The Necromancer's Tale News

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The Necromancer's Tale has been invited to be part of Steam's ScreamFest this Halloween! You can play our detailed demo (1.5 hrs+ content).

The demo contains four distinct parts:

Chapter 1 (From the Beginning) - Your character's backstory, early career and skills are chosen through an interactive fiction. This demo offers an abbreviated version of the interactive fiction (chapter 1), followed by a portion of 'Homecoming' (chapter 2) which deals with the events and intrigue after you arrive home for your father's funeral.

Chapter 2 (Homecoming) - This demo covers the second half of chapter 2: your initial exploration of the city, meeting old friends, and finding a job. You have gathered enough information to realise that your father's death and hurried cremation were suspicious, and that the family finances are in trouble. You will need to find a short-term job in the city and investigate recent events. We begin with you about to venture past your home gates for the first time...

Chapter 6 (Hospital) - This demo covers the first half of chapter 6. Using a ritual from an ancient spellbook you attempt to raise a dead body but collapse into a coma. You awaken in hospital beside Diedrik, your childhood friend who has been in hospital since he got caught up in a necromantic trap spell you had set to protect your house.

Combat Demo - A demo of the turn-based hexgrid combat system. Here you have some reanimated skeletons under your control in addition to your own character. Characters move in sequence based on their Agility skill.

The Demo version 0.89 update adds a bunch of things:

• Steam Deck compatibility. The game works great on the Deck! Combat controls still need some work.
  
• Added some additional minor NPCs to the demo.
  
• Added additional graphics settings, hint options and other info.
  
• Some people seem to be struggling in the first section after arriving home (the investigation bit), so now your old friend Sofia turns up to tag along and give a few hints if you seem to be stuck.
  
• I made a breakthrough in terms of save-file backwards compatibility, so hopefully save files from this version forward (0.89) will stay compatible. I know this is important as the Steam analytics show that some people are playing the demo for several hours (which is great to see, by the way!)
  

Other development is going well. We have loads of exciting content going into the game at the moment :-)

The Necromancer's Tale has been selected to participate in Yogscast's "Tiny Teams" Festival!
The official stream will include the game next week (Wednesday 9th August, 9pm UTC/8pm BST), but meanwhile watch out for affiliated streamers picking us up!

Tiny Teams Festival Page

We have added partial voice audio to the demo, covering the entire prologue and the early lines for the game's NPCs. The process of working with voice actors has been a lot of fun, and a lot of work too! We'd love to hear your thoughts on whether this is a good addition.

Other small changes include:

• footsteps audio
  
• functioning mirrors
  
• a "speed up" slider for combat
  
• a camera rotation speed option
  

As you might know, we ran a substantial testing campaign on our demo over the last several months. Nearly 1000 people have tried the demo now, and we have received a lot of really useful feedback. Not just bugs, but also strong evidence of what people like about the game and what they want to see more of.

One of the most requested features was wearable clothes - so, when you find a leather coat and wear it, it should appear on the in-game character. This makes sense as something players would want, when you consider that the depth of the game world is one of the main features they love. This is roleplaying, after all...

We have just updated the Demo to include a bunch of improvement on the main character art.
- Wearable clothes (with cloth physics)
- Improved animations, including procedural movement so everything feels more fluid
- Inverse kinematics on torches held in front of you.

Here's some quick footage showing this in-game. Naturally, there are wearable tricorn hats -- the 18th Century's most iconic fashion item. And yes, there is a royal ball in the game: it's at a major pivot point in the plot as the player's insanity is really starting to burn bright.


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