Welcome, one-and-all!
This week, we have a very quality update. That's a quality of life joke, get it? Look, I'm writing this while suffering from a massive migraine. Gimme this one and just laugh-- if I think about the way Salt and Vinegar chips smell right now, my head might explode from pain. Anywho, this week is full of goodies. We'll talk about the patch notes, some cool stuff I wanna do, and then some more stuff to expect in the future! My home state may be under quarantine, but that doesn't stop me from cracking away at these updates for you guys. ːsteamhappyː
Ephemeral Tale 1.2.1 Changelog
- Options menu has been remade from scratch
- Difficulty settings added for a more flexible gameplay experience
- Window tint options added for the differently-abled, or those who just like different colors
- You can now disable most of the visual effects filters (for low-end or older PCs)
- Autosave is back, this time as a toggle-able option in the settings
- There is now a minimum threshold of steps required between encounters
- Several tweaks have been made to the font to increase legibility
- Fixed a bug where Bootwalla wouldn’t properly animate
- First wave of changes made to The Great Palace, mostly bug fixes
- Some slight performance optimizations
This week is a bit of a more substantial update than usual, due to a major feature upgrade. A few weeks back, I'd spoken about the idea of difficulty settings coming to Ephemeral Tale-- they're here! As part of the New Game+ changes will be in difficulty, multiple portions of the code base had to be altered to take into account a scaling number (so that enemies could do more damage, drop more Power, that sort of thing). The result was that I was changing these settings anyway, and while I had an inkling that I'd end up being able to expose them to the player (you), I wasn't entirely sure until the time came to throw it together. So irregardless of whether or not you're someone who needs a lighter challenge, or a heavier one, you can customize various elements of the gameplay experience to suit your particular desires. In the future, I hope to flesh out this menu even further. One idea I’m tossing around is the idea of a “rogue-like” mode, where there would be an increased drop amount (maybe quality?), harder difficulty, but when you die those items disappear. If this is something that sounds appealing to you, let me know! If not, again, let me know! I’d rather not spend development time working on something that you guys don’t particularly want. Another concept would be to let you decide the minimum threshold of steps required between encounters, effectively setting your own encounter rate to your personal pleasure. That one should be (hypothetically) easy enough to do, so expect that in a future update (unless I forget, then please remind me).
If you keep up with me over on Twitter, you’ll be aware that I’ve started development on a new boss fight! This will be something added in New Game+, alongside the other changes coming in that Major Update (which is #3, as a reminder). Progress is slow, but consistent on that front. I’ve been spending some of my free time (and business time, really) learning some basic programming in order to better accommodate the needs of Ephemeral Tale as necessary. I’m really excited for New Game+ to be ready, and I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I’m enjoying planning and creating it. You can check out that boss preview over on our Twitter if it piques your interest, or you can just wait until it's ready to go!
Lastly, before we part ways for the week, let's talk about The Great Palace changes that are coming. Normally, for an update for existing content, I'll make the changes in a vacuum-sealed build, wait until everything is ready, and then throw it all in at once. Due to our being in Early Access, and the Great Palace already being accessible content, I'm tossing the changes for that dungeon (that are part of Major Update 3) in as they're ready. The first wave hits with this patch, today-- more will come as they're completed and tested. This is a bit of transparency, that way anyone who gets to the Palace between now and then isn't shocked if changes that have occurred as part of this process are pitched as part of that update. I don't feel that it would be right of me to hold back these changes until they're all ready, as that dungeon suffers from how deep those issues run.
I hope you guys enjoy this patch, and stay safe out in the wild. We'll talk more next week.
Until then,
-- Ryan