Capes – New Demo and Trailer

Last year, Spitfire Interactive, a team staffed by many of the key members behind the board game/action-RPG hybrid Hand of Fate, announced Capes – a turn-based superhero strategy RPG following in the footsteps of Freedom Force. And with the game scheduled to go live later this year, we can now check out a new trailer brought to us by its publishers over at Daedalic Entertainment:

Beyond that, leading up to the game’s release we can experience an updated Steam demo, featuring new missions and enemies, assorted UX improvements, expanded story bits, and more. Here’s the changelog:

Hello people! We recently updated the Capes pre-release demo with a new version that better reflects the current state of the game and adds some additional content in the leadup to Steam Next Fest. Here’s a look at the key items as at 0.0.1.11301!

New mission and enemies

We’ve added an additional level to the demo, which showcases another enemy faction and mission objective as an unexpected tip leads you to investigate a Primax Technologies warehouse.

UX improvements

We’ve also brought across some improvements and polish, including new tutorials, patrol path indicators when hovering over enemies in stealth mode, attack range and special attack indicator when hovering over enemies outside of stealth mode, and more detailed hero, enemy, and object descriptions. We also added a phase counter to the HUD to help communicate when a mission has multiple waves.

Improvements based on feedback

Last but not least, we’ve made some changes based on the feedback we received on the first demo.

Nightjar’s regular attack and ultimate ability have been revamped, making his teleport attack now an ultimate that can be disarmed. When a hero is spotted during stealth, more feedback is given on which enemies have seen you, and why. We’ve also added and tweaked some demo-specific tutorials to better introduce concepts that players have more time to ease into across the full game.

Writing updates

We’ve been iterating on the game’s story and writing, which has touched every mission, cutscene, and dialogue sequence in some way.

We’ve tried to tune things for a comfortable reading speed, but we’re aware that everybody reads at their own pace. If you find that cutscene dialogue is progressing too quickly, you can disable the “Auto continue conversations” option in the Gameplay settings menu.

The full changelog for the past three months’ worth of development are too long to be listed here, but here’s a summary of major items relevant to the demo.

• Added new mission (Tech Support)
• Updated Mercurial unlock to happen after the first side mission is completed
• Updated additional ability unlocks before Greater Power to be presented as their own text “mission”(Preparation)
• Added Android enemies
• Added Security Bot enemies
• Added tutorials introducing various mechanics across the demo
• Updated ability unlocks across the tutorial
• Updated Nightjar ultimate and regular attack behaviours
• Added patrol path indicators to patrolling enemies during stealth
• Added indicators for offscreen alert enemies during stealth
• Updated camera movement to better communicate alerted enemies during stealth
• Added clearer feedback when enemies become alarmed and stealth is broken
• Updated boss health pips to be clearer
• Added attack range indicator when highlighting enemies
• Added special attack indicator when highlighting enemies with special attacks
• Updated enemy opportunist attack indicators
• Added more detailed info and descriptions for highlighted heroes and enemies
• Updated dialogue and cutscenes for all demo missions
• Added new GUI theme
• Added new SFX
• Updated ability unlock order
• Fixed not being able to revive heroes pushed off buildings onto exploding barrels
• Fixed patrol issues in Greater Power
• Fixed opportunity attacks of growth-encased enemies being re-enabled by applying a second growth crystal