Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle, Season One News

Hi everyone! We're going to announce the launch date for NALES1's v5 update very soon.

However, we wanted to split this news out into its own update as it's really important for existing fans.

The v5 update is a significant upgrade to Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle, Season One, which will improve many aspects of the game.

After the update goes live, your unlocks in-game will be unaffected. This means if you've unlocked Chapter 2, Chapter 3 or the free-roam mode in-game, you'll still be able to select these when you load up the v5 version, and start from that point onwards.

However, these upgrades are so significant that the v5 version will not be compatible with savegames from older versions.

Steam Achievements are not affected by this.

In practice, when you first boot up v5, the game will inform you about the change, and prompt you to delete your older saves.

If, for some reason, you absolutely need your saves and want to stay on v4, you should set NALE in your Steam library to reject updates right now.

However, in doing so, you'll miss out on all the improvements coming in v5, such as more character busts, name-cards on the text boxes, Linux & Steam Deck support and more.

We apologise that this is necessary; we performed R&D to try and see if we could avert this requirement, however, it was simply impossible given the nature of the changes to the game.

We hope this won't inconvenience anyone too much, and that you're still looking forward to the new features of the v5 release! That announcement is coming very soon!

Hi everyone! Just wanted to give you all a quick progress update about the v5 update later this year, following on from our roadmap post a little while back:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1547290/announcements/detail/5291150756569323437

[h2]Linux Version is coming soon![/h2]
Fans will be happy to know that we have a fully running Linux version now, with only some minor issues that are being ironed out. This runs in a newer version of NodeJS (the Windows release will do this also) meaning that performance is much improved over, for example, the Windows release running via Proton.

Naturally, this is also the version of NALE that will take the game onto the upcoming Steam Deck!

We're not quite ready to release this yet but I think we're at a point where it's safe to confirm it is coming, just a question of when. We'll update you once we have a date.

[h2]Withdrawing support for Mac[/h2]
Due to updates to MacOS, RPG Maker MV is deprecating its Mac support, which affects the editor, but will soon have a knock-on effect on the games themselves.

https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads/regarding-future-rpg-maker-mv-macos-support.139708/

Up until now, NALE hasn't had full Mac support (just the demo of Chapter 1 over on indie services, not Steam), but we had intended to support the platform in the future if revenue made it viable (we needed to purchase a Mac for development & testing).

The immediate result of this is that we will be removing the Mac version of the Chapter 1 episodic version of the game from itch.io, to prevent giving the false impression that future NALE content may appear on the platform.

We will not be releasing future versions of NALE for Mac OS, unless the above situation changes. We're sad to have to announce this, but at the same time, we want to be clear for those of you who were waiting for this (as several of you have asked in the past).

[h2]Art Update for v5[/h2]
Progress continues on the art update for v5, that will add character busts for Anya Miller & Judge Tawny. We've almost finished the base images for Anya in 1 costume, and are well on-target to produce the rest. We'll update fans once we have more to show on this.

[h2]Looking forward to the v5 release![/h2]
Thanks for reading this! We're looking forward to the v5 release, and will give you a date once we have one.

We're pleased to announce that the crowdfunding initiative that we announced 3 days ago is now 100% funded:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1547290/view/2947030218280684090

This means that we're full-steam-ahead on providing additional bust images for v5, which will launch later this year (pencilled in for November). These new images will cover Anya in all three of her outfits (regular, prison jumpsuit and catgirl) and Judge Tawny (in her judge attire).

Thanks so much, all of you, who got involved!

Now we just need to make sure that those character images of Tawny & Anya are the best they can be for v5.

We'll have news once we have something to share!

Since the release of NINA AQUILA: LEGAL EAGLE, SEASON ONE on Steam on July 9th, we’ve been absolutely blown away by the response from the community – so many streams, tweets, reviews… But also, feedback. One of its major enhancements over prior episodic releases of the game were the character busts of Nina, Dylan and Chad, and you people said you wanted more! But we need YOUR help to make that possible.

Version 5 of the game (the released version is v4) is intended to go out in November. It’s our intent that this update will contain a number of improvements, such as native Linux support, running on an upgraded framework for better performance, and a range of smaller fixes like addressing some typos that slipped through the net on the first release.

However, the biggest change we intend to make is to add busts of Anya Miller & Judge Tawny to the game!

Left-to-right – sketch of Anya, final image of Nina, sketch of Judge Tawny, final image of Chad
These Anya & Tawny images are just initial sketches, but we wanted to give a little preview!

These will include all three of Anya’s outfits (regular clothes, prison jumpsuit and catgirl attire) as well as Judge Tawny in her traditional judge’s robes, and will be completed in a similar style to the Nina, Chad & Dylan busts already present in-game.

These are made by a new artist, working under the guidance from our prior Nina/Chad bust artist, @Koahri1.

[h2]Why do you need help?[/h2]
As always with additional art, the biggest obstacle for NALE is cost; we need to pay for these assets to go into the game.

NINA AQUILA: LEGAL EAGLE, SEASON ONE on Steam has made $1115 in revenue to-date, which means we beat our revenue target of $1000 (the budget we spent to get the game ready for release), and had some additional funds to help offset some of our costs. However, we’re at a point now where we’ve made pretty much 0$. We’re “cost neutral”.

Although we’re really happy that we managed to do this, it makes it difficult for us to afford additional features or assets for updates.

NALE has never previously accepted donations. We don’t run a Patreon. We wanted players to be able to support the game by buying the game, so you (and us!) have certainty, when you’re giving us money, that you’re going to get what’s promised.

This is the first time we’ve ever tried to crowdfund anything for the project, but we’re hoping fans are okay with doing this because the end goal is so specific and quantifiable. We hope you’ll be up for this chance to support us and make a tangible improvement to the game (and because we know some of you really love Anya & Tawny’s characters, and have voiced that you’d like to see busts of them).

[h2]How do I help?[/h2]
In order to help pay for this, we’re trying to raise $500 from the community to cover some of the costs of the busts for Anya & Tawny.

You can help us in several ways.

From now until September 30th 2021, all revenue from NALE will go towards this target.

If we hit the target, that means we get the bust set for Anya & Tawny; if we go beyond the target, then we’ll look into adding more characters or some other art improvement. If we miss the target, we’ll still channel the money into NALE art – potentially just doing one character, or some other similar purpose that will improve v5.

To break it down, this means you can do any of the following to contribute:

• Donate via our Ko-Fi page
  
• Buy NINA AQUILA: LEGAL EAGLE, SEASON ONE on Steam if you haven’t already
  
• Buy NINA AQUILA: LEGAL EAGLE, SEASON ONE as a gift on Steam for someone else
  
• Buy any merch on the NALE Teepublic store
  

We would really love it if fans considered the “Steam gift” option above, because this is great for twofold reasons – firstly, it contributes to the goal, but it also introduces NALE to whoever you give the gift!

Fans will be able to see our progress towards the goal over on Ko-Fi. The goal auto-magically ticks up when people donate via Ko-Fi, but we’ll also manually edit it to include the support via the other methods above. We’ll also periodically post progress on Twitter.

At present it looks like this:



So we have 7 weeks to raise $500. Fingers crossed!

Thanks for reading this, and if you’re in a position to contribute, it’d be fantastic if you could help us out. But if you’ve read this far, whether you donate or not, we hope you’re enjoying the Steam release and continue to enjoy it with the upcoming v5!

Hi everyone, and thanks those who took part in our inaugural screenshot derby!

Our winner is Juke, who posted this fantastic shot of Nina driving up to the Rostro Spire from Chapter 3:



Juke submitted tons of entries with many great shots to choose from, but we liked this one as it shows off the Mode7-style scaling present in NALE S1's driving sequences.

Juke can be found on Twitter, here: https://twitter.com/Jukeotakuri

We'll be hosting more community events in the near future, so stay tuned for that!