Noble's Life demo delayed

Dear nobles,

Unfortunately, once again, we have to delay the next presentation of the game and thus cancel the showing of the demo at October's Steam Next Fest.

Before we explain why, we want to highlight that this does not mean that there will not be another presentation of the game. On the contrary - the demo, already out of the festival, will appear in November 2023.

What happened

Bugs. By the time the previous news was published, the demo was almost ready, but we over-optimistically hoped that we would be able to fix all the problems that arose with such a large expansion of the game in a few weeks. We even crunched a little, but it still wasn't enough.

New month, modification of the queue for audience, warehouses, a city to explore with dozens of events, a great many consequences of the choices of the first months of the game, more options only for specific origins, letter writing, better representation of coats of arms, new characters, option improvements, more extended scenes, a handful of secrets, etc. There were plenty of new features.

However, they have resulted in the build no longer being stable. Fortunately, there are no bugs that would block our work on the game in some serious way, what’s more - the demo can be completed, knowing which options are the problem, but we did not want to publish it in such a version. This is because it would have to contain solutions like: avoid exiling François if you previously ordered the innkeeper to return, as this will block the dialogue with Pierre.

Moreover, a bug in which a beggar when we give 1 écu of alms takes 75 quarters of grain from us (but not the loss of that 1 écu) can be funny. On the other hand, the fact that with a particular origin and choices our advisor, Guiscard, leaves us alone in an empty audience room for eternity, leaving us with no way to continue the game is not funny (well, maybe a little funny, but you know what I mean). We want to get rid of the bugs that we know about, so that we can play the game smoothly and so that we can again gather valuable feedback from players.

Sometimes the guards in the Baron's castle are terribly naughty.

So our programmers will fix any problems. Graphic designers, on the other hand, will once again polish the already finished levels to make this part of the game look even better. Anyway, there were quite a few streams (in fact, one is still ongoing at the time of this news) of the early September version of the game on the Steam page of Noble's Life, and I hope you can see significant progress relative to February 2023. Although we point out that we avoided showing there some of the functionality that will appear in the demo.

And our designers will make sure that all the commas are in place and that even the strangest combinations of options are included. We already have quite a few interesting options hidden behind conditions such us: player origin, acquired information, being in the right place at the right time or making certain decisions. Sometimes each of these conditions must be met for a new option or dialogue to appear. With a single playthrough, you certainly won't even meet all the major characters, and we hope this does a good job of showing the depth of the game.

What's next

As we wrote at the beginning in November 2023 for the second time we will give you time-limited access to the initial part of the game. Probably in the form of a demo, maybe another playtest. For sure, the next time (and with another portion of news) we will appear in February 2024 at the next Steam Next Fest.

Moreover, these two events will certainly not be the only ones before the release. Before the game is released, we still intend to present, improve and develop it.

We also thank you for your support and many kind words about the game. Recently, quite a few people have become interested in Noble's Life, which makes us very happy and energizes us to keep going!