A Very Important Date
A downloadable Game Demo for Windows, macOS, and Linux
Hi, everyone! Here's our most recent update post on KS.
We do update our Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr more than here, so if you want to keep up-to-date on what's going on, you can follow us there.
A Very Important Date is a café romance set in a strange, yet familiar world, with loose ties to Lewis Carroll's Alice stories. But this isn't the typical Alice in Wonderland styled story! While A Very Important Date takes a few notes from the Carroll classics, you don't have to be a big fan of them to enjoy this game for its rich dialogue, witty humor, and unique art style!
Our story follows Alison Sunderlund, an average small town Ohio girl. By day she can be found working as a server in a local café and by night she takes care of her house and family: her dad and younger brother. Though she doesn't have a lot on her plate, the life she has gives her very little free time. But Alison's life changes one morning when she wakes up sitting under a tree in a brand new world.
Confused, Alison sets out to discover more about her new surroundings, accidentally stumbling upon the Arkwright estate, home of Gwyn Arkwright and The Looking Glass Café. With no place to go and a way back home seeming impossible, Gwyn, being the kind soul that he is, gives Alison a job and a place to stay for the time being. Everything's peachy except... now Alison must choose which of The Looking Glass' five employees will train her!
Will Alison stick with what she knows and remain a server? Will she a cut a new path as a cook's assistant? Will she wipe away her past burdens as a low-level dishwasher? Will Alison ever figure out what strange world she's in? Will she ever return to her old life?
Will she want to?
All stories are written by Noëlle Hyzy, the winner of Voltage Inc.'s 4th Annual International Script Writing Contest for Romance Apps.
- 8 suitors
- Expressive animated characters
- 12 chapters for each Suitor's Main Story
- 3 possible endings per Main Story
- 3 chapter Epilogues for each Suitor
- 40+ hours of content across all stories
- ≈50,000 words per Main Story
- 300,000+ words across the whole game
- At least 6 CGs per Main Story
- Main character CG options
- 12 amazing tracks from Composer Geoff Moore
- 60+ beautiful backgrounds
- Episodic content
- Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux
- Available for iOS and Android.
This demo consists of our game's prologue, where we introduce Alison, build the wondrous town of Mimsboro, and give players a glimpse of the Looking Glass crew.
To pull up the in-game menu outside of the main menu, press P or ESC. Note: some programs render the ESC key inoperable when running in conjunction with other programs, this demo included.
Features include:
- Save/Load/Delete
- CG/Event Illustration toggle
- Quit Menu that allows you to go back to the Main Menu
- Tutorial Screen at the beginning of the Prologue
- More in-game content
- Gwyn's First Chapter(s) with choices
- Emil's First Chapter(s) with choices
- Rory's First Chapter(s) with choices
Naïve Sprites is an indie otome game group that's currently developing our first visual novel. Our goal is to make stories that all of you wonderful people want to read. We hope to shake-up the visual novel market with more westernized stories, while still retaining the beautiful anime inspired art of the otome genre's roots.
A Very Important Date started as Noelle's passion project in June 2014. She'd grown to love visual novels and the otome genre and felt that it was time to tell one of her own stories. But ambition took over, and the Important Date lore grew to the epic story that it is now. So to help reign in the project, Noelle found other like-minded individuals along the way to make sure that this big game got made.
- Noëlle Hyzy: Project Director, Executive Producer, Lead Writer, Character Concept, Background Concept
- Justin V: Co-Writer, Editor, Art Editor, Background Concept, and GUI Artist
- kooriesque: Character Concept Artist
- darkenmarr: Sprite and CG Artist
- furude: BG, GUI, and Game Icon Arist
- lordless: BG Artist
- IchBinJager and Wolfborg: Programmers
- Geoff Moore: Composer
Download
Development log
- A Very Important Date [Otome|Fantasy] - Demo 2.2Jun 21, 2017
Comments
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I went to their Kickstarter and was able to read the most recent update on there. Unfortunately. as of January 2023, the development of this project has officially ended. I linked the post below for any that would like to read it.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1827116409/a-very-important-date-spin-off-b...
I really hope this project wasn't dropped, it shows a lot of potential!
It still is but vary slowly do to heath problems.
I am sorry to hear that, good luck :)
I think we can say that this project is rather dead, unfortunately.
Hey guys!!!! I just wanted to know if there's any estimated release date for the game now... I saw the last update about the issues you were having... Are they solved yet???
i hope you guys healthy, be safe. i'm still waitting for this game `(*>﹏<*)′
Thankfully so far that we know of no one on the team has covid. Our team lead was diagnosed with a genetic mutation last year that caused her to have her colon to be removed back in May. She's still healing from her surgery.
We don't remember if we posted this anywhere on itch.io, but our character artist left us in December 2019, so we had to find new artists to redo the artwork that we had at the time and complete the rest. Things have been a little slow because of those two situations plus with covid affecting people's main jobs.
Most recent update is here:
https://www.facebook.com/naivesprites/posts/1739898286168026
How are things going on development?
I'm so sorry! I thought I responded to your comment. Our most recent update can be read here:
https://www.facebook.com/naivesprites/posts/1739898286168026
I don't think I posted this on itch.io, but our character artist left us in December, so we had to find new artists and start over on the character art. Our team lead (myself) was diagnosed with a genetic mutation which caused her to have her colon removed in May.
So progress has been pretty slow this year.
when was the last time this page was updated??
Hi! Because of serious health issues that a few members have been dealing with for the past year or two progress has been slow. We plan to release a new demo in a few months as long as health issues don't get even more in the way.
is this done yet? how is the progress?
Oh wow! I didn't even get a notification in my email for this comment. I'm sorry for the extremely late response.
We are still working on A Very Important Date, but the progress has been slow due to serious health issues for some of the members on the team. There are plans to release a new demo in a few months as long as nothing else gets in the way.
I wanted to try the game for linux but I get the error:
Games/AVID Demo 2.2 (Linux)/AVID Demo 2.2 (Linux).x86: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I do not know of other linux users with the same problem.
The story looks really interesting :)
I'm sorry for the late response.
Thank you so much for letting me know! I'll look into it tonight and try to load up a new Linux file as soon as I can. If that file doesn't work, I'll talk to our programmers to see if they can figure out the issue.
But in my search (I'm not overly familiar with Linux) about the error, some other people had similar issues with other programs and were told to run this command: apt-get install lib32stdc++6
Once again, thank you!
- Noelle
I enjoyed the Demo so much ! The story is very captivating and the characters are lovely , so I ended up getting attached to most of them ;D .When will the full game come out?
Thank you so much for the compliments ^_^. I'm happy to hear that you enjoy it.
At the latest, we plan to have the visual novel out in a year from now. Hoping for sooner. A Very Important Date is going to be episodically released by character, but we plan to have both Emil's and Gwyn's main and epilogue stories out on release day.
Absolutely love the story line and characters but I wish we could input our own name to make it a bit more personal. Great game though!
Thank you so much! We're happy to hear that you like the story and characters. We do plan to allow players to input their own name for Alison. We haven't programmed this feature into the demo yet, but we hope to see it in a future release. This is something that I like in other visual novels, too, as I feel it makes it even easier to connect with the characters and the storyline.
- Noelle
I've played the demo, and I really enjoyed it. I like Alice in Wonderland inspired stories, and this one is pretty interesting and unique in it's setting. It's nice to see how the alternate world is actually similar to ours, but still not the same. I may usually rather very fantasy oriented worlds more, but as far as Alice based stories go, this is an intriguing take on it.
All of the characters are pretty nice, though I don't know if I'll try all of the routes. I'm also lucky because Emil is my favorite so far, so I had a couple of chapters to do.
Can't wait to play his full route!
I enjoyed the Demo so much ! The story is very captivating and the characters are lovely , so I ended up getting attached to most of them ;D .When will the full game come out?
Thank you and hello! Well, it's hard to say when the full game will come out as individual stories will be released episodically. As our first attempt at Kickstarter didn't make it, we have to push back our release date for the first two stories (Gwyn's and Emil's). If our second attempt is a success, we're hoping for the first two releases to be somewhere between November 2017 and February 2018 with Gwyn's and Emil's main stories and epilogues. After that, we plan to release another character's story every month to two months (we haven't fully gone over the scheduling system yet).
We're currently planning two seasons for the game, with each season having a main story, epilogue, and sequel for each character. Then in the second season, we plan to add even more characters for players to choose from.
- Noelle
Hello ! I can't wait to play the first episode :)) I m sure the full game will be a wonderfull success :) best of luck to you !
I hope so ^_^ and thank you so much!