DEV LOG 2025-11-12 Dreams of Ylina, update for demo: v. 0.9.4

After reflecting upon the possibility of artificially restraining the main game to create a demo, I had came to a point where I thought it may be a good idea to do a sort of prequel in several tiny episodes instead of offering the beginning of the main game.

Mostly because the main game is supposed to offer a complete liberty of exploration since the very start of the game. Also the game will probably be a little short (and the price set accordingly), so maybe it wasn’t the best idea, cause it would have required invisible walls all over the island.

Now, in the demo, there are invisible walls, but since the characters have specific quests to do in each episodes, that are all localized in particular places, I think it feels more natural, because these characters, in order to do the things they have to do, don’t need to go far away and explore the island.

So, recently, Unity3D has pachted each version of unity since 2019 (or 2017?) with a critical fix for security issues, so I looked back at the demo in order to update it with the patched version. I took this opportunity to fix various bugs (and in my airtable project to list the things to correct in the demo, there is now something like a hundred entries…, bug fixes or small improvements) plus things I had corrected already but not pushed online for the demo.

The demo is delayed to wednesday 12th november, due to a change in security on Steam, which requires a 72hours wait to make a change on the games.

Main modifications for the demo v0.9.4:

• Larger rooms in houses: the camera controller had difficulties handling the camera when the houses had 2 or more rooms, because the spaces were too narrow, so the houses now all have one room, and the underground ruins have larger hallways etc.
• Added: a jumped attack, right click when the characters is moving forward at full speed. I’m wondering if i should maybe add a small auto-focus on an enemy to guide the jump (this particular thing is not planned though).
• Added: characters now can look to the player more smoothly, and the player look the character.
• Fixed: ocean didn’t look as good in cloudy weathers due to the way the ocean shader handled the fog.
• Fixed: Esc (pause) froze the game, it seems, it now seem to work.
• Various fixes about things that worked in the previous demo version (0.8.x), but didn’t work afterwards, maybe due to the change of unity version?
• added: campfire with pots on it that can move with the characters collision (and maybe the wind when it is strong enough, but this makes a random bug occuring, so will probably be deactivated).
• Added: a setting scene, accessible from the menu, that allows the same settings than the in game menu (Tab), in order to set the quality, distance for grass and trees etc.).
• Added: preload of the island exterior (the most demanding in terms of loading time), in the main menu, only if RAM > 2Go (maybe useless check? depends on how the resources are handled)
• Improved: dodging can be done with Left Ctrl and Alt as before, but also with double press on left and right keys.
• Improved: navigation of enemies and animals and NPCs
• Added: behaviours of NPCs: now some are gathering corn etc.
• Fixed: use of Gamepad (still not usable in the whole game: the setting menu does not really handle well the gamepad) but the game is playable, it seems.
• Added: SFX and VFX when hit a wall with the axe.
• Improved: some interiors of houses, models of some furniture, textures etc.
• Added: explicit dialog choice to « Trade », because one of the person that tried the demo back in the days didn’t find how to trade (there is a specific button shown), but now there is a dialog line for this while talking to Dawn
• Changed: new « help » messages in the loading scene (still some basic stuff).
• Fixed: male voice instead of female voice for masculine players.
• Improved: limits of the accessible zone in episode with Fayern.
• Improved: clean up of the main menu options and end of demo message
• FPS counter and infos added, make it appear with Ctrl+Backspace
• Fixed: more french translations
• Improved: hair of charactesr now use transparent/fade materials, allowing for better hair. Better eyes (light reflections).
• Improved: more shared textures between characters
• Added: sfx added when trade successful.
• Added: new food.

Thanks for the people who tried the demo.

The Main game also has its own list of tasks, a little more than 50, but some of them are really long tasks, like translating long texts, or adding props.