November 1, 2024: Shae & Maeve's Routes (Part 1)

Good morning, fateful friends!

If you haven't yet heard from our other social media accounts, the first full-game update will soon be upon us: As of November 1, 2024, we will be releasing part one of Shae and Maeve's routes, respectively called the Book of the Soldier and the Book of the Warrior. Here's what to expect if you choose to purchase it:

• The first five chapters of Shae and Maeve's routes — totaling 100k words, individually 50k words (for comparison, the demo is 37k!)
• 175 choices, impacting both your relationship with Shae/Maeve and the projected ending (NDM can be played romantically or platonically, and each route will have good/bad endings!)
  
• Multiple scene variations depending on your current relationship/ending paths
  
• Additional sprites and outfits for both current and new characters (every member of the cast makes an appearance in this update!)
• Several new background locations to explore
• Four stunning CGs by our guest artists
• Twenty-five new voice lines for Shae and Maeve, and ten new voice lines for the rest of the main cast
• Drama! Danger! Mystery! Betrayal?! Love...?
  

Pricing & Reasoning

On Nov. 1, the price of NDM will be $14.99 USD. Once paid for, all subsequent updates will be free, excluding side story DLCs. Note that this price will increase with each new update, however, so if you decide to wait until your preferred route(s) are out, it will be more expensive. 

The gist of our price reasoning is as follows: As stipulated in our January 2023 Kickstarter, NDM is a serialized project. If it wasn't, the game wouldn't be ready to play until the late 2020s (just half of one route is longer than the original demo, after all) and we want you all to be able to experience the story as soon as possible! However, we recognize some folks are wary about buying unfinished games, which is why we decided:

1. The earlier the game is bought, the less it costs. This is our thank-you for supporting us at this stage of development. 
2. We won't micro-transaction the main game content, i.e. the routes. You pay once, and the price reflects the amount of content currently available.

An aside: If you didn't know, we're also on Steam. Ergo, if you don't want to go through the hassle of patching/re-downloading NDM every time we update, purchasing our game through Steam will mean you get updates automatically.

Mechanical Updates

Along with the routes, there are two mechanical updates coming to the paid version of The Good People (Na Daoine Maithe) that we wanted to talk about briefly. The first update concerns the MC/Daonna sprites: Along with the recent additional sprites we provided, we've introduced a 4th MC/Daonna option which will allow the sprite to appear in-game as a blank silhouette or a customizable sprite that players can manually add-in via the game files. Daonna's clothes will still be visible for story reasons, but the arm/face/neck/etc. will appear "blank" unless overridden by custom files. (Instructions will be provided in the same folder.) This option exists for players who don't like the "canon" options. Beyond this point, we are unlikely to include full customization due to the cost, but we hope our artistically-inclined players will have fun inserting their own designs. 

The second update concerns saving and replaying: As demonstrated in this short sneak peek of Shae's route, we now have an instant-save feature in the individual chapters. This will allow you to manually save while in a chapter, and if you have to exit the game mid-chapter, your spot will be "bookmarked" automatically. All you need to do to reload is click on the chapter and press "load bookmark" in the top right.

That said, we do not currently have multiple save files, meaning the decisions you make in previous chapters are carried over to subsequent chapters/affect future scenes and the ending(s) — when we get there. However, if you would like to replay individual chapters without your choices saving/carrying over, you can turn on "replay mode". This means that all of your choices will be contained to the chapter you're currently playing, and not saved after it concludes. Feel free to use this mode to experiment with choice selection!

The Demo

As we conclude this announcement, we wanted to remind everyone that the demo is most likely not going to be updated again, with the last update being on Sept. 4, 2024. It will remain available for new players to gauge whether they're interested in the paid version of the game, but any new general features, mechanics, or slight updates made to the demo contents (i.e. Volume 1)  are going to be in the paid game only. Ultimately, this is because keeping the demo up-to-date alongside the paid game would be a bit of a hassle. :P

Anyway, that's all for now! Slán go foill!! See you November 1!!!

- Clotho