Our Life: Now & Forever

Rose: For someone who has never heard of your game, how would you describe it without using the usual genre labels?

It’s like getting to be the main character of a cozy story. You read and make choices to determine what the MC feels/does.

Rose: Where did the idea for this game come from?

I personally enjoy stories where the characters go through different periods in their life and have multiple years to develop the relationship between them and the rest of the cast. So, it’s the type of game I’d be excited to play.

Rose: What makes your game different from other games in the same space?

The fact that there’s four time periods you live through. It’s more common for story-focused games to either have one time period or sometimes two. It’s much rarer to have this number of time skips in a game with a lot of text as well.

Rose: Was there anything you had to cut that you still secretly wish you could put back?

I’d really hoped to have a DLC that let you romance or form a closer friendship with one of the side characters, Renee. That was never put into production but it was something I had in mind when designing her as a character in the story.

Rose: What is something players probably won't realize took an absurd amount of work?

Every minor alteration based on the MC’s qualities. The main character of the game has very few set details, almost everything is decided by the player. That makes it complicated for writing/programming to have events play out in ways that make sense for the created MC.

RoseWhat is the weirdest bug you've encountered that you almost wanted to keep?

I can’t think of any, sorry. I’m not the lead programmer for the project so they might have an interesting story, but all the bugs I’ve dealt with have been boring problems that needed to be fixed.

Rose: Is there a particular emotion you wanted players to walk away with from your game?

Yes! Nostalgia and/or sentimentality.

Rose: What's one piece of advice you wish you'd had before starting?

It’s very easy to let scripts balloon out of control for a highly customizable project, and every bigger scene will set a bar for everything else. I wish I’d been stricter about the number of alterations that could be expected per event.

Rose: Five years from now, what do you hope people remember about this game?

How it felt to grow up in the imaginary world we created.

Rose: Why should someone reading/watching this go play your game today?

The base game will be free when it launches! It’s also set in autumn, so if you read this while it’s still autumn that means it’s the best time of year to play it. Our Life: Now & Forever will launch into Early Access late November 2026.

Rose: Finally, the question we ask every developer: After everything you’ve told us, can you officially confirm that your game is, in fact, probably a game? Why should we believe you?

Well, some people believe that visual novels aren’t “real games”. I’d declare it a game because it is interactive. This type of experience couldn’t be had as a movie or comic. The player is controlling what happens, even though it’s through text.