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!

Update 4/9/2017

Hello to all of our wonderful fans!  Noelle here!

Justin and I are trying to get back into the groove of things after what happened two weeks ago. It’s been a hard process, but we know Leesa wouldn’t want us to stall, so we’re trying to move forward the best we can.  Also, with this being the last month of my semester, a certain amount of slowdown was already expected.  All that being said, we’ve started writing and working on Sven’s story once again, while we plan out the twins’ and Julianna’s routes.  Once my semester ends, we will pick up speed leading up to Kickstarter, Round 2.

Speaking of Kickstarter, we’ve been looking over our goal, tiers, and rewards this week.  We’re aiming to have all those figured out soon to show you all what we plan to do this time around.  Looking at the feedback from our survey, we can definitely say that there will be more digital rewards this time around.

In convention news, A-kon has announced our table location in their Artist Alley!  They have not created a map graphic yet, but for now we have a spreadsheet map they created to show where we’ll be stationed:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aj1SiXmWYDG9kq4X-rsnq79GYNdkVY14HfdZZuqjX-c/edit#gid=0

We have also listed some A-kon merchandise on our Storenvy account, so our fans attending the con can pre-buy the items they want, and pick them up at the convention.  These items are set to our con prices, which includes Fort Worth taxes and eliminates shipping fees.  To pick up your items, show us your receipt for your purchase and we’ll already have them bundled up for you.  Knowing how crowded A-kon has been in the past, we figured we would do what we could to make things easier on attendees at the artist alley. To order our A-kon merchandise online you must be going to the convention in Fort Worth, TX.  If you order the items and don’t pick them up but still want them, you will have to pay for shipping and handling at that point.  Otherwise, your money will be refunded. So that’s it for today’s update.  We will post again soon with some more production news

Update 3/18/2017

Hello to all of our wonderful fans! We’re all still plugging along on A Very Important Date.  On the programming side, we’re still having some issues with a few pesky bugs for the CG’s, but once those are solved we’ll move onto the Fast Forward and Log features.

Some good news, @darkenmarr is now officially retired from the army and will be able to work full-time on the game soon!  She will be moving off base at the beginning of April, but she hopes to get a lot of stuff done this coming week.  Because of this, we might move Kickstarter to the beginning of June instead of Mid-May to give her some extra time to work on the art.

Lordless is working on a new background, Connor’s bedroom, while Justin and Noelle try to determine the room’s color scheme.  Also @furude is working on the night time version of her current background.

Justin has gone back to looking over Sven’s main story while Noelle is working on school work and studying for an exam.  She should be able to help him this coming Monday.

We got into the artist alleys at two anime conventions!  So for people attending A-kon and San Japan, be sure to look out for us!  Writers Noelle and Justin and Sprite Artist Darkenmarr will be at both tables (unless some unforeseeable event occurs between now and then).  We’re going to put new listings for A-kon on our Storenvy and Etsy this coming week.  These listings will have the items with Texas taxes on them and no shipping so you can pick them up at the convention.  To pick up the items you will need to show us your invoice either via phone or a print out.  This way you can make sure you get the item(s) you ordered from us.

If you don’t pick up your item(s) from us at the convention, we will add a shipping payment listing on both Storenvy and Etsy so you can still get your item(s) or I can refund you for your purchase.

As we plan to have Kickstarter going while we’re at A-kon, any profits we make at the con will go towards our stretch goals.

For our preorders, we will be ordering the charms at the beginning of the month and our goal is to ship them out Mid-April.  If anyone still wants to order the preorder charms, you still can.  If you want to order one of the charms, but want to pick it up at A-kon, please let me know.

That should be everything we have of note at the moment.  Check back soon for more updates!

Hello everyone!  We would like to present our fifth track, “Smooth and Bright” by @geoff-moore.  This track will coincide with the warmer, happier moments of the story, as Alison and the suitors become better acquainted.

For even more enchanting melodies, be sure to check out Geoff’s music on his Soundcloud.

Diversity is a Beautiful Thing! <3

We were recently attacked for establishing diversity in our cast for our visual novel.  We expected to be attacked because the internet can be a toxic place and trolls are gonna troll.  It can’t be stopped.  Artists and writers have to develop a sort of thick skin to be able to handle this sort of thing.  We expected to get complaints about 1) being a visual novel and not a traditional “game”  2) not liking the art/writing/story or 3) for not being someone’s cup of tea.  We also take criticism we get to help strengthen our game as a whole. But to be called essentially unrealistic PC nonsense strictly on the grounds of creating characters that are different races and having some of them not be straight?  That was never expected, especially with yuri and yaoi VN’s being popular stories.  It was especially unexpected to get that sort of message from a fellow visual novel developer.  

So, here’s a quick rundown of the diversity in A Very Important Date.  Though our game mostly takes place in another world, the continent that the main character finds herself on one morning is made up of 6 nations.  The people that make up these nations all have their own common traits, be they skin color, eye color, hair styles, what have you, that separate the nations from one another.  The ancestry of our first 8 suitors can be traced back through 5 of those countries.  These same 8 characters come from multiple socioeconomic backgrounds.  Within these same 8 suitors are 2 different LGBT characters.  We have planned suitors beyond the first 8 that are also LGBT characters, including a transgender character (MtF).  We didn’t do this to be all inclusive, we did it because we wanted to create actual, realistic characters, but making different characters is apparently a problem for this dev.  We don’t see it as one.

Even if you don’t think you’ll play our game or don’t like the visual novel genre (which is fine, everyone has their own taste), please vote for A Very Important Date on Steam Greenlight.  We need to “normalize” diversity because there truly is no “normal” and having the media perpetuate what they consider “different” as a problem in our society shouldn’t be something that we’re still dealing with today.  Creators, like myself, can be too afraid to go “outside the box” because of comments and attacks like this, even to the point where they close up and stop creating.  We can’t have that.  Creativity can not be silenced and if we spread news of new diverse media, it can help encourage others to explore diversity and break from this close-minded bubble.

Hello all!  We would like to present to everyone to our fourth track, “Eat Me!” by @geoffmooremusic.  This track will play during the game’s more angry and tense moments, when agitation and frustration run high.

For even more enchanting melodies, be sure to check out Geoff’s music on his Soundcloud.

We’re currently live on twitch with @darkenmarr and @chibisubaru.  They are working on a new sprite!

Have You Seen Our Demo Yet?

While the development team is working hard to assure the next stage in development transitions smoothly, we wanted to remind everyone to check out the short demo we put together. You can find it on itch.io at https://naivesprites.itch.io/a-very-important-date! We have downloads for both PC & Mac a the bottom of the page. If you’re feeling generous, we encourage you to rate & leave a review as well, all feedback is greatly appreciated.  You can see some pictures from the demo below!

Also, just another reminder that we do have a Kickstarter coming up, so stay tuned for more information on that! If you’re interested, you can learn more about upcoming campaign on our prefundia page over at http://prefundia.com/projects/view/a-very-important-date-otome-visual-novel-romance-sim/9444. Thank you again for your support, everyone!

Our current deals at our table!

Hello all!  We would like to present to everyone to our third track, “Secunda” by @geoffmooremusic.  This track will play during the game’s calmer moments and could be considered Alison’s personal theme.

For even more enchanting melodies, be sure to check out Geoff’s music on his Soundcloud.

Hello all!  Last week we introduced our composer @geoffmooremusic and A Very Important Date's main theme, "In Memory of a Golden Afternoon".  This week we're introducing a track that will play during Alison's most treacherous and fear-filled moments.  We proudly present to all of you "Eleven Moves".

For even more enchanting melodies, be sure to check out Geoff’s music on his Soundcloud.

Hello, all of you wonderful fans!  We have a treat for you today! On Saturday, we gave you a glimpse of the elegant melodies of @geoffmooremusic‘s with a 30 second sneak peek.  Today, we would like to unveil “In Memory of a Golden Afternoon,” the beautifully charming, full-length main theme to A Very Important Date!   For even more enchanting melodies, be sure to check out Geoff’s music on his Soundcloud.

Update 7/7/2016

Happy Update Day!

Like we say at the start of most of our updates, the team has been very busy lately.

With San Japan rolling up soon, some of the team members are switching gears for a bit.  Justin V, @chibisubaru, and @darkenmarr are getting things ready for the convention which means getting new merchandise designed, printed, and getting all the pre-con related details put together.  Once all those things have been worked out, the three will shift their focus back to the game until San Japan happens.

Justin V and Chibisubaru have also been able to get back to editing.  Currently, Justin V is in Harlan's chapter 5 while ChibiSubaru is in Rory's chapter 5.  They hope to be nearly done with their two stories by San Japan.

With the demo, our programmers are working on bug squashing and implementing some GUI elements.  We want to make sure there aren't any issues with the demo at all before we release it, so that's why it's taking a little extra time to release it and our Prefundia page.

Along with these updates for the demo, we're also waiting on music.  Once we have those items implemented, our demo will contain most of what our final release will hold, sans sound effects, certain platform specific elements, and unfinished pose/emotion changes.

So that ends another update post, but before we go we would also like to remind everyone that our giveaway ends this Friday night at 11:59PM EST.  Remember that the winners get to pick whichever characters they prefer from the items on our online store.  A link to our giveaway entry and rules can be found HERE.

Goodnight all!  Check back soon for more wonderful news, updates, and asks from Naïve Sprites!