As is my habit, I'm releasing the demo earlier than I should today in the hope of getting feedback about new things that may have bugs or unintended consequences. While the game is playable at this stage, it is in active development and not as interesting or pretty as it will be on release day.
The demo includes the starting islands and their towns plus the graveyard zone. Games are saved in the Steam cloud and will transfer to the full version of the game, so you won't lose any progress you've made in the demo. This is a very early version of the game, so you should save often.
For people who have played any of the previous games, here are the things that are new or different in this first release of the Toward The Ice demo:
- The ability to have a roster of "extra" characters. You can have up to 25 characters total with 6 in the party and up to 19 "extra". These extra characters will stay at an inn when not in the adventuring party, and new characters can be created at the inn. You can also delete a character. Deletion is not permanent until you save the game. I plan to add a confirmation prompt to the deletion process, but there isn't one now, so be careful.
- The option of using a pregenerated adventuring party. If you don't feel like going through the process of character creation and just want to get into the game quickly, you can start with a pregenerated party. You can always create more customized characters at the inn later and leave the pregenerated characters at the inn.
- A bestiary where you can view info about monsters you've encountered. The more of a monster you kill, the more info is revealed. I have not added descriptions for all of the monsters yet.
- Resting in the wilderness to regain hitpoints and mana. It will require that the party be in an outdoors zone (somewhere they can camp) and have enough food in their inventory to feed everyone. While resting, there is the danger of being attacked by wandering monsters, and some or all of the party will begin combat asleep. It may be worth noting that areas can have different random encounter chances (and always could in all of the previous games). Resting is entirely optional and you can always pay to recharge hitpoints and mana at healers and mana rechargers. Please try to break this system - it's new and has had limited testing.
- Elevation changes. You can now walk uphill/downhill and across uneven terrain. That's pretty important since there are a lot of mountains in this game.
- Automatic scripted movement. This allows you to ride boats/ferries to other places in the world.
- Added footstep sounds. These can be turned on or off via the settings menu.
- Counterattacking (can also be considered riposte). When dodging or blocking, all characters will have a chance, based on combat skill and level, to swing back at the enemy. Warrior-type classes will also have a very small chance to do this during normal combat when not actively blocking or dodging. You should not expect to riposte with low-level characters.
- Adding notes to the map. When you discover something like buried treasure but don't have a shovel, you can add a note to the map to remind you that it's there so you can find it later. Notes are visible as the letter "N" on the map and are stored with your game save data. You can also view all of the notes from a window that can be opened from the overview map and they will be displayed as a pop-up message when you enter the location that contains them. Right now there is just basic note adding and I plan to improve the user interface so you can edit and remove notes.
- A new spellcasting screen in combat. Instead of bringing up the full-screen spellcasting window in combat, which is a little jarring/disrupting, there is a smaller overlay interface within the context of combat for choosing which spell to cast. Spells now have icons that will be shown on this screen. I'm still polishing the design on this.
- New character classes with new abilities: Valkyrie, Berserker, Skald, and Runecaller. In addition to their magical abilities, runecallers can also affix runes dropped as random loot to items in order to enchant them with bonuses. This affix is permanent and an item can have up to 3 rune enchantments, so think carefully about what items you want to use them on. Not all class abilities are complete yet -- I plan to add a few more things before release, especially for the Berserker and Skald.
- New item materials. Thanks to the Dwarven mining industry, the frozen lands have different materials availale, and the +1/+2/+3 items you might be familiar with from other games have been replaced with mithril, adamantium, and diamondite items and more items made from these materials will be added before release.
- More playable races. In this region, Kobolds, Ratkin, Goblins, and Gnolls are commonly found in adventuring parties. I also made some layout improvements to the character creation screen to make room for more classes and races than before.
- Better resistance bonuses on items. They've been doubled compared to previous games.
- You can now drag-and-drop items to equip or unequip them. This still needs a bit of tuning for the visuals because item icons can be hidden by other UI elements while you're dragging them. The old way of equipping and unequipping still works.
- More and better sound effects overall. More to come, especially for the new Runecaller spells.
- Now shows an indicator over a monster when it is hit by a player in combat, just like is shown when players are hit.
- Added translations for the feedback form so it's easier to send feedback in every supported game language.
- Improvements to initial startup load time. This was necessary because this game has a bigger file size than the previous ones. You'll get to the main menu quicker now.
- I have not written much music yet, so you'll probably hear music from previous games reused temporarily in some places.
- The English manual has been updated with the new features and changes. Manuals in other languages still need to be updated, and will be updated before release (most likely in the next demo update).
- KNOWN ISSUE: The terrain textures in the build are very low-resolution compared to those in the editor. I'm sure there's a build setting buried somewhere that I need to track down.
- KNOWN ISSUE: The game can take a while to load without giving any feedback. I'll be adding a loading progress bar in the next update.
With the exception of the new game-theme-specific classes, races, and region-specific materials, I also plan to include these new features in the older games once they've been tested and tuned. That's fairly easy since they all share the same core code modules.
I tend to update demos for in-progress games about every 6 weeks on average, so that's about what you should expect for the next demo update.
By all means, please share your thoughts, bug discoveries, or translation improvement suggestions either via the in-game feedback form (available via the escape key menu), on the Steam forums, or in the newly-created Discord (link on the store page).