Royalty Free Demo (BxG Princess dating sim)

[RoyaltyFreeVN]

Ever wanted to date a princess?

Now's your chance.

Royalty Free is a visual novel where you have the opportunity that not many people get: the opportunity to date a princess.

You play as Takahiro (default name), a new guard to the castle. He meets the five princess sisters, all with their own unique personalities, quirks, and interests.

Princess Utako, the youngest of the five, is energetic and doesn't care about behaving in the proper princess manner. She'd rather go out running around the castle or watching action movies behind her mother's back. Her true love is music. Composing, writing, singing, the entire process. But Utako may not be as cheerful and carefree as she seems...

Princess Ayaka, who goes by Aya, is Utako's polar opposite. Stuck-up, prissy, and prone to anger, Aya is all about enforcing proper behavior and setting the textbook example of a princess. Her hobby is designing and sewing. She specializes in clothes, but is capable of sewing many other things as well. However, Aya has some problems under the surface.

Princess Shizuka, the eldest of the five princesses, is shy and a borderline recluse. She spends most of her time in the library reading and writing. Shizuka aspires to be a writer, though doesn't really like to take criticism. She occasionally writes lyrics and collaborates with Utako to make them songs. But what happens when she begins to shut herself off?

Princess Hinata is kind, creative, and perfectionistic. She tends to be in the art room, painting, sculpting, drawing, you name it. Art is her life, her love, and her passion. She won't stop until whatever she's working on is absolutely flawless. She occasionally sketches dress designs for Aya to sew. But are her perfectionist tendencies worse than they seem?

Finally, we have Princess Mai. Mai is sweet, caring, and very extroverted. She is a dancer, spending most of her time in the castle ballroom, waltzing away. Mai works closely with Utako, dancing to whatever melody Utako has for her. However, she has a tendency to be prone to mood swings. What happens when these mood swings start causing problems?

Takahiro also meets his two roommates that he will be living with in the castle: practical and honorable Daichi Hisakawa and spacey, hyperactive Ryouta Mizushima. He also bonds with quiet yet dignified 11-year old castle servant Chibana Yukimura and a castle chef with a dark sense of humor, Naoko Kurosawa.

Takahiro receives choices that will raise or lower each princess's affection towards him.

Which one will he fall in love with? Will it work out? Will he be happy with the girl?
That's all up to you.

The game is currently set for release in Fall 2016.
Right now, all first drafts for routes are finished except Mai's, which is almost done. I just have no clue how to go about her bad end.
I am expecting to enter the "rewrite phase" soon, where the writing and pacing will be improved, and maybe a few more scenes will be thrown in.

The game was written by me, Emily LaPerch (http://hatoheart.tumblr.com).
The character art was drawn by Viktoria Aleksandrova (http://viki-chii.deviantart.com)
The game was programmed using Ren'Py.


You can download the demo version here: https://hatoheart.itch.io/royalty-free-demo
Only available for Mac and Windows at the moment, however I can make a Linux version if necessary.

[glithch]

its very short, sweet and silly! i really liked hinata :'D although everytime i heard the hatoful boyfriend soundtrack i kept thinking aout hatoful boyfriend and i dont think thats the effect you expected xd

[RoyaltyFreeVN]

Yes, I know, but I believe most (if not all) of the music used in Hatoful Boyfriend is royalty free, so it should be okay.

And thank you for enjoying it! Everyone I ask seems to have a different favorite, but I really like Hinata as well.

[RoyaltyFreeVN]

It's been almost three long years, but...
The base script is finally complete! Now I only have to go about the rewriting.
This is really exciting. This game's been in development since September 2013, and I'm really happy that it's almost ready!

All I really wanna do are some aesthetic changes. Like making the textbox and buttons less generic, adding a scene selector and music room and stuff, having a title screen. If anyone would be willing to help, let me know!

[radium]

i played through the demo 2 times while noting down my thoughts. i hope these don’t sound too harsh but i think honest feedback is quite important to improving anything, so i hope it will be useful.

graphical:
- i thought the western style character sprites are quite charming
- hinata’s sprite looks a bit weird because her dress is just totally black. i thought her sprite hadn’t loaded in at first.
- photographic backgrounds don’t fit the cartoony character art
- in the night sky background i could see the watermark at the bottom

writing:
- grammar and spelling is all fine
- descriptive writing is too sparse and doesn’t give a vivid picture of what’s happening in each scene
- show, don’t tell: all the princesses’ introductions have the mc telling me her personality and interests (how does he know these?) which feels a bit forced
- imo it would be better to have the mc discover their traits through interacting with the princesses. talking with shizuka in the bookstore or hinata fixing mc’s collar were nice little ways to show their personality without the mc saying she’s shy or she’s a perfectionist all the time.

characters
- hinata and shizuka were my favourite princesses. hinata was really chill and shizuka opening up more to the mc while talking about books was nice.
- mc seems disinterested in the princesses. he says very little during convos and most scenes with them end with him saying bye and walking off to do errands, so him suddenly declaring his love for the princess at the end is jarring
- the interaction between the mc and daichi and ryouta were nice, but it feels like he talks more with them than the princesses

and these are just extra opinions about the worldbuilding because i’m a nerd for worldbuilding

time period:
- the dialogue, character designs and backgrounds seem to be modern time
- but 15 - 17 year olds are extremely young to be doing a strenuous job like royal guard, and having a 11-year old servant is definitely against modern child labour laws
- also the queen and princesses walk around 24/7 in their formal dresses and tiara/crown which modern royalty don’t really do

setting:
- couldn’t really tell if the setting was japan/asian or western
- characters have japanese names but don’t really follow japanese social etiquette besides honorifics.
- status is pretty important in japanese and other asian cultures so it's weird that princesses and the queen would personally show a new guard around, and decorate/write invitations for a party by hand when they should really have servants to do that.
- people talking about the mc dating a princess 3 days after he arrives is really abrupt. at this point he’s only met each of them 1 or 2 times.
-the guard uniforms look like school uniforms

overall i think you're making good progress, especially for a solo project. i think the most important thing to work on is the writing, while graphical things like the gui, backgrounds and such can be tweaked afterwards.

[RoyaltyFreeVN]

i played through the demo 2 times while noting down my thoughts. i hope these don’t sound too harsh but i think honest feedback is quite important to improving anything, so i hope it will be useful.

graphical:
- i thought the western style character sprites are quite charming
- hinata’s sprite looks a bit weird because her dress is just totally black. i thought her sprite hadn’t loaded in at first.
- photographic backgrounds don’t fit the cartoony character art
- in the night sky background i could see the watermark at the bottom

writing:
- grammar and spelling is all fine
- descriptive writing is too sparse and doesn’t give a vivid picture of what’s happening in each scene
- show, don’t tell: all the princesses’ introductions have the mc telling me her personality and interests (how does he know these?) which feels a bit forced
- imo it would be better to have the mc discover their traits through interacting with the princesses. talking with shizuka in the bookstore or hinata fixing mc’s collar were nice little ways to show their personality without the mc saying she’s shy or she’s a perfectionist all the time.

characters
- hinata and shizuka were my favourite princesses. hinata was really chill and shizuka opening up more to the mc while talking about books was nice.
- mc seems disinterested in the princesses. he says very little during convos and most scenes with them end with him saying bye and walking off to do errands, so him suddenly declaring his love for the princess at the end is jarring
- the interaction between the mc and daichi and ryouta were nice, but it feels like he talks more with them than the princesses

and these are just extra opinions about the worldbuilding because i’m a nerd for worldbuilding

time period:
- the dialogue, character designs and backgrounds seem to be modern time
- but 15 - 17 year olds are extremely young to be doing a strenuous job like royal guard, and having a 11-year old servant is definitely against modern child labour laws
- also the queen and princesses walk around 24/7 in their formal dresses and tiara/crown which modern royalty don’t really do

setting:
- couldn’t really tell if the setting was japan/asian or western
- characters have japanese names but don’t really follow japanese social etiquette besides honorifics.
- status is pretty important in japanese and other asian cultures so it's weird that princesses and the queen would personally show a new guard around, and decorate/write invitations for a party by hand when they should really have servants to do that.
- people talking about the mc dating a princess 3 days after he arrives is really abrupt. at this point he’s only met each of them 1 or 2 times.
-the guard uniforms look like school uniforms

overall i think you're making good progress, especially for a solo project. i think the most important thing to work on is the writing, while graphical things like the gui, backgrounds and such can be tweaked afterwards.

Thank you for the feedback! I think you're the first person to actually give me detailed feedback, so now I can have something to go off of.
A lot of what you pointed out is stuff I've noticed myself, and much of it is being fixed.

I am aware of the numerous problems in the writing. I began this project when I was only 14 and have been working really hard over this summer to rewrite the parts I found problematic or otherwise poorly-written. All the parts in the demo are what I consider the worst parts, so a lot of it is, in my opinion, improved a lot in the full version.
Going into detail isn't really my strong suit personally, but I have been trying to work on that.
I think I was just so enthusiastic to begin making this that I just kinda rushed through it at first.

Unfortunately, I am not the artist for the game. The sprites are the one thing I commissioned outside help for, so there isn't really much I can do about that.

I do my best to point out multiple times that most of the stuff you listed about status and social etiquette is presented as being kind of odd for them to be doing, but I can make that more clear if need be.
I also think I should do a better job explaining why there are such young people working there. There is a reason, it's just not very well-explained.

Overall, thank you so much for your feedback! I really appreciate the honesty and I will do my best to fix these problems.

[RoyaltyFreeVN]

It's here!

The first version of the game is finally being released!
Some of what was mentioned above has been fixed, and others will likely be fixed through later updates and the like.