Royalty Free

Royalty Free is a Visual Novel/Dating Sim where you can date princesses.

The game's demo was released on May 22nd, 2015, and the full game was released on September 1st, 2016. It can be downloaded for free here.

You play the role of a new guard to the castle. Your first day on the job, you meet the five princesses that you have the option of pursuing:

You receive choices that affect which girl you end up with. However, if you make wrong choices, you will get kicked off the guard and the game will start over.
 * Utako, an energetic, tomboyish musician that doesn't care for stuffiness or being proper.
 * Aya, a designer and seamstress that wants to enforce proper princess behavior.
 * Shizuka, a shy, reclusive writer who spends most of her time in the library.
 * Hinata, a perfectionist artist with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
 * Mai, a kind dancer that is friends with everyone.

Release notes

 * The game began development on September 29, 2013. The demo was released on May 22nd, 2015, and the full game was released on September 1st, 2016.
 * A rough timeline of the game's development is as follows:
 * September 29, 2013: Development begins.
 * Act 1 is completed sometime between October and November 2013.
 * Utako and Aya's routes are written in January/February 2014.
 * Shizuka and Hinata's routes are written over the course of two weeks in August 2014.
 * 2015 was a "hiatus year" of sorts. Other than the official sprites being made in March and the demo's release in May, the only work really done on the game included the beginning bits of Mai's route, minor rewrites, and scene additions.
 * Emily later clarified 2015 was an extremely busy year for her (as she was just about to start her senior year of high school and was busy with applying to colleges and jobs) thus leaving her very little time to work on Royalty Free.
 * Rewrites begin in spring/summer of 2016. Parts of the game that Emily felt needed improvement were rewritten and bugs and sprite errors are fixed.
 * Mai's route is written in July/August 2016, and finished two weeks before release.
 * The two weeks leading up to the game's release mainly involved more rewrites and minor tweaks, as well as making sure no errors were left in.
 * September 1st, 2016: The game is officially released on itch.io.
 * The game was originally set for a 2014 release upon its announcement before getting pushed back to 2015, then pushed back again to 2016, due to it not being finished in time. In early 2016, she decided on September 1st of that year as a release date, due to being determined to finish the project and not push it back any further.
 * It is completely free to play. There is an option to donate to Emily on the game's information page, but this isn't required in order to download it. Emily has stated that she'd intended for the game to be free from the beginning of development, and when she finished development she justified her choice, saying she'd feel bad charging for it since the overall quality wasn't great.
 * People involved in the making of Royalty Free:
 * The game was created, written, and programmed by Emily LaPerch.
 * The character art was done by Viktoria Aleksandrova.
 * The beta testers include Brian Quinn, Alex Svarplaitis, Corinne Jones, Ellirose Edwards, and Viktoria Aleksandrova.

Trivia

 * The game's overall budget would've been nothing, but when Emily was getting desperate for actual sprites as opposed to placeholder or copyrighted ones, she shelled out $50 to commission someone to make them. Therefore, Royalty Free's overall budget was $50.
 * The location of this game is undetermined, though it does take place somewhere in the Fukushima prefecture. The game is implied to take place in the present, since modern technology comes up a lot.