Hello from the Lost Gate team! We hope the new year is treating you well so far. We are back from break and eager to share our plans for the next public release: the Intro Playtest. We learned a tremendous amount from player feedback on our first demo of MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking, released during Steam Next Fest in October 2024. Since then our vision for the game has evolved to include new game systems, characters, and adjustments to our narrative pacing. As part of this evolution, we are planning to release a new demo of MINDFLUX: Dead Man Walking later in 2025. This new demo will be a massive leap forward for MINDFLUX, with improvements to virtually all aspects of the game, and brand-new narrative content. In addition, we’ll be embracing the psychological horror elements of our setting and integrating them in a more direct way into our game’s mechanics. Spooky! For our first step towards our next demo version, we plan to host an Intro Playtest in March 2025. During this playtest we are seeking feedback on some of our new psychological horror mechanics and our more engaging, hands-off introduction to our game. Content-wise, the intro playtest will be restricted to a small slice of our new demo, the very beginning of the new demo to be specific. We intend to make player feedback a bigger part of our development process moving forward, so we will be building up to our new demo, and making improvements based on that feedback while adding content. We will have a follow-up announcement about the various options to give us your feedback around the playtest release. Stay Tuned! Our plans for the Intro Playtest build includes the following features: -New psychological horror mechanics -A new role-playing mechanic -Improvements to the character controller, scanner system, and item visibility -A new interactive start-sequence -New content including a puzzle, [][][][][][][][], and dialogue -A more hands-off introduction to the controls and game mechanics -Various other improvements Since our new demo is still a work in progress, parts of the intro playtest build are likely to still be unfinished during testing. Some models may have missing textures or animations, some UI elements may be placeholders, and there will certainly be bugs. Regardless, we believe that participating in the test will be a worthwhile experience for anyone who sees the potential in our game, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the new features. Stay tuned for more information on the new mechanics we plan to include in the Intro Playtest -Ian [Technical Director]