Somnova Studios

For most people, returning to another year of high school is a wonderful time to get in touch with friends, go to parties with others, have trouble with homework, and (maybe) find love amongst the masses. For me, my time in high school was a different experience. As someone who was never quite in the 'in' crowd, I found it hard to attend parties where all people ever did was grind up against each other to some loud, grating beat on a cheap stereo set. Homework, though I had a lot of it, was never too difficult - perhaps due to my lack of partygoing habits. Romance was something I shied away from; only having one short relationship that was never bad, but never all that good either. Perhaps this describes you. Perhaps it doesn't. Whatever your history, the unique environment of the high school campus manages to pervade popular media across the globe to this day. When we see a character in a television show, or - dare I say it - a visual novel, we can't help but fi

(edit: If anyone's noticed this post changing between page views, it's because I wrote this early in the morning while medicated. I ended up accidentally a lot of words. Also, steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5...) Believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, but Missing Stars did not always have a plucky cast of adorable mental patients. When we first started, we had plenty of potential writers, yes, but no characters. Although imperial.standard had some character designs up, it was neither feasible nor desirable for the writers to stick with just those characters. Let's take an abbreviated look at how we resolved that. 1. Getting started. First off, we had our potential writers come up with at least two possible love interests, plus a main character if they can.  Name, Age, Mental Illness Appearance Background description Basic idea of their route (what you want to happen in the route, it should be an event on how the character and MC are coming closer [please note, this d

Note: some of the following images have been resized and/or cropped for blog purposes. "Appearance: Lean, athletic build, modest bust, tanned olive complexion, short and messy dark blond hair, greenish gold eyes. Tends to wear clothes that would be considered too cold for current weather. Always seen wearing restraint mask(think Hannibal Lecter)" That right there is an excerpt from my character proposal for Lena Forst, written up all the way back in mid-January. Lena was the most developed of my proposed characters(more on that in a later blog post), so I had a pretty good idea what she should look like. image by imperial.standard Based on my description, however poorly articulated, imperial.standard pretty much nailed it right away with his concept art. There were some alternative mask designs that were proposed, but in the end, we stuck with something Lecter-inspired. (For more information on the origins of the original SOTL mask, click here. )

Development has come quite a ways since the last one of these, and we felt it was high time to put out a status update. Right now we’re still trying to identify what assets we need and who’s in charge of completing them, this makes progress understandably difficult. Despite some troubles, we’ve still managed to make some progress on all fronts. Our writing team is chugging along merrily, coming closer and closer to completing their scenes for Act 1, after which it’ll be just a matter of polish. As it stands, I’d estimate we have 60% of the first drafts for Act 1 scenes done. The editing process is only just beginning, and that remains a large chunk of work. The outline for Act 1 is complete however, so it’s just a matter of getting all the scenes written up and polished. On the art side of things, the art team is moving along slowly but surely. The sprite production process looks to be a fairly long one, with several stages of iteration and refinement so making a real decla

Hey, look! This happened last night! Thanks for all of your support thus far, everyone! Hope you enjoy the last few weeks of summer. Art by Imperial.Standard -Hamadyne Discuss this post in the forums.