We messed up. Got delayed, lost time on fixes and putting together systems that weren't meant to exist until later in the production. In short, the demo wasn't ready for the Festival and we were looking to pull out.
But our hand got forced - for better or for worse!
At the Festival's start on Monday, an early dev build got auto-pushed to release on Steam. The meaningless hellscape that some of you have attempted to play was never meant to see the light of day; its sole purpose was testing out some scripts and searching for holes in the environment.
But upon discussing the situation internally, we figured we might have just enough actual content ready to put a demo together after all.
I'm pushing the first update to the demo right now. it's got some neat dialogue now. The card games (3 of them for now) should be easier to get through now (we're working on a proper tutorial though! For now, just remember all you have to do is keep the bars from BOTH filling or emptying.)
The performance is improved. We fixed like a hundred bugs that we originally meant to tie up months from now. We threw in some systems that were slated for later.
It's certainly not where it *should be* as a proper demo, but we'll be getting there soon.
We'll be pushing an update with more content each day until the end of this week, and the demo should reach its intended state by Sunday. Not optimal, I know. Kinda bad. Nobody wants to watch the birthing pains of a videogame. But we'll try to rinse down that bad aftertaste of a raw dev build getting released.
I'd also like to acknowledge how INCREDIBLY understanding y'all were in general - most people noticed something was off right away and withheld their judgement. We don't deserve you guys.
Anyway! Check out this new build or wait for the updates - Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I'll also be personally livestreaming the game on Friday evening. :)
Thank you for your patience!
Alan Padziński
Head of Studio at ACHARA