My fellow seafarers, the Steam Demo has been disabled for now. Those of you who have already downloaded should still be able to launch it from the directory directly (outside of Steam). Also, if you have received a Steam key for the demo from me, you will still be able to access it for now. I thank you all for playing and for providing feedback. Soon(TM) I will be opening up a new preview branch with private key access exclusively for Discord members. I've spend the past half year or so working on the current demo, and I'm now ready to leave it behind. I learned a lot about the type of game I want to make, what works and what doesn't, and while there is still stuff to figure out, I am now confident enough to go into the next phase of development. This will also mark a big shift in how I work. For the foreseeable future, I will be looking at greyboxed levels and placeholder stuff, as I'm setting up the rest of the game. This will be difficult for me as I always need that visual connection to get a feel for what I'm doing. But, I'm happy with the visual approach I laid out in the demo and I need to take a step back now. My plan is to layout the entire game from start to finish; with placeholders for some puzzles and story sequences. The goal is to have, by the end, a full "prototype" of the game, that I can build the final game on. I feel really good about this approach, especially since I've spend so much time on this one part of the game; I now need to get on with it and see if everything flows together the way I imagine it in my head. There is also this whole part of the game that I haven't really talked about much in public yet, and those are the music sequences. They need a lot of iteration to make them work the way I have planned; they might not work at all. We'll see! But it's time to get into the meat of it now! The type of access I will be granting on Discord will be for specific demo levels that showcase stuff like: Puzzles Specific puzzle concepts for which I would like some feedback; not necessarily about the puzzles themselves but about mechanical aspects of it. A big part of this will be the rope sim, as I'm improving that to be more versatile and allow for more complex puzzle designs. New player feel The entire player controller is being rewritten with the goal to make movement and interactions even more tactile yet fluent, and giving the player more freedom in interacting with stuff. Systems I'm testing include a "2 handed" interaction style, were players are able to chose themselves which hand they will use to interact with something; this in part was already present in the demo, but I'm extending this even more. The IK system will be reworked (see below) which also means getting rid of glitches, making it all feel more realistic and immersive. Also the player will react more to the environment, holding on to railing when the ship moves and stuff like that. Reworked interaction system The interaction system will also be overhauled. Currently I'm using a custom system build on top of the third-party IK solution I'm using. It is, to be frank, a mess and really cumbersome to maintain, scale and super bug-prone. I'm rewriting that entirely with my own codebase and with a custom IK solution to better suit my needs. It will also allow to better merge procedural movement with premade animations to make everything look and feel better and less glitchy. An immersive diegetic inventory system A lof of players felt restricted with how the demo handled holding items and how they were forced to follow a specific path (for example, once you've picked up the Temporal Resonance Locater, you couldn't put it down). The reason is, I didn't have any kind of inventory system in place! But that is coming -- in the form of a fully diegetic system that is set believably in the world. There will be no magic carrying of tons of items; instead, you will only be able to hold on your body what you realistically could. That means: Holding two items at a time, unless an item requires two hands for example. Small items like notes can be placed in your pockets. To take them out, you look down at the pocket and take it out; all that with minimal UI prompts and no inventory overlays. You will be able to use things like bags to carry more stuff, but there will be situations where you have to carry stuff one by one to a specific point to solve a puzzle. I'm SUPER excited to work on this system! Plus there is a lot more. I'm also still in the running for a new kind of governemnt funding round, I'm hoping to find out where that is going soon. Stay tuned for more! Thank you all for your support. Cheers, Markus