Our Life: Now & Forever

Begin your life anew in this second installment to the lovingly nostalgic Our Life series! Create an experience that’s all your own in this near-fully customizable, choice-heavy story. A demo is available.Fall settles over the charming mountain town of Golden Grove as the story begins. But it isn't only glittering leaves that are changing. You and your mom leave behind everything you knew before when you move to a new home nestled right in the middle of a tight knit cul-de-sac. It’s there where a paper airplane lands at your feet and brings you to unanticipated crossroads.Make your own path through life as you grow from childhood to adulthood with your two closest neighbors. Even in the chilly autumn weather, it’ll be a truly heartwarming time.

Characters:

While you’ll be able to decide how fond you are of everyone in your life, there are two people you’ll meet whose connection to you will go deeper than all the rest: Qiu and Tamarack. Each one the same age as you and both living right next door.

Qiu “Autumn” Lin: A true Golden Grove local, born and raised. Qiu is the kid to know in that town. The most popular, the most charming, until it all becomes too much. There’s a point where a coldness comes over Qiu and they shut out all except a few people. However, the rain doesn’t fall forever, and sadness can heal with real support. The day comes when Qiu is able to shine again, even brighter than before.In Autumn you will find a thoughtful individual who just needs some time to embrace the person they’ve always known they were. Qiu was assigned male at birth, but comes out as genderfluid (they/he) partway through the story.

Tamarack Baumann: A fellow newcomer, Tamarack moved in only about a week before you did. She’s a darling joy to those who get to have her company. And like the forests she loves so much, Tamarack is always changing in big and small ways. That isn’t always for the better. She’s surrounded by wrong branches, leading her down paths that only cause hurt. Yet despite all the pricks and snags on her path, the heart always remains the same.With Tamarack you’ll see a kind miss who has a lot to learn about herself, but will never stop trying to find her way. Tamarack is a woman who only ever uses she/her pronouns.

Features:

Extensive Choice System: Make hundreds of decisions that reflect your personality and preferences, affecting how characters remember and interact with you throughout the game.

Customizable Experience: Tailor the protagonist and their mom’s appearances, with options to create family resemblances and adjust traits over time.

Replayability: Enjoy a rich narrative that invites multiple playthroughs, allowing for different story outcomes based on varied choices and relationship dynamics.

Life Stages: Experience and influence key moments through four distinct life stages: childhood, teenage years, young adulthood, and adulthood, each with its own set of experiences and choices.

Character Customization: Create a protagonist from scratch, including their appearance, pronouns, and personal details, ensuring a unique and personal journey.

Relationship Dynamics: Forge and develop relationships with various characters, allowing for a range of connections from friendships to romantic relationships, including the option for polyamorous bonds.

Advantage:

Create the protagonist of your story: Pick a first name, last name, honorifics, and have a nickname, too. Use any pronouns you prefer, including using multiple types and implementing your own set. Design your appearance using a dress-up doll, from skin tone, to hair, to clothes and accessories. Your mom’s appearance is partially customizable to have a family resemblance!

Take it Step by Step: Experience four distinct periods of time: childhood, teen-aged, young adulthood, and grown. With all the highs and lows, the fears and fun, and the endless possibilities of self-discovery.

Live as you please: Express your personality and preferences through hundreds of choices, then see those traits reflected in the story as people remember who you are. And you can always change as the years go by, whether that means discovering a new passion, shifting your disposition, or transitioning to different pronouns.

Find friendship, family, and romance: Your own mom, peers, their parents, teachers, and other acquaintances; there’s a whole community in Golden Grove, and it’s up to you to choose your place in it. Meaningful connections of all kinds can be nurtured. Is the stoic elderly man on the street scary or is he your new adopted grandpa?

Develop relationships that are truly yours: Use your own judgement to set how quickly bonds develop. Grow closer or farther apart as years go by. Focus on only one of the leads or be fond of both, including the option for a polyamorous relationship. And how you feel towards the people in your life is what determines your closeness. There are no limits on which behaviors you can have to be liked.

Enjoy a world to return to: Our Life: Now & Forever features a welcoming, sentimental story that can easily be played over and over using new qualities for yourself or different relationship types with those around you.

Read your way: Customizable lettering size and font type, two different textbox arrangements to choose from, and a self-voicing option built into the engine. Present the words in whichever style works best for you.

Changelog:

Hello again everyone, GB here!

The release structure poll for Our Life: Now & Forever has closed. Nearly 10,000 people voted, and we got hundreds and hundreds of thoughts people left about the idea. I want to say thank you so much for the supportive and understanding messages. It made me pretty emotional to see how much people loved the game and cared about the team

To restate how this worked, players could vote for or against the idea of OL: N&F releasing Step by Step. We would change our original plan to launch the first three Steps together if people wanted us to. But we wouldn’t do such a major shift if people weren’t interested or there was more of a split in the community. With that said, this is the poll-

Yeah, it’s almost exactly 50/50 between people who want the episodic release and those who don’t actively want it! That could have made this complicated, but after thinking about it and reading the reasons for and against the options, I do think the decision we’re going with will be for the best.

Our Life: Now & Forever will not release episodically. However, there’s going to be truly massive updates to the demo this year.

And this is why: a true early access release with DLC content becoming available would impact things in ways that might not be worth it. Us as a company would have to promote an episodic release the same way we would the entire game launching, and then we’d have do that again when the next Step came out. We’d have to be concerned with sales numbers and such before the base game was even done. Also, the game would be releasing for the entire world, not just for our current players. That isn’t the type of work we want to jump into ASAP unless it was what a majority of players really wanted. The point of this was always meant to be something good for the people most excited about the project.

If we keep OL:NF as a demo and focus on putting out a ton of the free-to-play parts of the story, we can make this all about our fanbase and that’s it. We could drop a 100,000 word demo update and move on with our day like it’s nothing ‘cause it’s not a proper launch. A lot of the best content has been left out of the demo, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. We could make the demo a more fulfilling experience without impacting anything behind the scenes or putting anything up for sale.

Not only that, but those who don’t want to see too much of the game before it’s fully launched will then be able to avoid the extra content more easily since it’s hidden away as a demo instead of getting the full marketing treatment. Sure, it might confuse newcomers who try the demo and find out it’s absurdly long for a demo, however that’s not the end of the world.

Since there is this clear divide, I think a compromise that tries to avoid the main things people were worried about while keeping as many of the benefits as we can is better than simply choosing one side or the other.

I hope that sounds like a positive development. Look forward to future announcements about the mega-sized demo expansions that will be on the way in coming months! And thank you again for following along with the development of Our Life: Now & Forever

Conclusion:

A romance with Qiu or Tamarack can develop as love at first sight, a longtime platonic closeness turning into last-minute confessions, a slow and gradual growth of affection that started at nothing, or anything in between.Friendships form in just as many varied ways, ranging from immediate connections to hard-earned fondness, from casual company to irreplaceable family, and more. What you have together is complex with history and detail, yet still as natural as the leaves changing colors in the fall.