Somnova Studios Presents: Missing Stars

[FeetLickerMcgee]

Hello! I've just started using the forum, but i'm ready to start posting. Just to clarify, I am not a developer of the project, but merely a fan. Thank you.

I'd like to start off by saying, this project was inspired by Katawa Shoujo, the hit VN made by 4 Leaf Studios. It was started over a little more than a year ago. The setting is Vienna, Austria, in a school for students with Mental Issues. Erik, the main character, meets his fellow students, including Annaliese, Natalya, Natasha, Katja, Jeanne, Isolda, and Lena. In recent blog posts, they've hinted at a release of a demo.

Link to the blog/main page
http://somnovastudios.org/

[Vialixia]

Cute! I hope they deal with the subject sensitively.

[gekiganwing]

The creators of Missing Stars have their own sub-Reddit, and they have a Twitter account as well. Their dedicated forum is reasonably active. (I logged into the Somnova Studios forum just a day or two ago, and mentioned Lemma Soft in a post. But I don't know if any of the creators even know about this one.)

Unfortunately, I have not travelled anywhere near Vienna, so I can't comment on the setting. But I have at least one friend who's been there. And I'm sure plenty of other people can talk with the creators about their firsthand experiences in and around the city. The development blog has a lot of articles, but I was not sure which or any of them talk about the VN's setting.

Also, I have learned over the years that it's easy to get burnt out after too many similar stories, games, and so on. As far as I can tell, Missing Stars has at least a few things in common with Katawa Shoujo:

* boy x girl(s) pairings
* featured characters all have a distinct ailment or handicap
* private school setting
* some NSFW content
* mostly serious, depressing tone (a nakige, or "crying game")

I say this while admitting that innovation is not everything. It's impossible to be completely original. Some of the best stories are relatively derivative. Some of the most innovative stories are famous because of unusual or gimmicky elements, and may not be all that good.

Finally, I don't know a lot of things about Missing Stars. Some questions that I should probably just ask on their forum include...

* Will it have a relatively slow pace?
* Will long sections of the story go by with no choices, or will they be frequent?
* How much story time will be devoted to the common route, and how much time will be devoted to the main character's relationship with individual characters?
* Freeware or indie game?
* Any unusual endings?
* Any chance for pairings other than boy x girl?
* Any chance for complex gameplay?

[Boomsickle]

Characters look great. except the short haired blond one...she scares me.

[Astartus]

Dear lemmasoft-community,

I'm Astartus, one of the devs of Missing Stars, and I wanted to reply to this thread to shortly describe the setting and to ask for help with the project, since we're currently looking for artists, so if this interests you, feel free to apply!

Missing Stars is a Visual Novel from the romance genre and takes place on an Austrian school for students with psychological disorders. The protagonist, a young man named Erik, transfers there trying to rebuild his life. There, he meets a variety of characters struggling with similar and different problems, and the decisions of the player influence the story, especially towards which one of the female main characters he pursues a romantic relationship with.

Our main goal is to look into everyday consequences of psychological disorders and the social stigma that people suffering from them face every day - especially pertaining to romantic and sexual relationships.

The project is organized on a volunteer foundation and will be offered free of charge to download to maximize awareness, which is why we cannot offer direct payment. Currently we are mainly looking for line artists able to replicate the style shown in our current blog entry, as well as background artists capable of creating environments and backdrops, mainly for a school setting. We estimate the remaining development time to be about two years. Because of its topics, Missing Stars will contain NSFW content and artists applying should be comfortable with that. Also, because our team is spread around the entire globe, a reliable internet connection, online presence as well as fluency in the English language are necessary.

Currently our art team consists of a line artists, two colorists and the renowned animator MikeInel.

If you are interested in joining us, please contact me at

A.Audio@gmx.de
+49-177-2552566 (German phone line, international costs may apply)
index.php

Thank you for your time and consideration! Kind regards,

Kris "Astartus" Flacke
Soundtrack Supervisor of Somnova Studio

[gekiganwing]

I'm Astartus, one of the devs of Missing Stars, and I wanted to reply to this thread to shortly describe the setting and to ask for help with the project, since we're currently looking for artists, so if this interests you, feel free to apply!

Thank you for being willing to post here on Lemma Soft. I know that Missing Stars has been a work in progress for a while. I have been worried that its scope might be too much to handle. If you might benefit by scaling it back, or releasing it in several segments, then consider doing so.

It can be difficult to find people on this forum who can dedicate their time and resources. Be sure to read our Suggestions for Recruiters. Also, look through large creative communities such as Deviant Art, and see if you can find someone who has the art and writing skills that you're looking for.

[Astartus]

Thanks for the link, I guess I should elaborate a bit I know we haven't made a lot of updates, but we generally want to keep our cards close to the chest until we can actually output a demo (which we will do, consisting of Arc 1, as soon as we're done, which might be soon - depending on the state of our art team). As we said in a previous post though, we are REALLY close to that, we have dozens of finished soundtrack files and some writers already finished their parts of Arc 1 completely. Our main problem has been art, for quite some time now, which also explains our lack of assets to show off - art is the easiest and most impressive way to show progress, and that is exactly the department we have too few people in. At the same time, seeing as how we are dealing with a really sensitive topic, we feel that scaling back our quality goals would be the wrong way to approach the project - if we want to do this, we want to do it right. It was mostly behind the scenes, but actually a lot of the last year saw a LOT LOT LOT of artist hunting behind the scenes, on deviantart, pixiv, reddit, tumblr - name it and we went looking for help there. By now, though, we realized that randomly searching for art and then asking them is a really inefficient way to do this and that our time and effort would be better spent by opening up, hoping that people will approach us and do the jobs that we actually joined Somnova to do - writing, drawing and composing.
I hope that clears up some confusion about the current state of the project

[gekiganwing]

There's a positive update on this project -- the Missing Stars team has just released a short story collection called Overture.

I first heard about Missing Stars over five years ago. I've become concerned about whether this work-in-progress will be finished, or whether it will be quietly canceled. So many freeware VNs have never been released due to problems including a much-too-ambitious scope, team conflicts, and so on...