Let’s check out the updated character creation process for Our Life: Now & Forever! There’s been changes and additions since we originally previewed it.
And this is the initial demo version, but it’ll likely continue to be tweaked as we develop the complete game.
Our Life: Now & Forever is a nostalgic Visual Novel where you create your own character and grow from childhood to adulthood with your two closest neighbors. It’s currently in development by GB Patch Games.
You are a recent member of The White Company, a mercenary guild on the far side of the law. Your job consists of hunting artifacts and roaming ruins that the Church has forbidden to mention. One of your expeditions, however, leads you down a path that is much deeper than you ever anticipated.
“The Golden Rose: Book One” is a thrilling 1.2-million-word interactive fantasy novel by Ana Ventura, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Juggle friendships, new alliances, and flames of romance in this epic adventure that will take you to an Europe where History took a different turn.
Play as male or female; straight, gay, or bisexual.
Find romance, friendship, or rivalry with a cast of colorful characters.
Hunt down the thief that stole your forbidden maps!
Fight against bandits and city guards while trying to stray away from the all-seeing Eyes of the Church.
Explore ancient ruins and the cobble-stoned streets of the medieval city of Tarragona. Step into a grand cathedral, a sprawling market, a multicolored harbor, the dark gates of the city, or an aqueduct that no one dares to come close to.
Bond with a stubborn old horse.
Choose to ally with a street urchin or the feral captain of the Guard.
Uncover what is true in a world where denial reigns supreme.
Start to unravel your own mysterious past.
Immerse yourself in a world rich with characters, story, and lore.
I thought I was going to be finishing it off at the beginning of this week, but instead I blasted through it last Saturday and got it done!!
Which meant on Monday I could do editing, and on Tuesday I started Chapter 13!!!And then, I’ve been hammering through Chapter 13 too!!
Yeah, it’s been a seriously good week, hehe!
Though I do have to give a HUGE thank you to DashingDon for being a massive help when I had trouble this week with the edit version. They were straight on it and got it fixed so fast after I’d been struggling for soooo long.
They really provide such an amazing site for choicescript creators! Definitely deserves all the support we can give! <3
But after finishing fighting with that and getting some Chapter 8 edits up ready for SpunkyCat to look over, I did move onto Chapter 13. I should have done more editing really…but I was way too excited to get onto 13, especially as I knew what was coming up and have been itching to write it for a very long time!!
Is there some angst in 13?…Oh yeah.
Do we got a little peak at what a heartbroken love interest could look like in 13?…Oh yes we do.
Chapter 13 is also a much more straightforward chapter without any split scenes until the end third section, so I’ve been managing to blast through it. It feels soooo good to make such major progress.
The branches and variations are what I want Wayhaven to be about, but it is nice to have a chapter where it’s just the MC and one other character. And this scene certainly brings a lot of tension to the mix because of it just being the two!
Next week, I’ll be continuing on with Chapter 13, though may have to take an afternoon or two for more editing depending on how SpunkyCat gets on. She’s a lot quicker at editing than I am!
Hope you all have the most wonderful weekend! We’ll be offline as usual, so I’ll update you all again next Friday! <3
Ok, so I know you guys are probably sick of me talking about the retreat by now, but it was SO amazing! I learnt an absolute ton, and it was so awesome to have someone explain it to you right there.
Reading writing advice in a book or online is fantastic, but it really does make a difference when you can have someone there explaining how you could adapt that into your own style of writing!
We did a class on character introductions, which was very timely as I was writing that at the time. But one piece of advice—about how your reader is more likely to remember a side character if they have at least a paragraph of interaction with them—made me rethink how I was writing it. So I went back this week and redid that, and now I LOVE it!
Not only will it help with that, but I got the chance to show a bit more of these new characters’ personalities in those moments because of that extended interaction (each of them got a choice set for the MC to choose from on how to introduce themself).
But one of the biggest things I had fun with there was one task we had where we had to do reversals. We had to take our love interest (I had to pick one) and take our antagonist (again, I had to pick just one, lol!) and flip them.
The love interest became the baddy, and the antagonist became the love interest.
It was…very interesting! Especially as I have been writing the characters for over half of my life, and these good guys have always been good guys, hehe!
I chose Adam/Ava, and I turned their past and their ‘trying to always choose the logical choice’ as their main traits to twist.
For the antagonist…well, that would be spoilery, hehe! I chose a baddy who is a bigger player later in the series.
But oh my word! We all remarked how disturbingly easy it was was to flip the traits around and make them baddies! But the class leader was saying that was kind of the point. Characters should always have that balance to them. If it was difficult to flip them, then you’ve made them unbalanced, and it’s a great way of seeing how to fix that.
I got Nai to read it, and I was seriously thrilled at how surprised she was that Adam/Ava still read like Adam/Ava. She was expecting them to be all baddy, but they were still them just scarily the baddy. If that makes sense? :D
And with it being social media days this week, I typed up that scenario (minus a few super spoilery bits!) and have that scheduled as the Monthly Bonus Content #2 for you guys on Patreon later this month.
Hope you enjoy Adam/Ava in all their villainous glory, hehe! :D
But yeah, I was super keen to get back to writing with all this new info in my head! So after social media days, I was back into like you wouldn’t believe! I’m actually going to finish two of the three split scene sections for this chapter by tomorrow!
Which means I might just be able to finish Chapter 12 next week!!!
Phew! That was a lot of blabbering in the update this week :D I’m just still buzzing about the retreat and how well I’ve done this week!
Hope you all have the most amazing weekend! We’ll be offline as usual, so I’ll update you all again next week! <3
North Acres Elementary School in Step 1 of Our Life: Now & Forever is very cute!
Our Life: Now & Forever is a nostalgic Visual Novel where you create your own character and grow from childhood to adulthood with your two closest neighbors. It’s currently in development by GB Patch Games.
I actually pictured Eris with long black hair with a red & black color scheme. But I stayed true to your canon but still gave him a splash of red and black.
Calder immediately made me think of Cullen from DA Inquisition. I pictured him with more platinum blonde hair.
Thank you so much @sarahslolitaportfolio ! We appreciate your drawings a lot and the effort put into them. We especially love how you captured Eris and Calder in your style and allowed your mind to wander, specifically with the red and black details added to Eris since you imagined them that way!
Sneak-peek of Blue-Blooded upcoming demo part two! Thank you for following our development & we hope you enjoy this extract as well.
alt text under cut:
[alt: For the first time, Calder did not face you when he spoke. He simply looked on, gaze averted, as though the etched-out words on the statue of the temple would become legible to him if he stared long enough. You couldn’t help but notice that even from the side he could easily have been a statue himself, sculpted by the hands of another. Finally, he turned to look back at you and spoke, his eyes holding a somber glaze, “We’re firewood and dreams are a spark.”
A pause.
“They may appear beautiful and bright, bring us warmth and lend us light, but even a single spark can ignite an uncontrollable fire.” There was something— an emotion, a feeling— indecipherable to you behind his words. His eyes wander to Valens, who has their back turned to both of you.
We know you guys are probably already tired of hearing us say this but we’ve reached another major milestone and just want to say thank you again and try to do something involving YOUR input that we haven’t seen before! But before we get to that, we just want to remind you guys of how grateful we are to have you here and supporting us in our journey! <3 It truly means so, so much and seeing you interact with us makes our day, every day.
Thus far, our submissions have been closed, but we are opening them for the next 96 hours for a very special reason! We truly do strive to make Blue-Blooded an enjoyable experience for you all and we want to do whatever possible in order to deliver that. For this milestone, we have opened submissions so that you guys can send in a scene/scenario idea you would like to see in the demo! It doesn’t have to be super long or descriptive or anything, it doesn’t even have to feature an RO! It could just be a scene you’d like the MC to be able to experience and make choices during. Send in your ideas through THIS SUBMISSION LINK and we’ll selectONEto be featured in the demo as well as the final version of Blue-Blooded. We will credit you for the idea once we publish our demo release post, and we’ll carefully consider all submissions!
Hope all of you are staying warm and healthy this winter— happy submitting!
“You took quite a hit yesterday,” they say, concern lining the way their lips press together, a grim slash across elegant features. There’s a pause, like they’re deliberating over what to say next.
“What do you remember?”
UPDATE 12/10:
The doctor’s in! Create your character, meet one of your companions, and discover more about the world around you.
As usual, apologies for any typoes/mistakes you might find, I might’ve decided to wing the entire proof-reading part and decide to impulsively toss an update up instead. The current word count for the project is 12.1k, though most of it is in character creation, & I haven’t quite figured out how to calculate average playthrough just yet!
Also, for anyone who is interested and might’ve missed the previous post, there is now a Discordserver! Feel free to join & talk about your characters, or yell at me about the typos that I’ve missed.
