STOP! IT'S PUPDATE TIME!
Another week has passed, and development continues. I spent most of the week working on a new side quest that is in this patch. Granted, it's hidden-- but DAMN if I don't dig this one. I got to write some absolutely ridiculous lines of dialogue, to be honest. So, let's go over the patch, and then we can talk about some other changes coming real soon.
Ephemeral Tale 1.4.1 Changelog
- Found the Fullscreen button hiding in a bin somewhere, put it back in the Options menu where it belongs
- Completely new icons for every Status and Skill in the game (Thanks, Tim!)
- New hidden side quest added
- Adjusted dialogue for an existing quest & character to better fit the new side quest
- Further adjusted miscellaneous lines of dialogue to smooth out rough edges
- Adjusted the trigger thresholds for the dog secret to be more easily discovered
- Further back end changes to prepare for Major Update #3
The side quest wiped me out this week, y’all. I suspected it would be a relatively painless process to create, but whew, was I wrong. It involved significantly more dialogue writing a fair bit more programming than I was expecting. With that said, I figured another party member was a worthy addition to the game this week. We also have a HUGE upgrade to the Status and Skill icons, courtesy of Tim from Something Classic. The goal with these icons was to increase the readability of the icons. In caveman terms, “OOG BOOG, FIRE MEAN BURNING. WATER MEAN WET.”
P H O T O S Y N T H E S I S
These icons are so much freaking better than the prior ones. This helps with the flavor of these enemies immensely, as you being able to visually understand what they represent is massive-- Take the above, for example. You can clearly gather that it's vines-- so if you see vines on that Floryn, and then see their HP go up every turn... "Oh, maybe it's a photosynthesis kinda thing?"
Yeah, that wasn't really clear from the old icons. Additionally, this addresses another minor issue with the icons that has bothered me for some time-- inconsistent sizes between pixels. The old icon has the border being represented by pixels of one size (2x2, to be exact), while the actual art is represented by pixels of a different size. Ideally, every element on screen is represented equally. This helps improve the presentation of the game, the feel of the game, and even how you interact with it in cases like we just spoke about. This is such a small, tiny detail-- but hot damn, I'm excited about it. In next week's patch, #19, We're actually taking this a step further:
Top: Old//Bottom: New
Tim was also kind enough to lend his talents for another portion of the HUD, so we have a new HP/MP HUD for Ephemeral Tale! It maintains the spirit of the old one, but is much cleaner, and has a couple cool details that I'm a big fan of. Patch #19 is largely a patch focusing on making these kinds of HUD changes, as they require a lot of pixel art-ing, changing where stuff is drawn/how it's drawn (sometimes in code, but thankfully not very often), and testing. I suspect that will take up the majority of this week, but it'll be a fun time. These are what I feel to be crucial changes, and likely won't be the last batch of changes of this type. These sort of things have been bugging me for a while, so being able to address them is a huge relief!
I'm hoping to roll out this second series of improvements next week, along with some other changes! Lastly, before we call this Pupdate complete, I'd like to apologize for the delay on the Spanish translation. The update is mostly (95%-ish?) done, but the whole COVID-19 situation has thrown everything into disarray. I'm more than happy to release it in its current form if it's something that people want, but I don't feel that it's ready quite yet for prime time. However, sometimes a global pandemic that asks people to stay inside (and as such engage in entertainment consumption) forces your hand, I suppose.
Next week, we'll talk about some planned changes to companions that I'm starting to work on. It'll be a fun time. Until then, stay safe and have fun!
-- Ryan