Fault Milestone One

One follows the royal guardian Ritona, who uses magic to escape the kingdom of Rughzenhaide, along with princess Selphine, after it gets attacked by mercenaries. The two arrive in a strange country unfamiliar to them halfway across the world, and follows their attempt to return home. It is the first entry in the Fault series, and was followed by Fault Milestone Two in 2015. Considered a "kinetic novel", the game is mostly linear and features minimal gameplay interaction. The game was directed and written by Munisix, with artwork by Hare Konatsu. The story was initially based on a pitch for a role-playing game delivered to Munisix; being underwhelmed with it, he reworked it until it according to him no longer resembled the original idea. When Alice in Dissonance were approached by Sekai Project about an English localization, they wanted to add some polish first. They financed the localization, as well as ports for other platforms through a crowdfunding campaign in 2014. The game was a commercial success and received positive reviews from critics.

• Title — Fault Milestone One • Developer — Alice in Dissonance • Publisher — Sekai ProjectAlice in Dissonance • Director — Munisix • Artist — Hare Konatsu • Writer — Munisix • Composer — Luiza Carvalho • Engine — * Ren'Py (PC) • Unity (consoles) • Platforms — Windows, OS X, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 • Released — Windows, OS X, Linux'Nintendo SwitchOctober 3, 2019PlayStation 4 • Genre — Visual novel • Modes — Single-player

Fault Milestone One is a linear visual novel with no player interaction aside from one player decision early in the game that affects some dialogue. The game focuses on telling a story, with the player being an observer. The player has access to an in-game encyclopedia detailing concepts seen in the game. The game is set in a world where the art of using magic, called "manakravte", exists and is used in almost every aspect of life. However, not everywhere on the planet has high concentration of mana. These places, called the "Outer-Pole", have instead had advances in science and medicine. The story follows the manakravter Ritona, the royal guardian for princess Selphine of the kingdom of Rughzenhaide. Among other characters are Rune, a girl from the Outer-Pole, and her brother Rudo, the head of a major company.

Fault Milestone One was developed by Alice in Dissonance as the first work under Project Written, the name of their operations. It was directed and written by Munisix, with character designs and other art by Hare Konatsu. The "Milestone" in the title comes from how Alice in Dissonance wanted to do something different from the commonly used word "Episode"; as the story is about a journey, they found "Milestone" thematically fitting. While Munisix is a native speaker of English, he chose to write the game in Japanese, stating that his reason for this was that he had had more exposure to the visual novel medium in Japanese than in English, also saying that he would have used English if he were to write a movie script. According to him, the writing is the aspect that takes the most time during the production, with a lot of time spent on coming up with ideas and turning them into "something consistent". Describing himself as a disorganized person, he has said that they have had to delete whole segments due to him overlooking some aspect of the game's world. The game's story originally began as a pitch for a role-playing game that was delivered to Munisix at some point in the 2000s. It included the premise of a princess defeating an enemy that had devastated her homeland, as well as character names and personalities, and asked Munisix to write a story. Munisix found the pitch underwhelming, but still worked on it, attempting to make it more interesting; while he was working on it, the person who had delivered the pitch stopped contacting him. Not wanting to abandon the work he had put into the project, Munisix continued with the project, making several changes to the point where it no longer resembled the original pitch. Among these were additions to the game world and cast, including the creation of Ritona and the Outer and Inner-Poles, the concept of the "path down", and a motivation for the game's antagonist. He also changed the structure of the story so that it could work as a manga or as "a better game than it was intended to be". Munisix wrote the main characters to be strong women who can "more than adequately do" what male characters from shōnen manga can, intending for both male and female players to be able to look up to them. He did not consider the characters' sexual or affectionate attractiveness to be a primary goal, and intended for them to be "gritty and cool" rather than "cute and lovely". He based Rune's condition on psychopathy. He aimed to give each part of the game world its own feeling: Rughzenhaide and the Alliance were made similar to the Age of Enlightenment, but with an information technology (IT) revolution that did not require computers. According to Munisix, the names of characters and locations came about naturally, with no time spent on any naming scheme. He tried to write slice-of-life scenes for the game, but felt that they were not compelling or convincing, stating that the tense situations the main characters are in throughout the story leave little room for levity, as they need to get home alive and constantly have to consider potential dangers. For the game's character design, Munisix initially gave Konatsu specifications of what each character would look like; as they kept working on the Fault series, they "found a rhythm", with Konatsu designing the characters according to their personality and function. They go through multiple prototypes, with some designs turning into other characters, and some clothes being reused on other characters. Due to misunderstandings, Konatsu initially designed Rune as a male character. Munisix had imagined Rune as looking "girly", wearing a skirt and having long, black hair. However, when Konatsu redid the design, elements of the original male design remained, with Rune being given pigtails and pants, which Munisix later said that he preferred over his original concept. Some locations that did not exist in the original draft, such as the Zhevitz family manor, were added to the story late during the game's production when Alice in Dissonance was low on money. Because of this, they had to resort to using stock background images.

The game was originally released in Japan on August 12, 2013. The English video game publisher Sekai Project found out about it while looking for new groups in the Japanese video game market by reading Japanese news sites focusing on doujin games, and found Fault Milestone One to stand out from the rest. They contacted Alice in Dissonance and organized a meeting in Tokyo, where they discussed the licenses that would be needed to publish the game in the West; the only one required was for the music. As Alice in Dissonance felt that the game required some more polish before getting an international release, they decided to finance development of improved character sprites, new cutscenes and an English translation through the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Sekai Project launched the campaign in June 2014, with the goal to raise $5,000 by July 18; by the end of the campaign, they had managed to raise 34,662, allowing for the production of Android and PlayStation Vita ports, an artbook, and the prequel game Fault: Silence the Pedant. Originally, Munisix had planned to handle the localization himself, but due to the success of the crowdfunding campaign he was instead able to focus on developing the sequel Fault Milestone Two. By December 2014, the English translation was finished, with Sekai Project working on finishing the production. The director's cut version was released in Japan on August 17, 2014, and internationally in both English and Japanese on December 15, 2014. In July 2016, the game was updated with a new English translation intended to be "100% faithful" to the Japanese version of the game, and more consistent in tone with Fault Milestone Two due to them sharing the same translator. While Sekai Project had initially begun work on porting the game to the Unity game engine themselves in order to release the game on the PlayStation Vita, they announced in February 2016 that they had instead decided to contract an outside company to do the PlayStation Vita port. The game was also released for the Nintendo Switch on October 3, 2019, and the PlayStation 4 on May 22, 2020. Both console versions are to get a limited physical release, done in a partnership with Limited Run Games. An update in March 2018 replaced most character and background art with higher quality ones, as well as a new score composed by Luiza Carvalho. These updates were also included in the console versions.