Early Access Release
Hello everyone!
Early Access has began! Explore the village of Illisor and discover your purpose in a story inspired by portal-fantasy novels, mixing fantasy with a hint of realism. Will you find the missing teenagers who may have the answers you seek? Or will you simply enjoy your time at The Dancing Moon?
Already played the demo? Your saves should transfer across - just seek out the blocked cave to continue your journey!
In September of 2020, after messing around with Unreal Engine creating silly mini-games about COVID. I began the journey of creating an RPG framework. I had called it "DNDTowns" at the time. I had been playing games like Animal Crossing and watching livestreams of Critical Role, which made me think - "hey, I don't think anyone has mixed these two ideas together before!".
And so I came up with the idea of a cozy life-sim game, but instead of going for pixel-art which seemed to be the trend at the time (and still is...), I decided to opt in to a more isometric aesthetic grounded in realism. Similar to games like the old Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity games.
A year later, gone was the "DNDTowns" placeholder name, and the Tales from The Dancing Moon Demo was born! Since then I've provided many patches and Newsletters about my gave-dev journey. I'm very happy with the current state of the demo, and it sounds like recent players enjoy it too!
I am currently sitting at 2500 Wishlists - nowhere near the fabled ~7k that I keep hearing about. I may not have had the intuition of "gaming" the Steam algorithm or the social media buzz to generate a large amount of interest for the game, but I'm grateful for all the players and content creators who have shown interest and went out of their way to provide feedback and praise for the game so far! Without you I don't think I would have kept up the momentum as I have done over all this time.
Early Access is available now, and for the first week has a 10% launch discount!
What now?
You might be wondering what happens next?
To set some expectations - particularly over the upcoming holiday period - is that I am only going to focus on urgent patches over the next few weeks. I don't expect there will be anything too bad - but treat this as a bit of a disclaimer over this time of the year!
Going into 2024 - my ideal scenario is that I don't want the game in Early Access for very long. There's definitely some loose ends to some of the quests and some polish to do with the sandbox gameplay. Balancing this with enough new features to justify a 1.0 release will be my priority, and I hope to announce a roadmap for this in the near future depending on the demand for it.
Demo Updates
I'm also happy to announce a bunch of updates and fixes to the demo. These were caught from recent players and Early Access playtesting. This will likely be the last major update for the demo. Read below for full details:
Updates
- Holding down the action button will now allow repetitive use of the sword, axe, and the pickaxe. Goodbye repetitive strain injury!
- More obvious button display for splitting item stacks. (Shift + Click!)
- Rotated the starting storage box around by 180 degrees, making it face the correct way. This will only be fixed on new saves.
- Adjusted music initialisation logic so music will play more often, resulting in less quiet moments.
- Added a new UI alert if there is no inventory space to craft items.
- Changed the "Rest" menu to "Wait" menu. This wording better represents it's purpose.
- Elaina can now be spoken to whilst playing her music, greatly improving her accessibility for quests and conversation.
- New reminder items have been added to the quest journal to remind the player of certain non-quest related gameplay.
- Improved rendering distance of underwater objects in the fishing lake.
- The Discord invite link in the main menu social bar has been updated.
Bugfixes
- Fixed an issue where the procedural task to defeat enemies would not grant a reward.
- Fixed an issue where a procedural task would not assign to Skye properly, causing a quest to have "None" properties.
- Fixed an issue where the cooking audio would not stop if leaving the UI before the cooking has finished.
- Fixed a rendering and brightness issue with the museum bust asset.
- Fixed a camera distance initialisation issue in the fishing boat.
- Fixed an issue where the shopping purchase confirmation screen can still trigger even if a shop item is unavailable/greyed-out.
- Fixed an issue where placing objects in build mode could not be done using a controller.
- Fixed some typos on the sleep tips screen.
- Fixed an issue that affected some players where you were able to waste seeds on plots that already had them.
- Fixed an issue that affected some players where the player would freeze when interacting with farm plots.
- Fixed an issue where starting a new game would not initialize properly if accessed from the main menu after exiting from an existing save.
Feel free to continue reporting any bugs via the many social media links below!
Discord: https://discord.gg/kpGVRKPn5W
Threads: https://threads.net/dancingmoongame
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DancingMoonGame
Thank you so much for playing!
-DjMonkey
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1782420/Tales_from_The_Dancing_Moon/