and I’m assuming we’ll be figuring out what type of surgery and when I’ll be having it.

Truthfully, I don't know what my quality of life will be like afterwards, especially when you pair it with the aftermath I deal with from the thyroid cancer. I do not plan to let this affect things too much, but it probably will at the beginning of treatments and getting used to my new life.

On top of the colon situation, my current thyroid medication isn’t working as well as it used to since the manufacturer has changed suppliers. This is the second time this has happened with my medication. My primary care doctor recommends me going to a Functional doctor as she thinks I need to get a compound thyroid medication specially made for what my body needs and also to finally have a doctor that will look into all of the health issues I have. Problem is that my Medicaid won’t cover Functional doctors and the first appointment would be $936 (and unsure how much subsequent visits will be) which doesn’t cover lab work.

As I’m unable to work and Justin can’t because of his own medical issues along with acting as my caretaker 24/7, we have no income. A low rough estimate comes to $4,000 for the trips up to Cleveland, hotel stays, and doctor appointments between both the colon issues and the Functional doctor. The goal is to diagnose what’s causing the muscle weakness, muscle and bone pain, memory issues, worsening depression, anxiety, and fatigue along with many of the other problems that I’ve been dealing with for seven years. During this time I’ll also be applying for disability, getting treatment, and hoping that I can eventually work again at a real paying job.

I’ve been so proud of all of us for working through whatever has been put in front of us, but lack of funds are truly a roadblock in this situation. I am beyond upset that I need to setup a gofundme for this, but there’s really nothing else I can do. I do not expect any of our fans to donate, but I would very much appreciate it if people could share my gofundme link. I feel like the faster I can get all of this over with, the faster I can put all my focus back on game dev work.

Along with my own personal health issues, Darkenmarr is out of commission for a while. In September her right thumb swelled up out of nowhere. For awhile she was able to still work on Alison’s sprite, but it’s gotten to the point she can’t hold anything in her drawing hand. She had gone to urgent care for help and they claimed it was arthritis, but after talking it over with her, Justin, Darkenmarr, and myself disagree with the diagnosis (we believe it to be fractured somewhere). She’s trying to get the VA to approve her doctors to look at her thumb and it has been taking awhile to get a chance to even talk to people at the VA. There’s also some very personal family stuff going on at the same time that understandably needs more of her attention.

The plan is to contact her on December 12th to see what’s going on and the plan of action at that time. In the meantime, I think Justin and I will focus on helping the other team members with their work and dealing with our health issues while we wait for Darkenmarr’s return.

Since I last posted, though, we did manage to get a couple of backgrounds done and Justin’s been finishing up the look of some of the GUI elements. So some progress has been made at least. Hopefully, we’ll have more to update on in the next post.

Health Update, Between the Lines, and Sifting Thyme

Hi, everyone!

Since we’ve started developing A Very Important Date, health problems have been an ongoing issue for a lot of different members of the team including myself.  These problems have been anywhere from temporary illnesses or surgery recovery to real terminal/lifelong problems.  But we’re all still plugging away at the game, working super hard to bring it to all of you.  

Last month, due to a series of problems I had been having, I had to have a colonoscopy.  After the procedure, I was told that I had polyps that were precancerous, later finding out that every single polyp I had removed (which was a lot) was precancerous for colon cancer.  That’s good in a way, since they were found early so they haven’t moved above the precancer stage yet.  Because of my history of thyroid cancer, my digestive specialist sent me to a genetic counselor, where I had a blood test to determine the possible genetic cause of the issues I was having.  The blood results came in a few days ago, revealing that I have a specific genetic mutation that makes the colon cancer blocking gene not exist at all, one of the symptoms of a condition called familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP).  Depending on the type of FAP I have, since they were not sure if I have classic FAP or AFAP, my chance of getting full blown colon cancer at any point in my lifetime is between 70% to 100%. Along with heightening my risk for colon cancer, this also boosts the chances of me getting a number of other cancers, mostly based in the digestive systems, but also even brain cancer.  Because of these results, I will be dealing with colonoscopies and other cancer screening procedures that are connected to FAP every few months for the rest of my life. Over the course of the next few months, I will be a little busier than normal as I try to figure out what new doctors I need and the scheduling of these new screenings.  Because of this, my side of things might slow down a little bit, but I’m going to try hard to not let it affect my work. Onto other much happier news!

The dating game Between the Lines is on Kickstarter right now!  I tried out the demo the other day and I have to say it was an interesting playthrough.  The game is LGBT+, even having a choice for the main character to be non-binary.

There are some mechanics teased in the Kickstarter page that I look forward to in the finalized game, like the phone and calendar.  For the phone, I’m hoping I can call people at any time within the gameplay sort of like you can in Mystic Messenger (though that game plays in real time, so I assume this will work differently).  The calendar will be great for someone like me, too, because I have trouble remembering who will be where on what days or important meeting times. There were a few points in the demo where I couldn’t stop laughing, especially when the fourth wall was broken.  From my playthrough this occurred with the character John, where at times his sprite would revert to a sketched version and the choices for talking to him would reference the fact this was all a game.  I don’t expect this in the finalized game, of course, but I thought it was a nice touch for a demo.  If it were kept in the finalized game, however, I could see it lead to a broken ending, à la Doki Doki Literature Club, only funnier.  If you play the demo, I also encourage you to visit the zoo, because there’s a giraffe. Please check out this game and back it if you can!  If you can’t spreading the word about them will help, too! Along with Between the Lines, another developer that we’ve talked about before, Nochi Games, has just released their demo of Sifting Thyme on Google Play! Check it out here.  

Starting this week we will be slowly posting our finalized sprites on our various social media so everyone can start seeing the new versions.  Once they are all released for everyone’s view, we will update our banners and promo materials with them accordingly.  It’s a day we’ve been waiting for for a long time.  See you all soon!

Update 6/19/19

Hi, everyone! It’s been a while since an update, but we’ve made a lot of progress on A Very Important Date!  

Things have settled down some in our personal lives and been working really hard on the game and Kickstarter rewards.  @darkenmarr​ has finished designing our body pillowcases and we’re about to start ordering them for our backers.  We will order these in one week, so any fans that want one can preorder a pillow from our Storenvy site so they can be among our first batch of orders.

Darkenmarr has been working on completing the shadows and highlights of our main sprites.  We’ve already shown our flat colored versions and a few completed versions to our Kickstarter backers.  Now we’ll start introducing our flat colored ones on our various social media.

On the coding and GUI side, we only have a few more menus to finish up before that part of the game is completed. We believe we have a total of ten backgrounds remaining.  Once those are done, Justin and I can focus more on the writing of the routes, instead of dividing our attention.

That’s what we’re showing off today, but we have a lot more to show you.  Stay tuned this weekend for more!

Update 9/23/2017

Hello, everyone! Noelle here.

Time for a quick update of what’s been going on the last few weeks.

We originally had plans to go to San Japan at the beginning of the month, but because of transportation reasons and concerns about Hurricane Harvey, the team had decided against going to the convention.  Instead Noelle and Justin used the time that was already allotted for the convention to travel to Wyoming to visit @darkenmarr and work together in person.

While visiting, we were able to fix her computer situation by helping her get a good desktop.  Her laptop had issues with running art programs, leading to frequent crashing and freezing, which caused a major delay in art progress.  We hope with the nice desktop set up there won’t be any issues now.

Speaking of art progress, while we were visiting Darkenmarr we were able to come up with designs for Lily, Caelius, Dem, and Layton!  Kickstarter Backers have already seen the sketches, but we plan to show them off to everyone else soon. While we were in Wyoming, we were able to work on a schedule for the sprite work, but it might have to be pushed back just a little bit.  After we left Wyoming, Darkenmarr reported to me that she hurt her hand when she was walking two of her dogs and she currently has her drawing hand wrapped up.  Also just a heads up, if you ever meet her dog, don’t touch the laser pointer unless you want to lose an hour of your time playing with her.

On to more updates!  I plan to send surveys out to tiers that are $55 and below once school calms down some more.  $75+ tiers will wait a little longer as I want to wait until we have body pillowcase sketches, unless everyone at those tiers knows which character(s) they want regardless of the design.

In writing news, Justin and I have finished editing Harlan’s first three chapters and are currently writing Connor’s first draft, where we’re about halfway through chapter three.  Once the first three are finished for Connor, we will give it to our readers in our read and review group for feedback, and then Justin will work on Sven while I take a crack at Lowell.

After working through the romance song, Geoff and I agreed that it wasn’t working, so we’re still tinkering with the romance song.  The next version of that song that we show off will be entirely different from the last one.

That’s all for right now, but we’ll be sure to check in soon with more updates!

Kickstarter Money Received!

Hello, everyone!

The Kickstarter funds have officially been delivered to us!  All totaled after fees and everything we came to about $4,700!  We will be sure to put that to good use in the coming year.  First thing it’s going towards is the keychains, which we’ll be sending the design to a number of companies to get quotes once again next week.

We are currently planning the Kickstarter surveys, but we want to wait to send them out until we have a little bit more reward art finalized so backers can get a look at the designs before making their decisions.

We’ve received a few messages from non-backers about funding us, and from backers about upping their pledges after the Kickstarter.  If you’re wanting to do this, we are still accepting pledges from PayPal, but we’re going to add our Kickstarter tiers and/or add-on rewards to our original GoFundMe page so we can keep things more organized.  Hopefully we can put the tiers up without typos this time.

For backers, we’ve posted some WIPs for Layton and Lily along with a background lineart.  We also have a snippet of the romance song that’s still being worked on in the most recent update!

That looks like all the news that we have for today!  Thanks everyone, and we’ll check back in soon!

LAST 5 HOURS!

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 138% with 5 hours left to go!

Less Than 60 Hours Left!

Hello, everyone!

Our Kickstarter is going to end in around 57 hours!  We’re currently at 108% with $697 away from our boys love side story stretch goal!

On Thursday night at 8PM EDT we’re doing a Kickstarter Live, which will be a Q&A with Noelle and Justin and we’re hoping to have a few team members on-call to help answer questions.  We’ll be showing off some of the physical add-on rewards that we have on hand.

Here’s some bigger images of our key chain design (I don’t know why this is pixelated)…

... and our Gwyn’s body pillow design, for an example.

Also here are some WIPS of the add-ons 5x7in Postcard Prints of Rory with Alison...

... and Sven with Alison.

We would like to thank @BeckNaja (review), @hayurika​ (review 1, review 2), and @otomesweetheart​ (review) for reviewing our demo. We also want to thank @nochi-games​, @legendofrune​, @dicesuki​, @sweetchiel​, Sentimental Trickster, and other devs that we may have missed who shared us with their fans and backers this time around.  We really appreciate it! Of course, thank you to all of our fans, followers, and backers for reblogging, sharing, and retweeting our posts and supporting us in anyway you can.

Two New Characters and Sifting Thyme!

Hello, everyone!

Today we’re happy to show off concept sketches of two characters from A Very Important Date’s Spin-Off visual novel: Dem, our male lead, and Caelius, one of our male suitors! First up is Dem, our male lead for the Spin-off game.  I didn’t really have a design idea for Dem to give to @darkenmarr other than the color of his hair and eyes.  She thought that we need someone with shorter hair as the rest of the guys either had long/shoulder length hair.  She came up with six designs for the hair and unanimously Justin, Darkenmarr, and I decided on the image below.

Next is Caelius, one of the suitors for the Spin-off game.  We had some ideas for Caelius, but we allowed Darkenmarr some freedoms with it.  For those that didn’t know, Caelius is supposed to represent the Unicorn in the second Alice books, so we decided to go with flowy, long hair for him and he has a birthmark on his forehead.

We hope to have sketches soon of Layton, our black male suitor, and Lily, our male-to-female transgender suitor. You can see more about our spin-off visual novel on our Kickstarter along with other concept art as a backer.

Here at Naive Sprites, we are always happy to see more indie visual novel dev teams coming into the field.  It especially makes us happy when they’re from the same state as us!  

Sifting Thyme, from the small developer @nochi-games, is an otome/boys love visual novel that needs your help on Kickstarter! Let’s make sure they reach their goal!

We would like to introduce our new song “Septima Impetus” created by Geoff Moore.  This is our second “danger” song for more slow and brooding scenes.

3rd Birthday!  Thank You, Everyone!

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 65% 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.

This year we’ll be at A-kon in Fort Worth, TX!  Noelle ( @chibisubaru), Justin, and @darkenmarr will be there to sell merchandise, talk to fans, and work on sketches.  While we’re at the con, we’ll be promoting our Kickstarter and any profits from game related merchandise that we make at the con will go towards the campaign.  We hope to see you there!

Live Stream Test Tonight

Tonight on a private FB group at 7:30 PM eastern, we're doing a quick live stream test with our backers from our first attempt at Kickstarter.   If you were a backer, but haven't joined the group and want to see the stream tonight, please message @chibisubaru.  Be sure to tell us what your Kickstarter name is and we'll give you the link to the group.

Update 5/1/2017

Hello, everyone!  Noelle here! Sorry for the absence lately.  A Very Important Date is still being worked on, though.  Two new backgrounds and their nighttime versions have been finished within the last few weeks and Justin is currently sketching two more while he writes and edits.  Darkenmarr is still dealing with the moving process from military to civilian life, but she will be back as soon as possible.  I on the other hand haven’t been able to write much these last few weeks because of the near constant exam schedule for school.  So it’s just been a whole lot of studying and studying and studying. In happy news, the doll charms from our pre-order have arrived at home base!  We’re working on the finishing touches so we can mail those out.  We do apologize for the delay on that.

This is our first merchandise item of Julianna!  Isn’t she so cute?! You are still able to order these charms on our Storenvy account. Once this week is over, I’ll be contacting some of our members to work with them on their current or next tasks.  I’ll also work more on the Kickstarter planning so we can finalize it and announce it to all of you. That’s it for today’s update.  We’ll check back in soon with a new update.

Update 2/2/2017

Hi everyone!  Noelle here!

I’ve been reading over the survey the last two days (which we’re still welcoming responses to) and figured I go over a few things.

First, A Very Important Date isn’t set up like a common route visual novel where you just buy the whole game at once.  As our game was originally planned to be mobile only, we went with the pay-per-route set up like Voltage, Shall We Date, and Hunex.  The computer version will be set up in the same way through Steam with DLCs.  This allows players to buy the characters/stories they wish to read and allows us, the developers, to continue creating stories as we go.

Second, Julianna will not be our only same-sex suitor in the game.  In season 2, we plan to have a few more same-sex suitors and a male-to-female suitor.  Along with this, we’ll have more POC suitors in the future.

Now onto some updates.  This morning I posted Rory’s chapter 4 to our read and review group.  Justin and I started going over Sven’s first chapter the other day.  Once his first four chapters are reworked, we’ll give those chapters to our reviewers, and then it’s time to take the reviewer comments for Harlan’s chapters and edit them accordingly.

We’ve hit a bit of a money snag for the month, which was to be expected.  So certain art has been pushed back a little, but everything should be back on track mid-month.  If you would like to help support us, you can buy some goodies from our Storenvy shop.

For those that saw our previous post, Justin’s mom is still in the hospital, going on almost a month now.  Doctors are still having issues on finding the source of the infection, but there have been small improvements as the days have progressed.  We want to thank everyone for their well wishes during this time.