Dear nobles,
Once again it's been a while since our last update. We hope that it won't become a habit of ours.
We'd like to assure you that it was not due to the suspension of our work, but on the contrary - because of the intensive development of Noble's Life: Kingdom Reborn!
The future of the project
Sometimes to hear someone talk about the future of a project is a sign of bad news, but not in this case. Not only are we going to continue working on the game, but also over the last few months the core of our team grew by 50%.
Additionally, as you can see by the changes on our Steam page, we acquired a publisher whose support is going to help us continue our work. However, it's not going to affect our creative freedom and the vision we want to implement.
The bad news may be that we will almost certainly not finish the game, as we had originally planned a year ago (in this Dev Diary), in the first quarter of 2024. Many tasks just require a lot more work than we had assumed at the time, and our aim is to achieve as high quality of the game as possible. We still are, despite the significant reinforcement, a small indie team.
All we can say at the moment is that we'll do everything we can to bring the game to you in some form in 2024, but we don't want to give a more precise date yet.
Second playtests
As we have already signaled before, we want to give you access to the game and use your feedback to improve Noble's Life. Hence, the February playtests were not the last.
Moreover, we want the second playtests to take place rather soon. We are aiming for the end of August or September 2023.
A slightly larger part of the game will be available for the tests, as well as functionalities that were not there before. We will describe it more precisely in July. First and foremost we are going to present the things that you have pointed out as the most important.
Playtests summary
Us taking your feedback and opinions seriously is not a mere slogan. We'd like to thank each and every one of the thousands of you who played our game. We are even more thankful to those hundreds of you who took their time to describe the bugs or express their opinion in our survey!
We analyzed all the answers, read all the opinions. It's a very important guide for us for the further development of the game.
We were very happy that the vast majority of you (82,33%) rated the game positively. We are going to do our best to make sure that those less content of you change their minds if only we are given the chance.
The answers to the question Which of the listed game series have you played? made it clear that most of you are experienced players. Here you can see exactly how many percent of respondents played a given game/series.
We are aware of the graphic issues. What we presented was still a pre-alpha version. We corrected and still are correcting the lighting, models, NPCs and animations. I hope that you will like the outcome, although it's worth mentioning already that it still will not be the final look of the game.
We were also calmed by the fact that the majority of you hadn't experienced technical issues or they were not serious issues. It doesn't mean we are not debugging the game. Since February hundreds of bugs have been fixed.
The picture shows the distribution of answers to the question: Which of the announced features did you miss the most in the shared fragment of the game?
The answers are: Free city exploration (27%), More extensive economy (16%), Sieges (12%), Raids (9%); Expanded estate map, Manor, Player character family (7% each); Other (8%), Nothing (6%).
Getting back to what we want to present in the further updates. Above all it's the free city exploration that most of the polled (27%) missed. The ability to freely walk around the city that the player, as the baron, rules and see with his own eyes the effects of his decisions is something we hope will make the game even more interesting. It currently is our top priority. Although a more extensive economy (16%) is also high on the priorities' list.
However, it is the first mechanic that we will focus on in the next Dev Diary in July showing how it's going to work (with examples from the game!). Of course we won't reveal everything so that you can see for yourself during the playtests.
Once again, thank you for your interest in Noble's Life: Kingdom Reborn!