The Ducklands region has been greatly expanded, with a bevy of content, features, and gameplay optimizations to boot!
Journey further into the woods, plains, marshes, and gardens of the Ducklands, finding new weaponry and allies to help you venture across the Scrabdackle landscape.
New content this update:
- The Ducklands region has been heavily expanded
- A new spell to learn
- Many new lore entries and collectibles to uncover
- Several new enemies, NPCs, and soundtracks
- A scrying-based sidequest rewarding players familiar with their lore!
- A huge amount of new dialogue
- A golf minigame!
The Ducklands are accessible from every other demo region, in the northwest of the current map. The region is by far the largest planned - while many new screens have been added, only about half of the region is accessible within the demo.
There are also a few new major features to talk about on their own:
The Challenge Menu:
- This menu serves as a customizable difficulty manager that serves any player’s preference. Choose between 4 presets to determine how intense you want your experience to be, or open the advanced settings to customize every slider and toggle yourself!
- Challenge Mode presets do not restrict any content, and can be changed any time without judgement. No achievements will ever be restricted to certain challenge settings. Play the way that feels best for you!
- Your existing save file will be set to the way of the Poet, and new game files will prompt you to select a preset on first play.
- Somehow, you begin to suspect even this menu has its secrets…
The Sticker Binder:
- This menu, accessible once you’ve found at least one sticker, can be opened up to browse your stickers and pop them on to your academy notebook for fun, bonus decoration.
- You can also see which stickers you’re missing here, as their silhouette will be visible. All visible stickers are collectible in the current demo.
- Share your best covers using F12 to take an in-game screenshot!
Other notable changes:
- Significant optimization improvements
- Hundreds (not exaggerating) of bugs patches and and quality-of-life improvements have been implemented
- The magic casting system has been adjusted to be clearer and more satisfying
- Falling into water or a pit now deals light damage, and correspondingly, a ledge detection feature has been added to prevent accidental pitfalls. (Hazard damage can be disabled in the Challenge Menu).
This work was largely completed by early November last year, but I ended up needing to focus on something new for a while and get away from the mentality of always updating the demo. It’s lighter on content than the Blustergust Ridge update, but that’s partially because the content I’ve been working on mostly will not appear in demo updates, and partially because some of the focus of this update was on depth of systems and polishing the experience, not breadth of new things to do.
From here, I am not going to be focusing on further demo work - I’d like to eventually add a new spell in once I’ve completed it for an upcoming region, but it won’t be a major update, just a patch. The demo may receive some tuning and optimizations here and there as I implement them out for the full game, but at the moment the demo is functionally both content-complete and systems-complete.
If you’re excited about the game, please pop by our Discord server to hang out! There’s a large, active community to talk lore with, talk speedrun strategies, and generally hang around and play games with!
Cheers!
Jake