itch.io

Thank you so much, we really appreciate the support!

Thank you! We're happy to hear that things got sorted! Best of luck with the rest of your playthrough

Sorry about the issue, that's very unfortunate! Based on the error code, it does indeed seem like something went wrong when your computer lost power, probably related to some files not being saved properly. As such, it most likely isn't something we can fix in an update. That being said, we suggest that you try the following:

1. Locate your savefiles in your computer's folders by going to: user->AppData->Local->Mistwinter Bay. You need to allow to show hidden files, or the AppData-folder and all folders in it won't show up

2. Delete the "settings.save" file. Start the game and see if it starts like it should. Deleting this file means that you have to re-apply any custom settings

3. If the above step didn't work, repeat the process but delete the "menus.save" file instead. Deleting this file means that menus, such as the Townsfolk Roster etc, opens in a default setting and not where you last left off

4. If the above steps didn't work, repeat the process but delete the "savemanager.save" file instead. It's worth noting that when this file is deleted, your savefiles will not be properly displayed when saving/loading in the game, but they are still there and can be loaded and saved to as before. Deleting this file will also delete some achievement progress statistics, achievement coins and some other things. As such, for the best experience, it might be worth it to delete the "achievements.save" file as well so that all achievements can be obtained again

5. If none of the above steps worked, deleting all remaining files should hopefully solve the issue. Unfortunately, this means losing all current saved games

We hope one of the steps helps!

Unfortunately, the demo is no longer available to download anywhere since:

1: It was a bad representation of the game, since the loading times were abysmal, making it close to unplayable on some computers, and there was a bad visual error visible on some computers as well. There were a lot of quality-of-life things missing as well, making the entire experience much less enjoyable than needed

2: Those who play the demo will still be forced to replay some of the same things in the full game, particularly the pretty lengthy intro, since savefiles cannot be transferred from the demo to the full game

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Thank you, we're very excited as well! :D

Hello, we're glad to hear you like the game and sorry about the bugs! You can report the bugs by:

Sending a message in the bug report channel on Discord

Making a topic about it in the Steam forums for the game (we're not entirely sure if you can make posts without having a Steam copy of the game, though)

Sending an email to our support email: swordlake.ent.help@gmail.com

Edit: Actually forgot that there are specific bug report topics here on Itch as well!

We will try to sort the bugs out as soon as possible!

You're welcome! Thanks for playing the game!

Yes, we did realize that it was basically impossible to have a playthrough without either or both the stone quarry and lumber camp, which isn't ideal (and it's a shame, since the other characters can have some pretty interesting interactions under specific circumstances). We hope this improvement will provide more freedom to players!

Thank you for the support, we really appreciate it! We're glad to hear you appreciate the addition of the easy mode, hope you have fun with the game!

Save files are stored on your own computer. They can be found in your user->AppData->Local->Mistwinter_Bay (show hidden files must be turned on, or the app data folder won't show up). Hope that helps!

Then we won't say anything (other than thank you for appreciating the work behind adding multiple body types!)

Not as in your player character fighting anyone, no.  There can be duels between other characters, but they are portrayed with a still image, no animations (and blood splatter effects can be turned off)

Great question! No, there is no adult content and there will be no such content updates or DLCs

Today, November 15 2024, we at Swordlake Entertainment released the full 1.0 version of our massive visual novel RPG, Mistwinter Bay! The game launches with a 15% discount lasting 1 week. You can download the game from this page: https://swordlake-entertainment.itch.io/mistwinter-bay

About

There are 32 unique characters who can live in the town and it is up to you to decide who gets that opportunity. Subjects, as well as six foreign rulers, may like or dislike you based on your actions. Positive reputation with a character opens up the opportunity to deepen the relationship with them. Negative reputation may lead to an unfixable relationship or even someone’s death.

There are many choices leading to unique outcomes in dialogues, and many of them affect the town’s resources or characters’ perception of you. With several unique endings to each event, randomization of which events will occur and more events than can be cleared during a single playthrough, every playthrough is unique.

Expand the town with buildings of your choosing. Since most buildings are linked to a townsperson, you also decide who gets to live in the town. Sometimes, you may have to choose between two possible buildings to place on a lot, which means that it is impossible to place all buildings in a single playthrough. The characters you have determines how you can handle events, since it is possible to send subjects to complete certain tasks. All characters are unique with their own personality, stories and set of skills, which means they can succeed or fail at tasks. If they fail, there is a risk that they will perish in some scenarios. Even the sovereign is not immune to death, and depending on your game settings, anyone’s death can be permanent.

Find out more about Mistwinter Bay on the game’s page:

https://swordlake-entertainment.itch.io/mistwinter-bay

Indeed it is! We're also excited (and pretty nervous, haha!)

That's some dedication! You have our permission to obsess over the full game when it's out, haha!

And we can't wait to see how everyone's playthroughs turn out!

Thank you so much, we're very happy to hear how excited you are! We feel honored to have been able to break your no-unfinished-games rule, haha! If you liked the demo, we can promise that you'll like the full game even more

We will take the time required to get all the things we need into the game, and if we don't make it by November, then so be it. But so far, it's looking good for the deadline ;)

Thank you, we're very happy to hear that!

Thank you, it's really encouraging to hear that!

Thank you, we're happy to hear that you enjoy the demo! You'll probably like the full game even more once it's released ;)

There's nothing wrong with your installation - the demo does indeed only last for 1 in-game year. The full game will contain all 5 years, though.

We're aiming for a release of the full game sometime this Fall (2024)!

You will be able to choose if you want to adopt or not!

Your spouse will present you with those options a while into being married. You'll only be presented with those options once. Your spouse  will have an opinion on it.

If you agree with them (adopt when they want to adopt, or don't adopt if they don't want to), your unique marriage relationship with them will increase a bit.

If you go against them (adopt when they don't want to adopt, or don't adopt if they want to adopt), it will affect your marriage relationship negatively.

There are also quite a few spouses who don't care what you pick, which means that you can choose whatever you want without risking them getting upset with you - or like you more, for that matter.

No matter if you go with or against your spouse, it will only have a small impact on the marriage relationship, though (for most characters, at least. It will be obvious if the impact is bigger, because your spouse  would get very upset if you go against them). It's generally pretty easy to make up for a potential negative impact caused by your choices with adoption. This is because you can increase the marriage relationship in the spouse's three unique married life events. But it's also possible to decrease the marriage relationship in those events, so it's important to listen to your spouse and understand them, if you want to maintain a good relationship even when married.

TLDR; It's ultimately up to you to decide to adopt or not. But since every character is unique, your spouse will have an opinion on the topic and it might affect your relationship with them in some way.

I hope that clears things up a bit!

I agree that it would be nice to have your own children! I myself would probably have preferred that option if I were presented with it as a player. In the perfect scenario, we would have that as an option, but there are several reasons why we opted for adoption only:

1: Having your own children would mean more graphical assets, which means more work for an already very large game. It would also require checking your player character's appearance against the appearance of your spouse and so on, which would make things quite complicated to implement

2: Having your own children would mean that the player would need to have an assigned gender, which we want to avoid. Alternatively, it would mean there would have to be some sort of "magical" childbirth (a stork or something), so that the gender of your character and your partner don't matter, which I personally am not a fan of

3: There are some characters that you wouldn't be able to have your own biological children with, which means that adoption would still be necessary in order to have a child with all possible spouses (if we assume there is no "magical" childbirth, of course)

4: By only having adoption, we can ensure that the children you can have are actual characters. Otherwise, they would likely be assigned one or two character traits, making them feel like cardboard cutouts and thus be almost impossible to give unique and interesting stories - especially endings. It would also make them a lot more complicated to implement. With adoption, we can also make the children a bit older, so that they can actually display their personalities, and not be static babies in a crib. The biggest reason why we went for adoption is to avoid the feeling of the children being props, which they often feel like in other games (like Stardew Valley, Story of Seasons/Harvest Moon, and probably Fable, too. I haven't played any Fable-games, so I can't say for sure)

I hope that answers your question without making you too disappointed! Hopefully, our decisions make sense when the game is fully released and you'll get access to the adoption-feature and see what colorful little characters the children are ;)

<3

<3

Hello! Currently, we have no plans to add such a tier or release an early build in any other way.

Scratch what we wrote earlier. We've posted a patch that may have improved the pixelation, but we are unsure. You would have to download the patch to see if anything has improved. If not, we will likely have to save that improvement for the full release of the game.

Hello, thank you for your input! As of now, we are unsure how to add different resolutions due to the way the game engine (GameMaker Studio 2) works, and it is unlikely that we will dabble in this with the demo. However, we will look into it for the full release of the game. Also, the native resolution of the game is 4K.

Mistwinter Bay

Hello everyone! We have very exciting news: the free demo is out now! You can find it here: https://swordlake-entertainment.itch.io/mistwinter-bay

We would like to thank everyone who has been keeping track of the development so far. We don't think we'll be posting any more devlogs on here, but you can always keep track of the development by supporting us on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/swordlakeentertainment) and watching our video devlogs on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCICWzkpUmB-Xv_52sAh_tUw/featured). You can also find us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/swordlake_ent) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/swordlake_entertainment/).

Thank you so much for the support so far! We hope you enjoy trying out the game for yourselves!

Today, September 9 2022, we at Swordlake Entertainment released the free demo for our visual novel RPG, Mistwinter Bay! You can download the game from this page: https://swordlake-entertainment.itch.io/mistwinter-bay

About the game

More information can be found on the game’s page here on Itch: https://swordlake-entertainment.itch.io/mistwinter-bay

Images

You can download the game from this page: https://swordlake-entertainment.itch.io/mistwinter-bay

The demo release is drawing very close now - it's only two days left! Today, we posted the demo trailer on YouTube (and yesterday, we posted another devlog, talking about the creation of the town view. You can find it on our YouTube channel). Here's the trailer:

Have you made something related to Mistwinter Bay? It can be art, a video, a Twitch let's play - anything that you have created that is based on Mistwinter Bay. If you have something like that, feel free to post it here (or link it). We would love to see what you've created!

Mistwinter Bay is a game with a lot of dialogue - we don't even know how many words are in the demo. Since we're only two people working on this and English isn't our first language, there's bound to be grammatical errors here and there. This is the place to be if you want to report a grammatical error that you found in the game. If you instead want to report a crash or bug, go to the designated thread, found here: https://itch.io/t/2337271/bug-report

!PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION BEFORE POSTING!

• Before posting, check you game's version number and the version number of the latest version uploaded here on itch. If your version number is lower (that is, it's older) than the one on itch, there's a chance that the grammatical error has already been fixed. Check the official bug fix report to see if that's the case.
• Before posting, make sure that no one else has reported the same error. If the error has already been reported, please like the report instead of making your own.
• Always include the game's version number (found in the lower left corner in the main menu, or alternatively by hovering over the game's installer)
• It's okay to report several errors in the same post. Just make sure that all of them include the following information:
  • Where was the text (in dialogue, menus, etc)
  • If it was in dialogue, who said it? (a character's name, "narrator", letter)
  • What words did the paragraph/line of dialogue start with? (this piece of information is the most important. It will greatly help narrowing it down, since it will be possible to search for the text in the game project)

This is the place to be if you want to report bugs for the game. With bugs we mean crashes and the like that make the game experience less than desirable. If you want to report a grammatical error found in the game, please report that in the designated thread, found here: https://itch.io/t/2337292/grammatical-errors

!PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION BEFORE POSTING!

• Check the version number of your game and compare it to the latest version number, visible on the game's page here on itch. If your version number is lower than the one on itch (that is, your version is older), then there's a chance your bug has already been fixed. See official bug fix reports/patch updates to see if that is the case.
• Before you post, make sure that no one else has posted a bug report about the same issue. If someone has already made a bug report, like that report instead of posting your own. We may delete duplicate bug reports.
• When you post a bug report, make sure to always include the following information:
  • Version number (found in the lower left corner of the main menu, or alternatively by hovering over the game's installer)
  • Any sort of crash message, if the game crashed
  • When the bug occurred (what were you doing at that point in the game?)
  • If the bug occurred during dialogue, please try to specify which character was talking, what they were saying and so on. Any information like this makes it a lot easier to find a specific bug, since there is so much dialogue in the game.

Thank you for reporting bugs and helping us ensure that Mistwinter Bay becomes as good as possible!

We are back with another devlog! This time, we discuss the game's artstyle and the road to getting the game to look the way it looks now.

As an example, there is one new short event where Dawn and Cecil interact. In order for this event to appear, both Dawn and Cecil must be living in the town and, naturally, be alive. There are also a few other requirements for this event that don't matter in the demo. The addition of this event also introduces a new "mechanic": the fact that it can become impossible for the player to hang out with and marry a character if certain choices have been made. This will, of course, rarely ever happen and will only be based on events that are deeply rooted to the characters in question. It is also clearly stated that a character has lost faith in the player once an event is over. In the full game, examples of events where this may occur is if the player is forced to support one country over another. Naturally, that makes the unsupported country's regent cross with the player, and all relationships that are deeper than surface level are impossible to achieve with that character from then on. As for why Dawn's and Cecil's event can make them that upset... Well, that's for you to find out when the demo is released.

Now, proper playtesting will be our main focus. We're getting really close to the release of the demo. In fact, we are happy to announce the estimated release date for the demo: September 9. That's Friday next week! We'll do our best to make the demo as good as possible for that date. Be sure to keep an eye out for the demo release and please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel if you're interested in the devlogs. We promise we have a lot more to show there in the future!

We have now released our first video devlog! In this video, the game and the process of working on it is summarized. Several more devlogs are already in production. (Don't worry, we're still working hard on the game, too. We can do both, since we are two people.)

We're moving closer and closer to the release of the free demo. By now, all planned major improvements and additions have been made. You can view this week's improvements in the video below.

By separating the mouths and eyes for animation, the player now has the option to choose a mouth. This has, of course, been added to the character creator. Also, the new background for the character creator can be seen in the video as well.

Last but not least, we've added a log to the game. Due to the way the dialogue is set up, it's not possible to have a log with several previous lines of dialogue. Instead, it's only possible to view the last line of dialogue prior to the one currently shown. We deem this to be sufficient, since it can be easy to skip over a line of text by accident at points and we only wanted a log for that reason. Besides, having some sort of log is better than not having one at all!

Besides the work on the game, we've also recorded and edited our first proper video devlog (devlog #0) and the script for devlog #1 is written. We'll inform you when a devlog is posted on YouTube.

Starting next week, we'll hopefully start proper playtesting, as well as complete a final long event. There is of course some marketing and business management that needs to be done as well, but all in all, it hopefully won't be too many weeks now until you can get your hands on the free demo. Stay tuned for more updates and info about the release!

Thank you! We're glad you like the art style!

Just like last week, we've been working hard on improving the game in various ways. The following video shows some, but not all, improvements made this week.

As shown in the video, a combination of images and sound make it more clear when the player switches to a different building in the town view. Having both images and sounds to convey that something is happening is usually a good idea. However, it's always important to not rely completely on sound effects, since there's the option to turn them off. The picture below shows the current appearance of the building information menu.

The dialogues have also been updated to make it more visually clear which character is talking. This is made using a subtle sparkle-particle effect behind the character. There's a bug related to this at the moment, which will be fixed next week. We also consider adding an additional visual indicator for the talking character.

Another visual indicator that has been added is a screen to indicate the end of a monthly event. Text, particle effects (if they are turned on) and a sound effect (if sound is turned on) tells the player that the event has been completed.

In addition to everything listed above, we have also been working on some other things. In the game, we've balanced food a bit, removed arrow buttons in certain scenarios (so that the start or end of a menu is clearly indicated) and removed the mouse pointer when changing rooms and other fading effects (to make loading appear smoother). Slightly improved loading has also decreased the live gameplay stuttering (which wasn't that big to begin with, but the less stuttering, the better).

Besides work on the actual game, we have also begun working on a video devlog! Video devlogs are but one type of promotion that we have in consideration for the future, but we will see what works best in the long run. The main focus is, of course, the game itself.

We've been hard at work this week with improving and polishing the game based on feedback. The video below shows some, but not all, of the improvements that have been made.

The top bar shows town resources and other information. The lower bar shows the player's personal finances mainly used to buy gifts. Both bars are split in two parts, with the upper section showing the monthly income of that resource and the lower section showing the current amount of that resource. The town resource bar has five sections showing (from left to right): current population (which does not increase monthly), food, stone, wood and gold.

Gifts have also received icons to more easily show the price and impact of the gifts. This is shown further in the following screenshot:

As such, the gift menu now displays an icon for the gift, the name of the gift, the price of the gift (in coins, the new name for what was previously called "personal wealth") and the increase or decrease in reputation.  This menu also uses anew resource icon for coins, much like the resource bars previously mentioned.

Then there has been an update to the menus showing who can receive a gift. The following screenshot illustrates this:

Now, the menu shows a picture of the character in question. Not shown in the video or screenshots is that a character who has their birthday during the current in-game month has a highlighted box/button, to more easily distinguish them from others. Also, the portraits shown in the screenshots are also used in popups for reputation changes, as well as in the hang out-menu. The hang out menu has also been improved with an image (the same hearts that are used in the roster menu, showing the romance level) instead of text to show which hang out is available.

Last but not least, the trading menu has been updated, as shown below:

Now, the trading menu uses the new resource icons. The current amount of resources owned by the player is also displayed at all times. Instead of having the price per one chunk of resources (right), it now displays how much the player will receive of that resource. Arrows for changing the player's resources (the resources which are sold) are now only displayed if it is possible to go in that particular direction. That is, if it's possible to increase or decrease amount sold based on current resources. Some balancing is still needed for trading costs (especially food, which has been updated in other parts of the game, but the update is not represented in the trading menu).

We will continue to work hard on the game from now until the free demo release in the near future!