A bit of a different announcement post today 🦌 .
As some of you have noticed, the demo is no longer available on Steam - the reason for that is that we don't think the demo version of the game is representative of how the full game is coming out to be.
What's important - We have taken the (many) complaints you had about it very seriously, and we're implementing all changes necessary into the game.
So, what would those changes be exactly?
- The pixel size is now unified between backgrounds and sprites. The artistic decision to keep the sizes different has proven to be jarring and unpleasant to look at. It just looks much better the way it is now.
- We rethinked our approach to designing fights. The fight with Rass in the demo has proven to be too difficult and unfair for the players. We have many ideas for the upcoming fight segments in the full version of Ghost of Fall, like more movement options for Ward, easier to predict attacks, more variation between attempts and more!
- Since the demo's release, we've spent a lot of time designing the world. While most of what you see and hear in the demo still makes sense within those new perspectives, some things actively go against of what we want to happen in the full game. This would also need to change if we were to keep the demo online. A little bit of retcon in there. Just a spoonful, but how meaningful...
- We added the "Closer Look" mechanic, the journal and inventory system, new interface elements, new animations etc. Those things don't exist in the demo and we find they're integral to the feel of the game now, so it doesn't make much sense that the demontrative version wouldn't demontstrate those things.
- We've slightly expanded our art department. While there was a small overhaul to the demo a few months ago, it still doesn't accurately show the attention to detail that we're capable of right now and may give a bad impression to any newcoming players.
While technically possible, putting all of those changes into the demo would mean making it from scratch, which brings us to the second main reason of deletion.
The demo actually became quite difficult to work with over time. When we started working on the app itself in 2021 it served as a test ground for the many ideas we had and solutions we had to test. The demo taught as a lot, but it at the same time working on it has become so difficult that it doesn't really make sense to keep it around.
Now, does that mean that the demo is gone forever?
We like to call the now gone demo "Chapter 0" of Ghost of Fall, as it's something meant to happen right before the main story.
Because of this, we would love for this short episode of the game to return in the future in some way!
Our hopes for now is to completely re-do this part of the game so that it fits the finished product more and make it an optional part of the full story. This is, however, a task we have to postpone - making such a huge game with such a small team is no easy task, and we still have a lot of work on.
So to answer the question - it's gone in it's current form, but it's not gone for good 🙂
(That said, if you still want to play the old version of the demo, we are not planning to delete it from our itch.io and gamejolt pages.)
It's a bit of a long post, but we felt that this deserves a proper explaination. In the next update we will let you know about more cool stuff we're making right now, but this is our update post for now.
Have an electrifying evening! ⚡️
