Cel by Date!
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
Download NowName your own price
About
Anna's starting to feel old. She's been going to conventions for years and she's exhausted, but is her anime hobby really the thing she needs to move on from?
Cel by Date! is an age-gap romance between two women having a rough night at an anime convention. Together, maybe they can figure out how to enjoy themselves again.
~~~
Features
- Mostly-kinetic visual novel
- Nostalgic vibes
- 8k words
- Traditionally painted cel-style anime art
- 4 backgrounds, 4 CGs
- ~30 minutes to read
- Romantic or platonic relationship endings
Warnings - game contains:
- Alcohol consumption
- Mildly suggestive content
Credits
Writing, art, and programming by Kat Hueber
Music:
Space Flyer by Dayz Music
Candy Moon by Dayz Music
Back in the 80s by HoliznaCC0
Dance Tonight by Hotham
Cherry Blossom Renpy GUI kit by RenpyGuru
Made for the NaNoRenO 2024 game jam
Status | Released |
Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux |
Rating | Rated 4.8 out of 5 stars (29 total ratings) |
Author | katmakesgames |
Genre | Visual Novel |
Made with | Ren'Py |
Tags | Amare, Anime, cosplay, Lesbian, LGBT, Romance, traditional-art, wholesome, Yuri |
Asset license | Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal |
Average session | About a half-hour |
Languages | English |
Inputs | Keyboard, Mouse |
Accessibility | Subtitles |
Download
Download NowName your own price
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Cel-by-Date!-1.01-mac.zip 110 MB
Cel-by-Date!-1.01-pc.zip 116 MB
Comments
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This was very lovely. I liked the messy and open ended nature of the story, it felt very true to life but that complicatedness wasn't framed as a flaw but really emphasized the value of just taking people as they are. thank you for this majorly cute story!
very cute very yuri!! i would love to read annas RP logs,, we read this while bored behind our booth tabling at a local anime con so it felt like..... conception. con-inception, not conception
Thanks for playing! An anime con is SUCH the perfect place to lol.
Hi, could you please mark the downloads with the OS they're compatible with? (The checkmarks next to "Executable" on the edit game page) Without it, it's currently impossible to download the games on the itch app.
Should be fixed now! Thanks, I didn't even know that was a thing.
Thank you!
This was amazing, i swear a cracked up laughing at every reference. Would love to see what you make in the future!
Thank you so much!! I'm making a micro-VN for the O2A2 jam next week and still working on the demo for my Big Project, so there's definitely stuff in the pipeline for soon!
HYPEE
I really enjoyed this game and was able to relate a lot to the main characters feelings even if I'm not as old as she is. (Also wanted to let you know the game is currently incompatible with the itch.io launcher in case you didnt know)
Thanks for playing and thanks for letting me know! I'll mess with that.
Sorry, writing reviews isn't my strong suit, but I enjoyed the game, and definitely appreciated the artwork (despite never having seen its inspirations myself).
Im glad you enjoyed it!
This was so cute omg!!!
I loved the art so much; the backgrounds have so much character (they really do look like retro anime backgrounds from the 80s/early 90s) and the filter over everything adds to it. The character art is really nice too; I love how expressive everybody is! Skye's grumpy faces are all very cute hehe >w<
It's also nice reading a yuri VN with older characters for once! It makes a nice change from the vast majority of yuri VNs where the characters are all set in high school. The world needs more age gap yuri with adult women.
I liked Anna a lot as a protag too! I love how dry and deadpan and kind of 'over it' she is haha, her narration was a pleasure to read.
Thank you so much for creating this, it's very cute! It was a nice bite-sized treat and I enjoyed it a lot! <3
Thanks so much for commenting!! I'm a big fan of your work (In Fair Spirits and Lovey Dovey Demon are recent faves) so it really means a lot!
I am for sure team "more older women in yuri" forever. Actually team "more older women in everything" lol.
Thank you! I loved it to bits! <3
It would`ve been a good story even as text only, and yet visual direction (holy shit, it`s all traditional art and real cels, that`s so cool) and that nostalgic yellow font make it even better. It really enhances the story themes. And that cel metaphor at the end... really ties it all together. Amazing work!
I`m a biit younger, but I can certainly relate how Anna feels. But we all still here and still enjoy our things and that is all that matters, right?
I`ll be watching out for your new works!
Thanks so much for commenting!! I'm actually Skye's age instead of Anna's myself (though I do have a big cel collection :P)
I'm glad it was resonant for you!
This is lovely. Geography and career have kept me from cons, but I'm ageing, I have too many degrees, and I have a cel collection, so I certainly felt aspects of this. Plus it has yellow text, over images in 4:3, the most virtuous aspect ratio!
Also the detailed written texture in VNs doesn't always get enough notice, so I want to say that I liked how crisp and tuned much of the dialogue (spoken and internal) felt. Nice variation in syntactic complexity, and a sense of two different register-sets for the two characters.
Thanks so much for playing!! I'm especially glad to hear your thoughts about dialogue because I come from a theater background and paying a lot of attention to that kind of thing is really important to me.
This one has been a healing experience and definitely one of my fav VNs I ever read/played.
I resonate strongly to it as I've been working/attending cons since high school and pretty much I've felt the same as the protagonist: how things changed and how one moved in a different way. And I also met people who relate with the problems of Skye regarding cosplay gigs.
All in all feels like a love letter to otaku culture and you can feel the warmth through the reading.
It's witty, funny, relatable and cute and too many words to express how much I loved it. Amazing job and thanks for this!!!
Thank you so much for playing it and commenting!!! I knew I was making this game for SUCH a specific audience and it brings me so much joy to see that it's connected with someone else in the community in just the way that I wanted it to.
I helped Cel By Date and I suffered emotional damage. And I'd do it again.
I provided a free consultation as part of a limited promotion to help Cel By Date! Cel By Date's unique presentation style made it an interesting exercise. Being painted on real cels and then brought to the visual novel is a cool way to do it.
If you are working on your own visual novels, be sure to check out my Twitch channel too for live tutorials, feedback and analysis.
WAAGGHH! Okay I just actually set aside the time to play this. You're killing me here.
My expectations going in: "well, it uses hand-painted animation cels, so my hipster sensibilities will be appeased, and it's gay, so that gives it points. beyond that we'll see"
What I got: the single most healing experience I've had in a long ass time. Playing this actually made me consider going to a convention this summer. It has been 4 years since the last time I went to a convention. I have never felt so seen by a game.
[Also the fact that the font + color makes it looks like old subtitles.... absolutely impeccable...]
The fluff was so cute it had me making scrunched Kermit face the whole time, but really I just keep coming back to how painfully relatable this all was. What a delightful story and a brilliant idea to literally use animation cels as your medium to tell it. This is straight up one of the best VN's I've played, obviously it's relatively short but it's like a short story as opposed to a novel—it's exactly as long as it needs to be to tell the story it needs to tell.
Absolutely fantastic shit, I'm inflicting this on every single other old tired gay ex-cosplayer I know [I know many of them]
YES YES YES THIS IS EXACTLY THE GOAL THANK YOU FOR PLAYING AND BEING A PART OF MY LASER-TARGETED INTENDED AUDIENCE
This was awfully cute. Thanks for creating this~!
I left you a review, too! ^^
Ahhh Anna and Skye are so lovely.... the aesthetics are of course amazing but the story was so cute too-- amazing job!!
thanks so much!!
I loved this short adventure, exactly what I needed! You've made an incredibly relatable protagonist. The themes really hit home, but in a good way. Similar situations have made me feel hesitant about going back to con next year but Anna's experience makes me feel much more excited and hopeful for my next con-adventure. :)
I'm so glad you connected with it!
Hey! I played the game and had a lot of fun with it!!
First of all, the fact it was drawn on actual cels is a HUGE highlight of the game. It gave it a very authentic and strong artistic direction, which I really enjoyed. The character design too was very great! And finally, mention to the omg so cute GUI!
The story was also very wholesome! I appreciate the depiction of "anime" culture and I think it's the first time I see a piece of media articulate how appreciating anime has changed (for example, where I lived at least, it was "childish" to enjoy animes 12-13 years ago; nowadays, it's become very mainstream), and how difficult it can be to navigate through a community that has transformed into something that isn't made for you anymore.
The story between the two leads was also very cute! Whether it is platonic or not, it was a nice thing to see them parallel each other, and the themes surrounding Skye (about being trapped in her cosplays, forced to please fans she doesn't even like that much anymore) is interesting. I especially enjoyed the comment about her creating lewd content to meet the requests, as I've been thinking a bit about people in their late teens but majors or early 20s creating lewd content, and if they weren't putting themselves at the mercy of the vagaries of life, at an age at which you can't necessarily project yourself into being 40 (while I think it's less of an issue for older adults with a more stable situation)? Anyway, I'm just rambling and it's not that interesting haha, but it gave me things to think about!
The overall message of the game was very sweet, and I enjoyed the idea of just taking things as they come, at your own pace, rather than letting doubts or questions get the best of you. Just have fun, respect your boundaries and others', and you'll be good.
It was a great game, congrats on making it under a month!!
I'm so glad you enjoyed it!! I had a lot of fun learning how cel animation works in a more hands-on way too lol.
Actually, my initial concept for the game was writing parallel viewpoints of both Anna and Skye that you could switch between at will, but the writing and coding of that proved a bit too much for me for the time I had here. Maybe in a future update!
Such fun compelling art style and great writing! Rather funny!
<3
YESSSSSS!!!!!! IT'S OUT!!!!!!! This is such a universe brain concept, I truly just LOVE the fact that you actually hand-painted animation cels to make the assets for this. I can't wait to check it out when I have the time HOPEFULLY VERY VERY SOON!!!! Congratulations!!
Thanks so much!! Can't wait to see what you think.