Somnova Studios

Hey everyone, we just wanted to wish you all a Happy Holidays!!! We hope you're having a very Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Hanukkah, whatever you celebrate! As long as you're having a good and safe holiday season that's all that matters! So let's talk about progress with Missing Stars. For the past few years, progress has been glacial, and we can't apologize enough. However, in the last few months, things have changed. In October we started using scrums. "What's a scrum??" I already hear you asking. Well, a scrum is a way of breaking a large task down into many smaller ones. Instead of attempting to tackle all of act 1 by 2019, we decided to tackle 6 scripts by the end of October. We've found this to be an incredible boost to our output; With this scrum we have officially passed 25% complete mark for act 1. Doing some Rough math, and given that nothing awful happens, we should have act 1 completed by late 2019. That's right, w...

That's right!  We're looking for new members for our team, specifically in our sound department. We're down to 1 sound personnel, which is less than ideal for them and for us. We're looking for people to help out with composing and arranging the soundtrack and background music. If you have experience in any of the aforementioned categories, contact us if you're interested! Requirements: -> We are working with logic Pro, so if you have some experience with that, it'd be a great plus. However, it's not a requirement. -> Missing Stars is a longtime project, so please only apply is you intend to stick around for the long run and put time and effort into it. Keep in mind that the job of a composer goes beyond simply composing - there's leitmotifs to plan, routes to read and understand, meetings to attend! ->We will want to see some of your previous work, so please make sure you have something to show us when applying. We don't ask for a pr...

Hey all! It's that time of year again, with tons of candy and costumes to accompany you off this mortal coil. Speaking of costumes, we have a few to show you! First is our Dynamic Russian Duo, Sofyia and Natalya! Kuroe did an excellent job, as always. They'll suck the capitalism right out of you! Second is... a new character? Introducing Eleanor Tabrizi! She also goes by Nell, if that's more convenient for you. A close friend of Katja's, the two of them spend a lot of time together outside of school. Likhos whipped up a very cute picture of her in a cat onesie. We even have a nice introductory Halloween-themed story featuring her, written by our own messiessie. Here's a link to download a PDF version! It's im-PAWS-ible to not like her.  Eora has made a few concept pieces of her, so here's a few never-before-seen sketches! We hope you enjoy this extra treat as we continue to work on Missing Stars. We may have made her too cute. (Or...

We recently participated in itch.io's Ren'Py Jam  to create a visual novel in two weeks. It was a fun challenge and we learned a few things! Eora, one of our artists, has been hard at work making her own sci-fi yuri visual novel, Sugar and Massacre (demo here). During the planning stages of our game jam, she proposed a side story that takes place in that game's setting, Surkea. We really liked her idea, so we all decided to go ahead and flesh it out. It's now available for download on itch.io! We sincerely hope that you enjoy Surkea.

Hello everyone! I hope you're keeping cool in this sweltering heat. As some of you might know, we're already affiliated with a few other studios as a means to build a community of EVN developers and their fans. Wolf, one of our developers and a director at his own studio, Watercress, has been developing a more formal version of what we've started to establish online. Today, I am pleased to announce that we are official partners of the Paladin Initiative ! Below is some art of their mascot (art by  KeiryuuSeo ) and an awesome wax seal as their logo. This group of fellow EVN developers aims to foster better ethical practices within the industry, including: Hiring/Commissioning artists, writers, musicians, and programmers Sharing resources between affiliated studios Standardized marketing materials and contracts What does this mean for Missing Stars? First off, we'll have access to a wider group of active EVN developers which can help out with p...

This month, some of us took the time to challenge ourselves with NaNoRenO: a project with a goal of making a short visual novel in the span of one month. We're pleased to announce the release of Arcadia ! You can download it on our new itch.io page! Please note that we'll be adding a few extra assets that didn't quite make it into this release - think of it as a "Beauty Patch" of sorts. Stay tuned! We sincerely hope you enjoy Arcadia .

Developer Notes (updated 3/31/2018) Hamadyne: Missing parrot, will need to add later Flare: Clearly needs graphics tightened on level 3 Likhos: Will they get this reference??? Kuroe: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Hello everyone! It's been a week since our little demo released, and we've gotten a lot of people talking to us about how much they liked Missing Stars! It's seriously great that people have enjoyed our project so far. That being said, we've also received some incredible feedback about our project. Stuff that has made us really think and re-consider how we want to move forward regarding Act 1. We really want to work on making Missing Stars a meaningful experience for everyone. So, we'd like to do the following: Work on finishing the entirety of Act 1: We really want to make sure Act 1 is written consistently by using the feedback we've received recently. So to do this job properly, we won't be releasing an amended demo like we discussed in the previous blog post. We intend for our next release to be the full Act 1.  We will, however, do our best to keep everyone posted on our progress this year! Polish our game executable to clear up known bugs: R...

Hello again, everyone! Thanks again for checking out our demo! It means the world to us. Now, I'm sure most of you have a few questions for us, so I'll do my best to answer them here. Why did this take so long to come out? This is probably the biggest question we've had an answer for. To keep things brief, I'll list the three biggest things that impeded our progress. Team Structure - we're a team of volunteers, so none of us were in it for money or "exposure". Most of us frequently work on this project in our (sometimes limited) free time, so progress was fairly slow until about 2016. This is mainly because of item #2... Lots of Reboots - We've lost writers and artists in the past, forcing us to get new writers and thus, a new story for our characters. New artists had to be trained on our art style, which took additional time. However, in 2017, we were able to get a dedicated group of people who could help us and improve our pace. We consi...

Hey everyone, Thanks so much for waiting for us. The Missing Stars Demo is now public.  We took the time to iron out some bugs and polish things this month, and we're finally happy to release something for you. A very special thanks to our beta testers who were able to give us some incredible feedback! You can download the demo on our website, which is now open to the public! Once you begin the installer, you may have to approve it through your computer's security settings. Don't worry - there's just some cute girls in there. No viruses. Thanks again for your patience, and we hope to share more with you soon!

Hello everyone! Just letting you know that there's been a short delay regarding our demo release. We unexpectedly found a game breaking bug in our latest build, so we're going to take the time and fix it up. We're really sorry about this, and we appreciate your patience on this matter.