Limited Time Demo for Father's Day, starting June 16th

We're running another limited time public demo for Dad by the Sword for this Father's Day! It will go from June 16th to the 23rd, and have a slew of new content and tweaks, including the ability to pick a starting Dad Class! Read on for a list of details, and a summary of the six new starting classes.

Also, read on for news on the launch date for Dad by the Sword. We delayed that a bit, short summary is that really want to get more enemies and another full biome in the game before we launch it. You can see more of my reasoning and things we're thinking about now in the bottom section.

New Demo Content

We've been really busy! Here's a short list of the new stuff you'll be able to play with in the demo:

• 6 new player classes you can pick from! They each have their own bonuses to different playstyles. Read the next section for some details

• Revamped tutorial! It's a little longer, has real combat practice segments (with you being immortal during it), and covers more things

• We revamped the mouse controls to be kind of a mix between Mordhau and Mount and Blade: Bannerlord. This actually took a lot less time than I thought it would, and feels great to me. I want a lot more opinions on this control style, as I still prefer the WASD Dark Messiah-style controls

• Gamepad support! It's not in for menus as I type this, but it's in for gameplay. This was requested a lot for the first demo

• The amount of possible room types more than doubled!

• The amount of possible weapons that can generate about doubled

• How weapon special attacks work was revamped entirely

• Rare golden enemies can spawn. They're dangerous, but fragile. Killing them gives the player a bunch of bonuses right away, including a sword full repair and a guaranteed critical hit

• New dadcessories!

• Lots more tweaks and requests

I'm really eager to hear what people think of all the new changes, particularly the Dad Classes and the gamepad and revamped mouse controls.

Dad Classes

You can now pick a Dad Class, each with their own perks and equipment. Here are a few examples:

Left to Right:

• CYBERDAD starts with A GUN and a cybernetic arm a golf club (currently). His unique perk makes it so every 6th kill with a ranged dadcessory (pistols,shortguns, nailguns, etc) puts +1 CRITICAL POWER on his sword. Because this is so reliable, you could just stack Crit Power on a side sword all day without swinging it, then hit a boss for 27 criticals in a row with one swing.

• LONGDAD has a long reach and a cool hairstyle. He starts with the Longish Sword, which has a lot of range compared to any of the early game swords. His unique perk gives him extra bonus range with his sword strikes the lower his health gets, and his second perk gives him one free critical hit whenever he takes damage.

• FENCERDAD is for players that want more flashy technique in their swordplay. His starting sword and two starting perks all focus on bonuses with the Parry mechanic. He also starts with a pair of shoes that let him reflect enemy projectiles when kicking them, and doing so gives him a speed bonus.

The other starting classes in the demo are POWERDAD, who has weak starting equipment but two nice critical-focused perks to start, HANDYDAD, a dadcessory specialist, and DEFENDAD, a tanky defense focused class that starts with a shield. DEFENDAD gets to go to the top of the list, as I think that and POWERDAD will be the most welcoming classes for new players.

We're shooting for about 15 Dad Classes in the final game, and currently have about 12 planned total.

Dad by the Sword Launch

I'm delaying the launch. With all the things we added, we did not have enough people to also finish implementing the enemies we almost have ready to go. We also have not finished the next biome, I'd say we're about a quarter done with the rooms. After the demo, we'll be focusing on the new monsters and blasting through the new Sand Zone biome.

During the demo period, I'm going to discuss with the team what exactly the kind of launch we want to do. Originally the plan was to do an Early Access launch with just the one biome, as other games have done this in the past with a lot of success. This just doesn't strongly appeal to me as a player, I'm not sure what the general opinion of this is now. I'm guessing the time for this may have passed.

Current plans are to either do an Early Access launch with at least 2 biomes and their enemies, maybe something like 2.5 biomes if we can. Then have some placeholder quick endgame and a final boss, so the game can still be beaten. Then Early Access would be about simply making more content. New monsters, biomes, weapons and items, an extended endgame, more Dad classes, so on. We would want to launch this before the year was over, and then shoot for a 1.0 launch for around Father's Day 2024 (I really want to launch around here so we can be the "ULTIMATE Father's Day game").

Thoughts on this? Wait longer for a more full EA launch, or launch as soon as we can? Comment below, or on our Twitter @rocketcatgames . There's also our Official Rocketcat Discord, on the #dad-by-the-sword channel.