Somnova Studios

Much as our spiritual predecessor was dubbed a 'cripple porn game', from the outset our game has received the pejorative of a 'retard porn game' (to paraphrase and collate the general reaction, which generally ranges from hesitant to hostile). I do think that maintaining a healthy level of skepticism is good to keep around you, and I honestly don't expect anyone to have good feelings about the project till we have at least a sample of work out in the public eye. Still, I would say that our acquisition of our particular label is, to an extent, a fault of our initial titling and billing of the project. As many of you will probably remember, our working title was Mentaru Shoujo  (a title we had never intended to keep), and it was described as a game based around the concept of mental disabilities. There are obviously a lot of problems here, and I'll try to go a bit in depth with them. Obviously, the original title, apart from being a bit derivative, does evok...

Hello everyone! We know we've been silent for longer than usual, but sometimes no news is the best news. As the heat of summer (or, for those in the Southern Hemisphere, the cold of winter) keeps us inside, we're pushing even harder to make this game a reality. There's a lot of stuff we've been hard at work on, and we hope you're excited for what we have in store! Our  slaves   writers are hard at work, as well as our crack team of artists, musicians, and programmers. Also, today marks six whole months of development!  Thank you for your continued support of our game and its development. As a reward for tolerating our existence, here's a little something. Art by naso4 Meet Erik Wilhelm, the main character of Missing Stars. He's a laid back and generally good-humoured fellow. Born in Switzerland, Erik has been an avid hiker for most of his life. Even at St. Dymphna's, the outdoors is still very much in Erik's blood, and he can often be fou...

Hello all. This is Wren, the background(BG) artist for Missing Stars. I am here to show you the process taken to make the backgrounds for the project. I do things differently than what a normal artist will do in this project. Also I have an array of programs to use to generate what you will see here. First of all the list of applications I use. AutoCAD 2012 AutoCAD Architecture 2012 Autodesk Revit Architecture 2012 Global Mapping 13.0 (for terrain creation) 3D Studio MAX 2012 Google Sketchup 8 Pro w/ Twilight Render 1.45 Adobe Photoshop CS5 (soon to be CS6) I am sure you are asking what the heck are so many programs needed. First off I am not as talented like my artist counterparts with freehand. And secondly, I am good at designing things with my engineering background. So long story short, I designed the whole campus with these programs and generate the shots needed for the project. First step: AutoCAD. Lines, lines, everywhere! I need a foundation and AutoCAD is p...

Hey all! Hamadyne here. Today, I'm here to talk to you about what I do on the team - writing.  The act of writing is an arduous process, with countless hours of preparation resulting in just a few pages of text. It's frustrating, annoying, and often gives me a headache.  That being said, I wouldn't trade this for the world.  Writing for a character is meant to be a challenge. Often when writing a scene, I'll have to write for two, maybe three people at a time. Differing mindsets, beliefs, and intentions drive much of the dialogue between characters, as well as driving the story forward as a whole. It wouldn't be in good form to make two identical, bland characters that only spoke about aircraft and popcorn. No one would like it, and the story wouldn't move unless something completely inconsistent to the scene occurred.  This of course leads to more writers blocks than a brick factory. It's tiring to try to slog through a scene, esp...

It's been about a month since our last character release (excluding Parrot-tan). As you may have noticed, the blog has been rather empty since then. Truth be told, it may be like that for a while. See, general development updates are rather boring (They usually amount to, scenes written today, art assets made today, programmers doing some incomprehensible tech stuff today), and finicky besides. The problem with posting progress is that it's liable to change very suddenly and very often. Besides that, we've also been a bit wobbly getting on our feet. With all the fun pre-production stuff mostly out of the way, the shift into the long slog of actual production hasn't been exactly smooth. There's been a bit of internal weirdness (all sorts of arguments and hurt feelings that arise from working with a large ass team where no one makes decisions) besides, but all in all I think we're starting to get the pace of it. I might as well give you guys some development...