Hi everyone!

Thank you all so much for playing and liking Herald: An Interactive Period Drama - Book I & II, and for your patience with us.

We’re very happy to announce that today, at long last, we released the completed version of the game, containing the final two books and several unique endings!

You will finally be able to conclude Devan’s journey, find out what the Rani wants from you, and discover the true reason behind the Herald’s perilous voyage.

We hope you’ll love it. <3



https://store.steampowered.com/app/2199510/Herald_The_Interactive_Period_Drama__Complete_Edition/


Why a new store page?
We have decided to launch the completed game as “Herald: The Interactive Period Drama - Complete Edition” on a brand new store page. We’ve always envisioned the story as a complete experience, and rather than offer the final two books as a DLC, which was the only option with our existing store page, we wanted to offer it as one full experience.

If you own Book I & II, you will receive an extra 40% discount for the Complete Edition with our special Complete Edition bundle.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/53156/The_Complete_Edition_Upgrade/

Will my saves carry over?
All your saves will carry over, so you will be able to continue the story where you left off.

What about achievements?
Unfortunately, we were not able to carry over the Steam achievements. We are very sorry about that, but we hope you will easily be able to achieve them again with your old saves. You can always start completed books from the main menu. In addition, we’ve also added a new feature where your choices unlock unique sketches in Devan’s journal.

So what are you waiting for? Go play Herald: Complete Edition now, and don’t forget to leave a review on our Steam page if you enjoyed it. We’d really appreciate it.

At long last, on May 1st, Wispfire's high seas adventure will be complete! Following the release of Books 1 and 2 of Herald: The Interactive Period Drama, we are finally ready to release the thrilling conclusion to the story of Devan Rensburg and The Herald with Herald: Complete Edition, which will include the previously-released Books 1 and 2, along with the all-new Books 3 and 4, which conclude the story.


Herald: Complete Edition is a narrative high seas adventure where player choice is vital. As Devan Rensburg, you will navigate an alternate history 19th century where the west has united into a colonial superpower known as The Protectorate. Aboard the HLV Herald, a luxurious merchant ship bound for Devan’s home country, players will begin to unravel a conspiracy that spans the globe.

Herald: Complete Edition tasks players with navigating complex politics and social norms despite inhabiting the role of a man with very little power. The narrative of the game will force players to make tough, realistic choices as they deal with a world rife with racism and intolerance due to bitter class divisions. Will you boldly call out injustice, risking an already-tenuous position, or will you bite your tongue and weather it, hoping that it will win you influence that you can use later on to make a tangible difference? Where other games put the player in a position of power, Herald: Complete Edition challenges the player to contend with the reality of an unjust world, and the restrictions that come with it.

While this game has been in development for over a decade, its message is more important now than ever before. Despite Devan’s relative powerlessness, the actions the player takes in his role can have a massive impact on his found family. At its heart, Herald: Complete Edition is a game about how everyone, no matter how powerless, can do something to change the world in a small way, and we hope that lesson stays with players long after they reach the end of our story.

Please help us spread the word, join our BlueSky and Discord to celebrate the upcoming launch. More news on the release of Herald: The Interactive Period Drama - Complete Edition will be posted soon.

For everyone who bought Herald: Book I and II, we will have an offer to upgrade to the Complete Edition at a discounted price for you. More info on how this upgrade works will be released soon, we are still ironing this out with Valve.

In the meantime, do not forget to wishlist the Complete Edition on Steam!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2199510/Herald_The_Interactive_Period_Drama__Complete_Edition/

Wishlish the new Complete Edition: https://steam.pm/app/2199510
The DLC page for Book III and IV will launch later this year.

We're excited to announce that Herald is taking part in the digital Steam event of AdventureX 22.

For the duration of the event you will be able to get Herald Book I & II for 60% off.
We will also be revealing the first teaser for Book III & IV, which will complete the journey of Devan Rensburg and the HLV Herald. This final chapter will be coming to Steam next year

For the event we've teamed up with MangoBtuber. Mango will be livestreaming Herald Book I & II, first here on Steam, and then starting from 21:15 CET on her Twitch.

Patch 1.2.0 is here, with many small updates and several new quality of life features!

To celebrate this, Wispfire has live streamed about the contents of this new patch. You can watch this and other streams on our Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/wispfiregames

Patch notes:

Before the year closes, a short update from Wispfire. In the past year our studio has been a bit in limbo. We were stuck in-between finding money to continue with Herald, and doing a lot of other stuff like work-for-hire projects, giving talks, doing guest lectures and pitching new projects that we want to do once Herald is finished. It sure has been a ride, but it has finally bore its fruits.

In the most recent update we showed you a bit of Herald: Book III & IV in development, and we also went in depth about our situation regarding funding for the project. We were struggling to work on Herald without the neccesary funds to pay for the more expensive parts, like voice acting and 3D animation. Regarding this particular roadblock, we have some exciting news that we can share.

In 2019, Wispfire will partner with researchers from the Utrecht University of the Arts to do a reasearch project on Interactive Narrative Design, with Herald's final books as the subject of the research. To do this research we applied for a grant with the Creative Industries Fund NL, and we got the grant! This grant is a giant step towards finishing Herald, because it pays for our livelihoods, which in turn frees up a budget for voice-acting and animation. The research will also provide us ample opportunity to experiment with gameplay mechanics that we will be able to use in Herald: Book IV and future projects.

There is even more that we can't share yet, but will be exciting once we get to it, so expect to hear back from us soon. For now, thank you for sticking with us, we've grown imensely from trying to keep ourselves standing in this competitive industry. But since 2018 marked our fifth aniversary, we're confident that we will be able to weather the troubles still hiding along our way. We would like to thank all of those who played Herald since its release, and we hope to see you again in 2019, the year in which we will resume full-time production on Herald Book III and IV again! :D

- The Wispfire Team

Hello all, it's been a long time since we gave you an actual update on development, so we thought we tell you where we currently stand with Herald. All of it is taking a lot longer than we want it to, and this is mainly because we have been trying to find funding for Book III and IV, but sadly haven't been successful in doing so. There are some very expensive parts of development that we can't do without a significant budget.

Reality is that Herald is a hard sell on the current market, story-driven adventure games are a niche, and we can't finish the game with only half a team working on it. To make up for this we're currently working on several side projects to support ourselves, as well as pitching new concepts to publishers that might be more lucrative and interesting for them to invest in. Such a project could potentially help fund Herald too, or at least buy us time to build a name for ourselves that will sway a party to invest in it.

Don't worry though, we aren't planning to cancel Herald anytime soon, it is just that we need to postpone the release date until we see an opportunity to properly finish it. As such, we aren't going to make any promises now, since that would be irresponsible from our part. But rest assured that we will keep you updated on any new steps we undertake to support Herald's development and secure its release.

In the past few months we have at least managed to build up a structure within the company that gives us the opportunity to work on Wispfire, while at the same time do some other work that earns us enough money to live from it. Herald is sadly not part of that structure anymore at the moment, but it is our ultimate goal to include it again sooner or later. And to prove to you that we haven't sat still over the past year, we wanted to give you a sneak peek into what is in store for book III.

In book III we finally get to see more of the Rani's lavish palace. The splendor of former glory is seen in the image below, which is the first of several extravagant rooms inside her personal quarters that you will visit in book III.

<Hover over black bar to reveal image>

Of course Tabatha Veazie and her uncle Louis Morton have their own private quarters aboard the Herald too. This large cabin is an area in book III as well. Below is a screenshot of this area that shows Lady Tabatha's side of the room.

<Hover over black bar to reveal image>

Now bear in mind that these are all development screenshots that we use to pitch the game to investors and publishers. These aren't the final product, and many things could still change once we're back in full swing. But these images do give you a glimpse of what is in store for when you will finally be able to enter these new areas in the game.

Notice the relative darkness of the images? Aside from just being nice moody lighting, it's also a hint to the direction that the story is going into. In book III night will have fallen over the palace as you start telling the rest of your story to the Rani, and darkness will settle in over our protagonists as well. The secret that the Herald harbors will come to light, and we'll discover why the Rani wants Devan to tell her his story. The way you will help Devan tell that story to her will ultimately determine the fate of many.

Thank you for checking in on us and reading this update. Once again, we're sorry we can't give you more clarity on the release date. We hope you'll bear with us for a while though. We'll always keep you updated on the most recent developments, and we'll post it here if there are any things of note about Herald or other story-driven games we're going to develop.

Remember that you are always free to ask us any questions. For more specific requests we'd advise you to send us an email through info@wispfire.com.

Yours,


The Wispfire Team

Hey everyone! Have you been thinking about buying Herald: An Interactive Period Drama Book I & II, but weren't quite convinced if it's your style of game?

We've just released our free demo for Steam. This is the same demo we've used to show off the game at trade shows during production, but updated with the latest tech and bug fixes.



The demo takes about 15 minutes to complete and features a unique conversation with the Rani, a flyover of the Herald, and a modified version of the 'Missing Gun' quest from the main game.

If you want to play the demo, you can find the 'Download Demo' button on the right-hand side of the store page. Unfortunately, because of the way Steam works it is not possible to play the demo on an account that already owns the main game.

- The Wispfire Team

Hey everyone! Have you been thinking about buying Herald: An Interactive Period Drama Book I & II, but weren't quite convinced if it's your style of game?

We've just released our free demo for Steam. This is the same demo we've used to show off the game at trade shows during production, but updated with the latest tech and bug fixes.



The demo takes about 15 minutes to complete and features a unique conversation with the Rani, a flyover of the Herald, and a modified version of the 'Missing Gun' quest from the main game.

If you want to play the demo, you can find the 'Download Demo' button on the right-hand side of the store page. Unfortunately, because of the way Steam works it is not possible to play the demo on an account that already owns the main game.

- The Wispfire Team

Hey everyone! We're excited to announce the release of the first Feature Patch for Herald: An Interactive Period Drama. This free patch adds support for dual analog stick controllers such as the Xbox 360 controller, the XBox One controller and the Sony Dualshock 4.



As many people have indicated to us, Herald is a very suitable game to play from the comfort of your couch. It's even more fun to play together with someone and get into fights over what dialogue options to choose. Couch gaming with a mouse has its downsides though, so even before Herald released we were already planning to add controller support, but unfortunately it didn't make it in for launch.

Now we could have just slapped a cursor on your right analog stick, pretended it's a mouse and called it a day. But we didn't want to deliver that kind of sub-optimal experience, so instead we overhauled the control scheme specifically for the couch experience.



If you have a GamePad connected you can go to the Gameplay Settings menu in options and choose 'Use Gamepad' to control Devan directly with the left analog stick.On the other hand we didn't want to lose the point and click elements of the game, so we did actually also slap a cursor on your right analog stick, with which you can inspect and interact with the environment.
If we were able to identify your controller, dialogue choices show the appropriate button images for dialogue choices. If we were unable to identify it, the Xbox buttons will be used as default. The journal and in-game menus have also all been modified to be usable with only controller input.

And of course, if you'd rather play with a mouse (or a Steam Controller), you can just turn the 'Use Gamepad' option off in the settings and keep playing with click-to-move as you're used to. If the game detects there's no controller connected, everything stays the way it was.

But that's not all! We've also made some other improvements here and there, and added another piece of music. Details are in the changelog below.

We hope you enjoy the update, and if you run into issues or have comments, feature requests, etc, let us know in the community hub!

- The Wispfire Team