Hello, everyone! It’s been a while, but we’re finally here with a bunch of information about the progress on the full game!

To start things off, I’d like to present a list of what we’ve been working on since the last demo-update. Then, I’ll go into more detail on some of the things mentioned in the list. After that, I’ll give a short summary of our plans moving forward. It’s quite a lot of text, so feel free to read what you find interesting! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment and we’ll answer it as soon as we can.

So, since the last post, we’ve added the following in the full version of the game:

• Artwork for all marriage candidates and important characters
  • 38 marriage candidates (6 foreign leaders, 32 townsfolk) + Jacques, Sophia and Ophelia
• Everything needed for the 8 townspeople from the demo
• Everything needed for 2 new townspeople
• New buildings, including one that opens up a new trade route
• The complete marriage-system
• The complete adoption-system, including 4 unique children
• Endings based on completed characters, children and long events
• A couple of short events
• A lounge/living room background
• A crown based on a Patron’s design
• An unlockable wedding dress and suit
• An unlockable, long event-related outfit
• A system that allows us to make magical effects when such are used by visible characters in dialogue
• Probably a bunch of other things that I have forgotten

Note: By “unlockable”, I mean it is unlocked by completing something or reaching a certain point in the game. Mistwinter Bay will not have any type of DLC or micro transactions. The full game will be a one-time-purchase with all content available upon release. So when something is “locked”, it can always and only be unlocked by doing something in the game! It’s up to you to figure out how to unlock it.

Completed characters and marriage

As mentioned in the list, we have implemented everything that’s needed for all 8 demo-townsfolk (that is: Dawn, Cecil, Erewen, Alm, Englia, Birgit, Hector and Celia), as well as two new characters: the Voidist Priestess, Ulesse Crescent, and the Blacksmith, Gale Smith. So what does it mean that these characters have everything that’s needed? Well, we mean that every character has the following (except an inn-event for Dawn, Cecil and Erewen):

• An inn-event
• Hang outs 1 to 5
• A personal quest
• A proposal event
• Opinions on marriage and adoption
• 3 married life-events
• 9 different endings based on your relationship with them
• A “bad reputation”-event (previously called -100 reputation-event)

All of these things are, of course, unique to every character.

As you can probably imagine, writing and implementing all of that takes quite a bit of time. Since there are a total of 38 (!) marriage candidates, it will take a while to implement all of them. But we have started chipping away at all the remaining characters, now that we have implemented the marriage-system. So we have currently 10 out of 38 characters completed and an additional 6 that are semi-complete. Those six are the foreign leaders. More about them later.

I could write in detail about the marriage system, but I’ve already made a spoiler-free overview video of it, so I suggest you watch it (below) if you want to know how getting married works. But I should probably point out that the “married life-events” I listed above are three unique events for each character where you get choices that decide how good your marriage is. These three events, the wedding planning-event and the adoption-event will determine which out of four endings you will get with your spouse. Each ending is, of course, unique for each character.

New characters and buildings

If you’ve been keeping up with our social media (Twitter, Instagram, Patreon), you know that we reveal a new character every other week. Today we revealed marriage candidate nr. 27 on our social media pages and nr. 28 on Patreon. Out of all those new ones, we’ve already fully implemented Ulesse and Gale. We have also started working on the Guard Captain, Dough, and the Ship Captain, Kieran. Hopefully, at least one of them will be fully implemented in two weeks.

These four characters do, of course, come with their very own buildings. Gale has the blacksmith, which can be seen in the above image, close to the town wall. It is a standalone building, which means you can’t build another building on the same lot. The same goes for Dough’s building, the guard tower, which is in the fields to the left. Kieran’s building, the ship docks, is on the same lot as Birgit’s fishing docks (which makes a lot of sense, right?).

Kieran’s lot is the first lot of four that opens up a new trade route. By that, I mean a new button will be available in the trade menu. By clicking this button, you effectively trade with Achait, Fleidal and Utrua. The rates are different than if you trade with Straena, which is the default option. Generally speaking, you gain more resources by selling wood to these three countries and you can buy stone cheaper.

Then we also have Ulesse’s building(s). They are a very special case, since they are the only ones that can and must replace an existing building. As long as you haven’t built the Cathedral of Avarall, you can replace the Avallerist building and Dawn with a Shrine of The Void and Ulesse. Like the Avallerist buildings, the Voidist ones can be upgraded. It starts as a shrine, then a temple and lastly a cathedral. Upgrading will increase the seasonal donation from the church and the building’s monthly income of gold, just as with the Avallerist buildings.

Lastly, we’ve also added a park. The park is the only building you can build that doesn’t come with a character. It also produces no resources. So, why would you build it? Well, it is (so far) necessary to have a park in order to complete a character’s fourth hang out. So, the park is basically a break to make sure the player doesn’t move too fast in a relationship (sorry, marriage speedrunners!).

Adoption

I assume some of you are excited about the adoption-feature. Then I have good news for you: it is fully implemented now!

So, what does the adoption-system consist of? It’s this:

• The option to choose to adopt or not adopt 1 child out of 4
• The option to rename your child
• The option to decide what your child will call you (Mom, Dad, etc.)
• Four unique events per child
• Three unique endings per child

As with the marriage system, it’s easiest for you to watch a video (below) if you want to know how it works in detail. I just want to mention that the results you get in the four unique events every child has determines which ending the child will get. While you can’t see your marriage happiness, you can see which ending your child is likely to get. Although, it’s a bit cryptic. There’s a new menu where you can see what your child is currently “fascinated” by. That, in turn, indicates which ending you will get. The “fascination” may change, depending on the choices you make in the child’s events.

Since I know some people won’t want to or have time to watch a video, I’ll leave some pictures of the “fascination”-menu down below. As you can probably tell, each child is just as unique as all the other characters in the game!

Continued work

Now that we’ve presented some of the things we’ve been working on for the past few months, let’s look to the future!

As you can probably imagine, our current focus lies on implementing the rest of the marriage candidates. We are starting with the regular townsfolk, since we have a sort of system for them. Even though the foreign leaders already have two hang outs completed, we’ve put them on the back burner for a while. That’s because we want to make them as special as possible and stand out compared to the regular townsfolk. Getting married to a foreign leader should be a challenge, but also give you some rewards. So, we want to get even more familiar with writing and implementing characters before we tackle them.

In other words, the next few months will almost only consist of implementing the rest of the townsfolk. We’ll try to keep you updated when we’ve implemented a few of them, but I won’t make any promises. Our focus lies on developing the game, after all, and keeping everyone in the loop does take time away from that. But you can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Patreon if you want smaller, more frequent updates!

Also, a little fun fact and semi-brag before we wrap things up: last time I looked, which was a while ago, the complete dialogue manuscript for Mistwinter Bay had more than 600,000 words! And that’s only a small portion of the game! This means that the complete game will be one of the largest games ever created, in terms of dialogue. Of course, any single playthrough will only see a tiny fraction of it, but it’s pretty cool that it’s so big! Naturally, that will mean that the finished game will likely have quite a few grammatical errors upon release and probably a few bugs, too. But what else can you expect from something so big that’s only made by two people?

I’d like to sign this long post off with a HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who has played and enjoyed Mistwinter Bay. Seeing the numbers of demo downloads tick up with time is very encouraging. I hope you’re as excited to play the final game, eventually, as we are to see you play it!

And a special, MASSIVE THANK YOU to our Patrons on Patreon – Emelie and Drakona – for supporting us! It really means a lot!

With that, I thank you for getting through this big block of text and thank you for your support!

//LevUNknown, lead developer