Somnova Studios

If you've spent any time in our IRC, or been following our blog, then you've probably seen a couple mentions of a few new artists that will be joining our team. Well, the wait is over, and I'm proud to introduce the new folks. Rather than include a bunch of links, we've instead decided to make things a bit easier: there's now an official Missing Stars art tumblr ! From here on out, any promotional art that we post on the regular blog will also be posted on the Tumblr, so you can admire without having to deal with our wordiness here. In addition, we've kept up the application pieces from our new artists, so you can see a bit of their work and get acquainted with some of what you can expect. Please note that none  of the application pieces contain Missing Stars characters or other MS-related material. With these new additions, our art progress should be much smoother than it has been, and you can look forward to more frequent promo pieces and updates. And just f...

I owe an apology to the rest of the Missing Stars team and the community. I erroneously assumed that the team would go along with my new proposed direction for Missing Stars that we introduced yesterday if they saw all of the amazing community support I could drum up for it, but they said "it doesn't count because it was April Fool's Day." Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon begs to differ, but I digress. I suppose I can work on the clearly superior spinoff in my spare time. In the time I was trying to give Missing Stars a bold, new direction, it turns out we got a lot of actual work done. In fact, no one even told me that we got a new artist who goes by the name Morthiasik , along with 12 other artist applications we are currently looking through. That's certainly a lot better than me plonking away in MS Paint trying to make sprites. Seriously, this new Isolda art has like, 2000 times as many pixels as my art: Speaking of Isolda, I have been told that her route for ...

So you may remember our previous blog post having a call for new artists. The bad news is, we didn't get any artists. The good news is, we're doing what every indie game without artists does.  We're going retro!  Missing Stars is now being done in the classic style of video games' past, and the early results are looking great! For instance, here's our menu, now updated with the new style: Also, we have already started rewriting our soundtrack to match the new look. We present you two songs off of the Missing Stars soundtrack in monophonic, hi-fidelity 8-bit glory. We also started on converting our already existing sprites, but our conversion algorithm isn't quite working as planned: We'll have something better by tomorrow hopefully. We know this a bold, new direction for Missing Stars that you probably weren't expecting, but we assure you it is for the best. We hope you will come to see this the same way we do: the way Missing Stars w...

I personally have received quite a few private messages from strangers wondering what our project is doing, and I think it's time we laid out exactly what is going on. 1. Development is still happening The relative scarcity of posts may imply otherwise, but we are working on this project as hard as ever. Admittedly, we have waves of productivity where we're sometimes more productive than at other times (which conveniently lines up with midterms and finals), but we're always working. We originally decided not to post much until the demo released, but we realized this was a mistake due to our aforementioned waves of productivity, which leads to: 2. We're going to stop being secretive about game assets We originally thought that keeping everything close to our chests would somehow make the project more prestigious, but in reality it just means people stop caring as little to no news is released. Even the recent reintroductions of the main characters was a back-and-f...

Slowly, with the hush of candles going out and final kisses stolen under the cover of darkness, Valentine's Day of 2014 comes to an end. Whether you spent the day holding hands with and coming closer to your loved one, like Isolda, exchanging meaningful glances over a specially made dinner, like Jeanne, or simply busying yourself thinking how you'll organize all of those new chocolates when you get back to your room (and who'll do something like that?), we hope each and every one of you had a wonderful time. Much as with writing, in this sense, there's something fundamentally paradoxical about love: it's an intensely personal experience, private, even - yet in the same time it is meaningless unless shared with another. Few people could attest to that complexity right now, in those final, fervid moments before night becomes morning and holy becomes every, than Erik Wilhelm, whose woes are laid bare in Worthington's new Valentine's Day short story, "Exp...