First, I want to thank everyone for playing, commenting, reporting bugs, wishlisting, and following. The demo is improving and becoming more enjoyable each day, thanks to your support. For anyone waiting for things to improve before giving it another try, now is a good time! The demo is not perfect yet, but it’s definitely enjoyable.
Last week, the game reached a point where it suddenly seemed to click with people, and since then, it has been seeing a significant number of new daily wishlists.. This might be due to the introduction of the interaction preview (the detailed list showing what raises and lowers the chances of success). I’m really glad it worked out this way, as I think I was previously a bit too hesitant to show too much on the screen.
I'm also excited to see traffic from all over the world! Speaking of different regions, I haven't addressed this yet, but the game is nearly impossible to translate into other languages. If you played the early demo, you probably noticed how the text is pieced together from various sentence parts, names, pronouns, and relationships in different variations. This was a decision I had to make at one point in development. I would actually need to speak each language well enough myself to change the code and make that work.
In the last announcement, I mentioned setting a release date after the Next Fest, but I don’t feel confident enough to set a fixed date while I’m still improving the game and don’t have enough time to write the stories and tasks. However, it’s still planned for this year (a matter of weeks, not months).
As a consolation, the new update (v_0_93_04) includes a new challenge/minigame. I only realized yesterday that I forgot to add it to the demo. In this challenge, the Deep Ones test your knowledge of the village. You’ll need to identify a villager using three clues, along with search and filter functions and menus like the family tree. I hope you find it fun!
-simulinati
P.S. If you find a bug, please send a report. Thanks!