Version 0.1.5 of the South of the March Demo is now live on Itch.io and Steam!

Update Details

Despite taking a bit longer than I expected, this one is a smaller update than the last. For most players, the main changes mostly come in bug fixes, as well as a bunch of small audio adjustments that add a couple new UI cues and make existing ones more consistent.

Self-voicing players, on the other hand, will find a few new features.

Self-Voicing Updates

The big structural changes to the self-voicing system in the last update seem to have been well received, so this time around I mostly built on that based on player feedback. The most notable change here is that the self-voicing setting now has a third option (rather than just off and on), which allows you to send all text that would be self-voicing directly to the clipboard. Depending on your setup, this should make self-voicing accessible via other screen-readers like NVDA, though they may require some customization to allow clipboard reading.

It's your clipboard, do what you want

Beyond that, there's a bunch of smaller quality of life feature updates specific to self-voicing, like:

• Separate UI beeps for the in-page self-voicing navigation to make it easier to tell what movement means what.
• Additional tutorial pages specific to self-voicing in all the existing tutorials, plus a new tutorial offered the first time you open the player menu that goes over its contents and navigation.
• A dedicated button ("R" on keyboard or "L3" on gamepad) to repeat the last self-voiced text.
• Readouts of quest availability on the main maps and on their respective buttons.

Bug Fixes

This update has also finally seen the end of a couple of bugs that have haunted me since early in development, though it's hard to say how many players have actually seen them. One was a weird intermittent issue only mouse-users would've seen where the items menu would shift slightly in size when hovered, which was mostly a curiosity. Mostly that kind of thing.

The big one, though, was an issue where the "skip scene" option would sometimes stop working. I don't know how many people would've run into this (who would skip these delightful scenes, after all?), but it was reported at least once, and it was something I ran into a number of times myself, as you can imagine testing involves rapid-fire skipping around quite a bit. It evaded me for a long time.

The only good bug is a dead bug

This really isn't worth writing this much about, to be honest. I'm just pleased that it's resolved.

In Conclusion

This will likely be the last demo update for a while (assuming there's no need for hotfixes or anything) as I focus on the full game. That said, I still expect to do at least one pretty major content update once we get closer to release. It'll get the demo in line with anything that's changed by that point, especially narrative adjustments.

I'll be doing some feature-specific devlogs up until then, so keep an eye out!

Full Patch Notes (v0.1.5)

• Add clipboard voicing setting
• Add direction to self-voicing info in the basic controls menu
• Add additional self-voicing tutorial pages to Battle and Shop tutorials
• Add a new Player Menu tutorial (only with self-voicing active)
• Add an option to repeat the last self-voicing readout
• Add self-voicing readouts for main and side quest markers
• Add UI beeps to self-voicing navigation
• Add UI beeps in more places to improve navigation clarity
• Add readouts of button icons for quests, shops, etc
• Change self-voicing readout of unknown character names
• Fix mouse hover UI bug on Items menu tab
• Fix load screen error with game saves over 10 hours
• Fix bug where camp can be initiated during battle
• Fix intermittent "skip dialogue" button failure
• Fix improper left/right selection during combat
• Fix currency readout bug in self-voicing
• Fix typos and make some small edits