Hello, everyone! It’s been a very long time, but we’re back with more information about the progress on the full game! Since it’s been so long, we have had time to add multiple characters, buildings and features, as well as implement a bunch of quality-of-life-improvements.

First off, we’ll take a look at a long list summarizing the work that has been done since Full Game Progress Update 1 in March. Since we've added a lot of things, we can only go into detail on a few of them. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment and we’ll answer it as soon as we can.

Since the last post, we’ve done the following in the full version of the game:

• Expanded the character creator
  • 2 new body types
  • 1 new head shape
  • 1 new face (eyes + mouth)
  • Lip color options
  • Eyeshadow color options
  • Added the ability to randomize names and appearance
• Added new characters
  • Finished Dough and Kieran
  • Added and finished Lynx, Oscar, Lilith, Euphemia, Jerome and Ulvar
• Added new buildings
  • Hunters’ Camp, Wheat Farm, Stone Quarry, Brothel, Stables (includes a new trade route with Meblia, Yscor and Ethal), Marketplace (includes generally better rates when trading)
• Your spouse gains your family name upon marriage, if they aren’t a foreign leader, Ethalian or Yscorian
• Building a Keep now comes with a set number of jail cells. Building a Castle increases the number of cells.
  • Both the Keep and the Castle shows a list of prisoners (both townsfolk and non-essential NPCs) and empty cells in a new tab-menu in the town overview
  • If all of the jail cells are full, it’s no longer possible to take prisoners
• Added visual effects
  • Screenshake (dialogue)
  • Blood spatter (dialogue)
  • Different particles when hovering over built and unbuilt lots (town)
• Added an item collection
• Added a laws-mechanic
• Added a taxes-mechanic
• Added the ability to change guard presence in town
• Various UI fixes
  • It’s now possible to see how much the population will increase when building something
  • It’s now possible to right click with the mouse to close or back out of all menus
  • Characters’ reputation is now visible in the gift-menu
  • An on-screen pause button and log button has been added during dialogue
  • The text log now displays the 25 most recent lines of dialogue
  • Buttons to instantly change text speed and auto added to pause menu
  • Information about foreign leaders is now available alongside the townsfolk roster
  • Information in roster if a character is uninterested in you
    • That is, they’re unavailable for marriage and hangouts and you can’t give gifts to them. That is separate from a character detesting you, which means you can’t change their reputation in any way. Information about a character detesting you has been visible for a while
  • New information to existing menus in the throne room at the start of a month
    • Shows if there are new hangouts, personal quests or a visitor at the inn
    • Shows which specific hangouts and personal quests are new
    • All personal quests now have names that are displayed on the button for each quest. These names will also likely be used for the achievement of completing said personal quest
  • “Round buttons” are now bigger
  • Added sound effects to buttons and other UI
• Overhauled the settings menu
  • Added sections based on categories (text, graphics, sound, etc)
  • A message above the apply-button indicates unsaved changes
  • Music and sound values are now displayed as percentages
  • Added more options related to audio, visual effects and auto text

New characters and buildings

If you’ve been keeping up with our social media accounts or Patreon, you know that we reveal a new character every other week. Today we revealed the final marriage candidate on Patreon and the second-to-last on Twitter and Instagram. If you haven’t already, you should go check them out, so that you can get a feeling for what you might expect in the full game!

Last time, we mentioned that we were working on implementing the Guard Tower Captain, Dough Moriarty, and the Ship Captain, Kieran Teriani. Both of them have been fully completed for a while now. In addition to those characters, we have also fully implemented the characters in the picture above. Those characters are: the Hunter, Lynx Lioness; the Wheat Farmer, Oscar Sweet; the Stone Quarry Miner, Lilith Bale; the Brothel Manager, Euphemia Kudarth; the Stable Master, Jerome Gotts; and the Marketplace Supervisor, Ulvar Freid.

As with all the other townsfolk, these new ones join the town when you build a specific building. You need the Hunters’ Camp for Lynx, the Wheat Farm for Oscar, the Stone Quarry for Lilith, the Brothel for Euphemia, the Stables for Jerome and the Marketplace for Ulvar. The Hunter’s camp shares a lot with Hector’s Lumber Camp. The Wheat Farm and Quarry share a lot, as does the Brothel and the Stables. The Marketplace is sharing a lot with the Black Market, which will be added soon.

Building the Stables opens up trade routes with Meblia, Yscor and Ethal, which means you can buy wood for cheaper and sell stone for more profit. The Marketplace also opens up a new option in the trade menu, providing generally better trade deals over all.

Improved character creator

One of the biggest changes we’ve made in the past few months is to overhaul the character creator. Now, there are a total of four body types to choose from and the option to choose between two head shapes!

Since the eyelids and mouths looked a bit odd on some skin tones before, we’ve completely changed how the eyes work. This means that the eyelids and eyes are separated, which gives you the option to choose the color of the eyeshadow, as well as the shape and color of the eyes. It’s also possible to change the color of the lips. If you want to see these changes in action, we have a video all about these changes:

In addition to those changes, we have also added the ability to randomize every feature of the player character’s visual elements, as well as the first name and surname. However, it’s not possible to randomize the entire character at once. We don’t plan to add that feature, either, since we assume that most players don't have use for it.

We will keep adding outfits, hairstyles, accessories and so on until the game is released. It’s possible that we will add some more faces and maybe another head shape as well. However, we won’t add any more body types.

Collection, taxes, guard presence and laws

Even though most of the game’s features have been planned since the start, we have recently added four unplanned features. I’ll try to break all of them down into bite sized chunks here, but if you want a more thorough explanation and an in-game look, I suggest watching the video above.

The first new feature is the collection. It is basically an item inventory consisting of objects that you have gained throughout the game. From the start, you only have one item – the ceremonial crown. You can gain new items in various types of events. Some items give permanent effects, while some are purely sentimental. Right now, there are a total of 11 items, but only a few are obtainable, since most of them are related to the foreign leaders. Two of the objects relate to monthly events that are available in the demo ("Jacques’ backstory" and "the traveling painter" monthly events), where you “gained” an item, but didn’t actually receive anything. In the full game, you do receive those items. The collection is viewable in the throne room at the start of a month.

The second feature is taxes. Via the new taxes-menu, you have the ability to raise taxes for the townsfolk. You can raise taxes for each of the three social classes independently. The tax raise means that you will gain a certain amount of coins per month and the social class in question will lose reputation each month. The amount of coins you gain depends on the social class and the number of townsfolk you have in that class. The tax raise is locked for a set amount of months before you can lower them manually. You can’t lower taxes if it means your coins per month will go below 0. A message is shown in the throne room at the start of a month if you can lower the taxes

In the same menu as the taxes, you can also change how many guards there are in town. The guard presence is split into low, medium and high. At the start of the game, it is set to low. It cannot be raised until you have built either the barracks or guard tower. Each of those buildings has the ability to raise the guard presence one level. Raising the guard presence reduces your amount of gold per month. Lowering the guard presence increases your gold per month, but reduces the reputation of every townsperson as a one-time effect (which means that you won’t lose reputation monthly. However, if you lower the guard presence again, reputation will be lost). The guard presence also affects the likelihood of crime-related events taking place as monthly events. However, it doesn’t affect character story-related events (like hangouts, personal quests, negative reputation events, etc).

The final feature is the ability to create new laws or change existing ones. By this, I mean that it’s possible to impact Mistwinter Bay’s laws in different types of events. You can’t actively change laws – instead, laws act as a reaction to things you do in the regular gameplay. A new button in the throne room at the start of a month gives you the ability to view laws that you have instated. These laws are (so far mostly) decorative and are made as a direct response to something you have promised or done in an event. These laws cannot be changed once they have been made.

Continued work

We’ve done a lot in the past few months, but there’s still a long way to go. We don’t know how long development will take, but we hope to release the full game sometime in 2024.

Just as during most of this year, our focus moving forward will be on implementing the rest of the marriage candidates. We have 14 townsfolk and 6 foreign leaders left. After that, we will get into monthly events, which will likely be a lot faster to implement. In other words, once all the marriage candidates are done, things should be moving at a pretty nice pace!

We might try to give a short update when we’ve implemented a few more townsfolk, but I won’t make any promises. But I can at least assume that it won’t take as long between update 2 and 3 as it did between update 1 and 2...

I’d like to sign this long post off with a HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who has played and enjoyed Mistwinter Bay.

And a special, MASSIVE THANK YOU to our Patrons on Patreon – Emelie and Cinder – for supporting us!

With that, I thank you for your support and wish you a happy rest of the summer!

//LevUNknown, lead developer