Hello fine Steam readers! Our demo was last available on Steam a year ago, during the 2022 June Next Fest. While we can't participate officially in Next Fest again, we do want to make the demo available for a limited time, to encourage people to come check out the game.
Note that the trailer on the home page is a year old now, so it's a little out of date! We have plans for a new one, but not the time to assemble it just yet.
What's changed in the interim, you may ask? Well, check out our 2022 Year in Review to see a full run-down of everything that was added or overhauled last year:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1678570/view/3621488651591732650
As for what's been added this year, we've spent a lot of time paying down our technical debt and fixing bugs, but we've found time for a few noteworthy additions:
The first is an overhaul to the Tracking skill that makes it much more engaging and interesting. Rather than tell you where players are, the skill now tells you where players were, and exactly how long ago, and in which directions they went.
This is much truer to the concept of the skill as tracking people down, and makes for a much more interesting and engaging gameplay experience, in a similar vein to the Scrounging update.
Heraldries and symbols! We really want people to band together into factions and adopt a unique visual identity. Therefore we are proud to expand the symbols that were previously available on coins and stamps onto tabards and tapestries, allowing you to signal your loyalties and decorate your burrows.
With 36 colors and 70 symbols, this gives us approximately 90,720 different heraldries, so there shouldn't be any danger of two factions using the same heraldry.
OK, so maybe this isn't a huge update, but: dice! This is "step 1" of the ways we want to encourage players to play games between characters diegetically. It's a lot more interesting than just sitting around talking! And it goes a long way towards creating an immersive living world.
Some more minor additions:
- Skill books reworked to have 5 "tiers" and last for multiple uses. Crafted skillbooks last much longer than scrounged ones.
- Barrels and sacks get heavier when stuff is stored in them now.
- Gray sigils are much more effective at preventing magic from lower crystal charges.
- Hold Shift to quickly pick stacks up and drop them.
- Charge Hiding, Disguise, and Impersonation to guarantee the best result for your skill level. Slight buffs to the skills.
- Detection rebalanced a bit.
- Languages are a bit easier to speak, Polyglot was buffed, and Writing is easier for the lower-skilled.