Hello, everyone! We have some very exciting news to share: a brand new update of Mistwinter Bay’s demo is live now!

This version is called 0.2.0.0, since it has seen so many changes from the previous playable version. It's almost a brand new game at this rate! Naturally, this means that there are many, many differences between the versions, so we won’t list all of them here. If you’re curious about some of the new features, characters, buildings and general content featured in this new demo, we suggest you read our old full game-updates. Most of what we have talked about in those updates are available in this demo. However, since it is a demo, there are still a few restrictions on what you can do in the game (more on that under it’s own headline below). We have also added a few things that we haven’t mentioned in any other update, so we’ll list those now:

• Improved character creator
  • The option to freely pick colors for most aspects of the player character with a color wheel
  • New hairstyles
    • Front and back pieces
  • New eyes and mouths
  • New outfits
  • You can now decide your character’s height
    • 3 heights to choose from
• It’s now possible to change hair and beard color in the wardrobe menu
• Adjusted all characters’ and NPC’s heights
• Improved and shortened the game’s intro and tutorial tips
  • Added the option to skip the planning and conduction of the coronation to allow players to access the main gameplay faster. This option is clearly presented along with a time estimate of how long it would take to play through the planning and conduction of the coronation
  • Added many more tips
  • Tips that show up automatically does so when you are introduced to them in the game’s intro, or when you click on relevant buttons or enter the relevant game areas later in the game
• Added more entries to the encyclopedia
• Made it possible to access the map when in dialogue
• Added all townsfolks’ inn-events, hangouts 1-3 and negative reputation events
• Added all foreign leaders’ hangout 3 and negative reputation events
• Changed the way “guaranteed success” is displayed when sending characters on events
  • It now shows those who are less likely to succeed in dark brown. Those who are more likely to succeed are shown in light brown, but most of them still have a percentage-based chance to fail
  • It is now referred to as “likely success”
• Added sliders instead of arrows for changing all sound related volumes in the settings
• Fixed how characters are drawn in dialogue, so that they’re hopefully no longer drawn with pixelated, grayish borders on some computers (please tell us if it hasn’t been fixed!)
• Shortened some loading times and added loading times to some menus, so that more computers will be able to run the game
• Lots of other minor adjustments to UI and dialogue

Character creator

I’ll try to keep this announcement focused on the demo and future development, but I just wanted to make a short segment about the updated character creator. Once again, we’ve given it a big overhaul, mainly by adding one pretty cool feature: the ability for you to freely choose the colors of most aspects of you player character!

If you keep up with us on YouTube, you might have seen our video discussing the creation of this version of the character creator. Like the picture suggests, we have added a color wheel which allows you to freely pick the hue and saturation of a color on a specific part of your character. A slider then adjusts the value (how light or dark the color is), allowing you to pick any color in the rainbow and beyond for your character.

There are a few default colors that you can choose from as well, if you feel like picking freely is too much. These are also the colors you can get randomly by clicking the dice next to the color-buttons. You have the ability to make several custom colors, though. They’re shared between savefiles and can be used on all parts of the character that can be colored. You can freely pick the color of everything on your player character, except for skin tone and décor color of outfits, earrings and crowns. Most outfits are split into four parts that you can color separately, and then you choose between gold or silver details for the outfit. For eyes and eyeshadow, it’s possible to color each eye separately.

In addition to the color features, we have also added several more front and back pieces for hair. With the new pieces, there is a total combination of 560 hairstyles you can make! (We won’t guarantee that all combinations of hair pieces look good, though.) There are also twice as many outfits as in the old demo, making for a total of 4 dresses and 4 shirt-and-pants outfits. It’s also possible to choose between 3 heights for your character. However, we know that the player character is currently a bit too short compared to other characters in dialogue, no matter which height is chosen, so we will make all player heights slightly taller in the full game.

We can’t wait to see what characters you make, so don’t be afraid to reach out to us with pictures or videos on our social media pages or the game’s community pages!

Demo content and restrictions

As previously mentioned, the new demo is still just a demo. That means there are restrictions on what you can do. Like in the old demo, it is only possible to play for one in-game year. You won’t be able to unlock outfits or achievements. Marriage and adoption is not accessible, since it is only possible to hang out with a character 3 times at most. This means that, unlike in the old demo, you can now access every character’s third hangout. So if you’ve played the old demo and found a character you were curious about, you can now experience a bit more of their story!

Speaking of characters, the new demo makes it possible for you to meet and hang out with all of the potential spouses. All buildings and building upgrades are also available so that you can experiment with which of the 32 townsfolk you want in your town. All 38 dateable characters – including the foreign leaders – have the same amount of story content in this demo (minus the fact that the townsfolk who can move in all have an inn-event as well). Everyone has hangouts 1 to 3, and a negative reputation event. The addition of the negative reputation events makes this demo quite different compared to the old one, since only Ophelia’s negative reputation event was available in that version.

It is worth mentioning that there are only a few new monthly events in this new demo, compared to previously released versions. Most of the new monthly events have strict restrictions on how and when they can take place, which makes it fairly unlikely that you will encounter them. This means that if you’ve played the old demo, you’ll probably see the same monthly events as you did back then. We will of course add many more monthly events to the full game (more about that further down).

Optimization, loading times and the limits of the game engine

I want to preface this segment by saying that this new demo is much more optimized than older versions and should be playable on most computers. All in all, it runs smoothly 99% of the time on most computers. However, there are some loading times that are not ideal and I will discuss that now, so that you understand why some things are the way they are and why we will be unable to fix them.

Mistwinter Bay is made in the game engine GameMaker Studio 2. To the uninitiated, this probably doesn’t mean anything and you might even think that it doesn’t matter to your experience as a player. That is unfortunately not the case.

The more we work on the game, the more obvious it is that GameMaker is not fit to handle the game’s high resolution graphics and the amount of needed graphics in a good way. We have made several attempts at optimization, but there are limits with GameMaker that we simply can’t get past. This far into development, it is of course impossible for us to change game engine. The game generally runs much smoother in this demo version than the old one, but it is still far from ideal. Unfortunately, due to GameMaker’s limitations, it can never be completely ideal. Instead, we humbly ask that you – just like us – try to live with some of the not-ideal ways the game functions sometimes. Trust us, if we could make it run smoother in some places, we would try to make it a reality, but it is unfortunately out of our control due to the game engine.

With that out of the way, I should probably explain what we have done to optimize this demo (and the full game). First of all, we have made loading into the town view much faster, but that loading time is still the longest in the game. Loading into the character creator is also much faster than before, despite all the new customization options we have added. Loading into dialogue is also slightly faster. All loading times are now also presented with a “Loading” text at the bottom of the screen, to remove the feeling of the game being “stuck” or “frozen” (the game does freeze when loading, but that is because of GameMaker, unfortunately).

We have also changed much of how the game handles visual elements, which means that the game can hopefully run on more computers without crashing due to lack of texture memory. Since we are only two people working on the game, the demo is so big and we have had a limited number of computers to test the demo on, I can’t guarantee that there aren’t portions where some (far from all) computers might run out of texture memory despite these optimizations.

Unfortunately, this optimization means that we have been forced to add loading segments to some menus. The affected menus and game sections are the character creator, character roster-menu and tips-menu. When changing the body type in the character creator, the game will load for a while, but all other sections of the character creator runs smoothly. When opening the character roster during dialogue, the game will also load for a while (this is not the case when opening the same menu at the start of a month). The same goes for when you get an in-game tip or when you go to the tips-menu when the game is paused. Also, there will be some loading when a letter is shown in dialogue.

Depending on how the final game functions, you may see more or less loading, or loading in other places, in the full version of the game. We would of course have preferred shorter loading times and fewer instances of loading, but due to the limits of GameMaker, we find it highly unlikely that the final game’s loading will look much different than this demo’s. However, that is something we are okay with, since it means most computers will be able to run the game.

Edit: Since publishing this post, we have made a list of ways that we will hopefully be able to circumvent the limitations of the game engine. This hopefully means that most (maybe all) loading times will be improved in the full game! We will keep you posted about progress with loading times.

We would like your help

We don’t often ask for things besides the regular “follow us here and there”-stuff. However, with this new demo that is much more representative of the final game than the old one, we would like to hear your thoughts. If you play the demo and find bugs (especially crashes), spelling mistakes, or other things, please report them to us! The community pages is a great place for that. There is so much text and dialogue in the game that it’s impossible for the two of us to find all mistakes, especially when we always have a big dose of “being blind to your own text”. With bugs (especially crashes), things work differently on different computers, so while some parts of the game works fine on ours, they might not always work on yours. So if you find anything, we would appreciate if you tell us about it, so that we can try to make the full version of Mistwinter Bay the best game it can be.

Another thing that we would like your help with is to spread the word about this demo (and by extension, the full game). If you have played the new demo and liked it (or even if you didn’t like it, I suppose), we would very much appreciate it if you mention it to other people who might be interested in trying it out. It could be real-life or online friends, some sort of online forum, or a content creator who might be interested in playing the demo. If you yourself make videos on YouTube or stream gameplay on some platform, we would very much like to see you play the new demo. As developers, the most helpful feedback we can get is to watch someone play. That is the most efficient way for us to see and understand if things work as intended. It’s also very motivating to see (live) reactions to something you’ve worked hard on.

If you think you can help in any way, we would be very grateful for your assistance!

Continued development

Now that we have released a new version of the demo, we will get back to working on the full version of the game. If there are enough bug reports for the demo, we might patch the demo with bug fixes, but we will not be adding any new content to the demo. Instead, we will focus on the full game, primarily by completing the 10 townsfolk who aren’t already completely finished. Then, we will finish the foreign leaders’ personal stories. After that, we can finally move on from the characters and start working on the monthly events and the main story! The main story was one of the first things I wrote for the game, so all that’s left for it to be completed is basically just implementation (which is a lot faster than writing. Trust me).

When we have enough monthly events and the main story is implemented from start to finish, we can begin play testing the game for the actual, final release. It might sound like there are just a few months left until the actual release, but we’re looking at a summer release at the earliest (a fall release is probably more likely).

Be sure to follow us here so that you don’t miss development updates and, most importantly, the release date of the final game! You can also find us here:

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/swordlakeentertainment

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCICWzkpUmB-Xv_52sAh_tUw

Twitter/X: @swordlake_ent https://mobile.twitter.com/swordlake_ent

Instagram: @swordlake_entertainment https://www.instagram.com/swordlake_entertainment

TikTok: @swordlakeentertainment https://www.tiktok.com/@swordlakeentertainment

Thank you for your support and have fun with the new demo! (Sorry that it took a while to upload it!)

//LevUNknown, lead developer