Hello, everyone!
The two of us here at Swordlake Entertainment want to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of Mistwinter Bay's release with you! It's crazy to think that it has already been an entire year since we hit the release-button and anxiously awaited the reception of a game that we had put so many years of work into. Thankfully, the game seems to have resonated with most players and that, we are very grateful for. A massive thank-you to all of you beautiful people who have given the game a chance - you are what allows us to keep going! While we're still quite a ways off of earning a proper living by making games, we have been able to start the production of a new game (more on that below).
But now, let's talk about the game we're all here to celebrate!
Player statistics
As you already know, there are many ways to play the game. Some of the results of this freedom are reflected in the Steam-achievements. Let's look at some excerpts of the achievement statistics, as they are at the time of writing!
The foreign leaders are quite popular, since every fourth player has married a foreign leader, even though there are significantly more townsfolk. Orreg is the favorite foreign leader in terms of completed personal quests, whilst Gaird is the least popular. About 40% of players have entered an alliance, and an impressive 21% have had three alliances at once.
Naturally, the three starter characters are at the top of the list in terms of completed personal quests, but Erewen (30.9%) and Cecil (30.2%) are quite a bit ahead of Dawn (21.6%). Since Erewen and Cecil were in the top of all characters, we put them on the anniversary picture above! The most popular non-starter-character is Kieran, with 20.4% of players having completed his personal quest. (For those interested in optimal strategies, Kieran seems to be a favorite pick as well!) The least popular townsperson is Birgit, with only 2.9% of players having completed her personal quest. Considering that Kieran and Birgit are mutually exclusive, those stats aren't that surprising.
About a third of players have had a townsperson die or move out, but only 1.6% have had at least 5 townsfolk die in a single playthrough. 12% have decided to change things up by replacing the Avallerist building with a Voidist one. However, more than 60% have constructed at least one building.
Players tend to prefer to be “good” in playthroughs, since achievements related to giving nice gifts and hanging out with characters are more common than the one about giving a mean gift or being detested. Many seem to enjoy creating townsfolk couples as well, with more than a fifth of players having tried it.
In terms of “special” characters, 34.7% of players have invited Robin, Sasee or Mallowan (perhaps all three) to stay with them. 19.8% have encountered a god, while 28.7% have met a pegasus. Only 3.1% have met a creature from The Void who offers some very powerful boons…
One game, one year
So yes, it has now been one year since Mistwinter Bay was released. Since then, we have added two major content updates, bringing the game up to the ideal vision we had for it. This new content brought the total word count of the game up to around 1.8 million, which is an absolutely insane number! Of course, the number of words in a creative work doesn't measure quality, but we have done our best to address player input and mechanical things as well, such as adding cheats. We have also released several small fixes, addressing bugs, balancing and grammar (there is definitely a lot of spelling mistakes left, though, and will so remain).
News and a new game
We teased in the intro that we have a new game on the way. We have been working on it since March of this year, after the official development of Mistwinter Bay ended, and it is shaping up nicely! If you want to be notified when the game releases or learn more about it when the time is right, please consider following our social media pages. Another great way is by following our new developer page here on Steam, by which you will be notified every time we release new games!
Hopefully, we'll have a store page up by the end of the year. We're very excited to show off our hard work then! While we can't give any specific information about the new game right now, we'll leave you with a list of key features:
3D
First person
Focused on story and characters, but reliant on some skill as well
A fairly linear narrative, but different endings
Four playable characters
Fully voiced in Japanese (by real, human actors!)
Once again, a massive thank-you to every single one of you! It is thanks to you that Mistwinter Bay is a game we can look back on with pride.
Sincerely,
The Swordlake Entertainment duo