Somnova Studios

Hello everyone, It's been 2,845 days since this project officially began, which is, well, a long time. Lots of things have happened since then, including several character reboots, scene changes, taking on new artists and writers, and so much more that I can't even describe it all. We've written 249,714 words, created over 650 original images, and have close to two hours of original music, all culminating in an astounding 25-hour playtime for all routes. During these past 2,845 days, we've learned a lot about game development, made some lifelong friendships, and have worked together on something we really believe in. Its truly been an incredible experience working with everyone, and our team has done an equally incredible job making our project a reality. So, it is with great joy that I can finally say... Missing Stars: Act One  is now available. You can grab the game on our website! As mentioned in a previous blog post, we'll be releasing updates ...

Hello everyone, hope you’re doing well and oh BOY do we have some exciting news for you folks!   To kick things off, we are very happy to announce that writing for Act One has been completed (except for a couple of things that need to be touched up) and we are sitting at more than 250k words for Act One! There will be a lot of content (almost 25 hours!) to hold you over for a while! Programming wise, we’re almost done with getting all of the scenes into the game. However, it is important to note that we will be doing a master edit after the programming is done in order to check for continuity, catch any programming errors, and correct any spelling/grammar mistakes.  In anticipation of Act One being just around the corner, we had a few devs begin recording a podcast! Titled Somnova Podcast (spent all night coming up with that one) we have Episode 1 recorded and set to release within the next few days. In this episode, we talk about a brief history of Somnova St...

Hello everyone, hope you’re doing well. We have an exciting announcement for you all! Watercress, Somnova Studios and Sarchalen Visual Media have all teamed up for YuriJam 2019 to develop and publish a game together! We’ve been working on it since the beginning of October and we can’t wait to show off all of our hard work to the fans.  Here’s a quick description of the upcoming YuriJam game:  Raine, a genius mechanic with a lust for adventure, thrives in the frontier of space accompanied only by her shipborne AI navigator. Well into her travels, she makes a critical error while piloting, jumping through an unstable wormhole and crash-landing on an unknown planet. There, she makes first contact with a young species of sentient beings that look a lot like humans with a hint of… goat? To return to her home, Raine must repair her ship before the wormhole closes. However, in this unfamiliar place, she makes a friend that forces her to question what she really wants. A ...

Hello everyone, hope you're doing well. It's Halloween! The time of year where fantastic costumes, delicious candy and all of the skeletons reign supreme. Speaking of costumes, the always amazing Kuroe has drawn Jeanne in a super adorable cat costume! It's the internet, we gotta go with cats.  While we're here, we thought we'd give a little update on Missing Stars: Act One . We're happy to report that progress is coming along very well! We have about 75% of Act One's scenes programmed into the game, so we just have to get the remaining 25% programmed in and begin our master edit. In the art department, all of Jeanne's line art is complete, and we're going to be retouching a few of our sprites soon. Once again, thanks for your continued patience and support! Facebook Twitter Instagram Discord

Hello everyone, hope you’re all doing well and oh boy do we have a special blog post for you today. As promised, we have an interview with Kuroe, the writer for Natalya’s route who was kind enough to take the time to be interviewed. Regarding how people find out about Missing Stars, it's incredibly common that people hear about it in some way because of Katawa Shoujo. Would you say that was the case for you? What lead you to joining the Missing Stars team? It was indeed my gateway! KS was such a unique experience so I wanted more after that. I binged through fanfics and other stuff (Sisterhood being an obvious one) and delved for more of that KS goodness until I stumbled on the TV Tropes page for Missing Stars. I saw that it was still in development, so being an impatient bastard I thought "If they aren't releasing it soon, I need to help do it myself.” So I applied as an artist. Now I'm writing the Natalya route.  So you say you applied to be an artist for S...

Hello everyone, how you’re doing well. We just wanted to share a post to wish Jeanne Lefevre a happy birthday!! To accompany that, we wanted to share a short character info sheet about her and some cute photos of our favorite thicc girl. We’ll be doing this on all of our character’s birthdays so please look forward to more fun facts about all of our characters! Birthday: October 23 (Mole Day) Favorite Food: Jeanne's a big fan of tomatoes, having greatly enjoyed some fresh ones in her youth. She developed a bit of a habit of evaluating the taste of food as she eats it, something she does when eating at a restaurant somewhere. Hobbies: Jeanne loves reading about scientific discoveries in various blogs, websites, and journals. She especially likes reading about chemistry and physics, her two favorite classes. Outside of school, she enjoys leading St. Dymphna's Astronomy Club in looking at the stars, as well as doing small projects related to it, such as orbital mec...

Hello everyone, It's been almost eight years since our little group started up out of the Katawa Shoujo  forums. While we've been through a lot of staff changes, Missing Stars  has managed to garner interest from a variety of groups, from fans of Katawa Shoujo  to fans of visual novels in general. More recently, we've gained a sister studio in the form of Watercress, who have proved to be invaluable allies in terms of helping us with marketing and a lot of other optimizations for us. Our other, smaller projects have also been well-received, with our initial release of Arcadia  getting us a lot of positive feedback. We're excited to re-release it on Steam (thanks again to Watercress!) so please check it out there! Missing Stars , of course, has always been our number one priority throughout the years. We've worked hard to make sure our stories about Erik and all of our lovely ladies are well-written, thoughtful, and meaningful for our readers. Fans have as...

Hello everyone, hope you’re all doing well and oh boy do we have a special blog post for you today. As promised, we have an interview with Hamadyne, one of the directors for Somnova Studios who was kind enough to take the time to be interviewed. In the past, we’ve talked about how Katawa Shoujo was an inspiration to Missing Stars and was formed along with Somnova Studios. Could you go into details on how that had happened and how you got involved with the project?  Shortly after Katawa Shoujo released, there was a discussion on the forums where another user had asked “Would you play a 'mental disability' VN similar to KS?" ” After that, there was a post asking questions such as what was the setting, what kind of characters would we be dealing with, etc. During that time, I was interested in it and asked the OP, HoneyMuffin If I was able to join/help out, and ended up helping out as a medical advisor. Being on the autism spectrum, I felt that I could help out givin...

Hello everyone, hope you're all doing well. We have some exciting news for all of you! We're proud to announce the release of Arcadia! This was a si- wait a minute, haven't we already released Arcadia back in April of 2018?  A bit of history: we released Arcadia back then as an entry to NaNoRenO some time back. Sometime after release we announced work on what we called a "Beauty Patch," in which we said we're gonna add in the bells and whistles to make this jazz cafe simulator into a full-fledged VN.  And patch the beauty we did! We are finally releasing what we'd like to call the snazzy D E F I N I T I V E version of Arcadia.  This version includes: -A functioning Extras Gallery -Updated UI with some cool new animations -Improved sprite art -Sparkling new CGs As well as grammatical fixes. We're pretty proud of this one!  What's also new is our new platform we'll be releasing Arcadia on: Steam! That's right...

Hello everyone, hope you’re all doing well! We’re coming at you with your monthly dose of Missing Stars Act 1 progress and oh boy, do we have a lot of news for you wonderful fans! So let’s talk about that.  Firstly, about Act 1 progress: We’re very happy to say that we are approaching the ¾ mark in terms of writing. Once that is done, all we need to  do is edit said scenes and program them into the game. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s all said and done. We’ll have to play the game to perform what Hamadyne calls a "master edit". This is done to make sure that we catch any mistakes missed during the initial edit, check for any continuity errors, and that no routes have been snuck in (Sorry Ela, Sofiya and Irene fans.)  While we work on the game, we also have plans to update our web presence. The website is a touch out of date, so we'll  be doing a lot of tidying up on that. We also have plans to update the main Missing Stars website with updated bios of our c...

Originally established as an all-boys Catholic school, Privatgymnasium St. Dymphna (formerly known as the Ignatian College of St. Dymphna) was established in 1858 as means to cultivate the talents of young, but troubled, youth. Jesuit educators started by taking over an old, yet otherwise abandoned, Baroque monastery situated outside of Vienna and converted it into a boarding school. Victims of wars, survivors of tragic accidents, and orphans were often taken in as students as a means to help them heal from whatever afflicted them, as well as give them a quality education. By the mid-1880s, the rising popularity of psychological analysis led to the college begin admitting more psychologically troubled students and hiring interested professionals who would offer to study and help treat their students alongside their schooling. Soon after, it was decided that the college take in female students as well, creating one of the first co-ed elite boarding schools in Europe. The school functi...

(Content warning: This article briefly mentions suicide.) Written by Fia, Medical Consultant for Somnova Studios As someone who has been hospitalized three times as well as worked in an inpatient unit for people with developmental disabilities at one point, I felt like I would be the best to talk about psychiatric hospitalization and what it is like. There are a lot of myths surrounding psychiatric hospitalization and I want to give a more realistic view of what it is like. I won’t deny that being hospitalized isn’t a fun experience, but if there is anything I would like people to take away from this article is that psych wards are more boring than scary.  You can be hospitalized either voluntarily or involuntarily. With a voluntary hold, you can technically leave at any time as long as you can prove you are not a danger to yourself or others. Even if you decide to leave, the process of getting you discharged can take a couple days. With involuntary holds, you can only b...

Hello everyone, hope you’re all doing well. We’re coming at you with our regularly-scheduled update for Missing Stars so that we can keep you informed of our progress for Act 1.  At this point, we have 44 scenes programmed into the game. This includes writing, sprite direction, and scene direction. As of this writing, our current word count at this point is at about 123,000 words.To put that into perspective, that is approximately the length of about 2 full routes from Katawa Shoujo . Compared to a real-world novel, J.R.R Tolkien's The Return of the King has 134,462 words, making Missing Stars quite the read once it's all finished. We hope this explains why we’re taking so long to get Act 1 out. Our largest focus has always been on the writing quality and ensuring the programming of these scenes looks consistent.  We apologize for delays for July's Mental Health Blog post . It will be out soon next week however!  That's all we have for you this month! Tha...

Hello everyone, hope you’re all doing well. We’re coming at you with our regularly-scheduled update for Missing Stars so that we can keep you informed of our progress for Act 1.  In order to give context to how much progress we’re making, here’s a breakdown of how Act 1 will unfold: Erik will transfer to St. Dymphna's. Erik will meet all of the route girls. Depending on the choices you make, you'll get points towards a specific girl Eventually, you will get to make a choice as to which girl Erik will hang out with for the Gala event at the end of Act 1. Depending on the choices you made previously, the girls available to you will change. It's at this point where the routes officially split.  After that, the Gala takes place and Act 1 ends there. Act 2 begins shortly after with the girl you ended up with. We are happy to report that a lot of progress has been made on the writing aspect of Missing Stars as we’re at the point of branching out into specific routes ...