Wassup, world?
This week, I've been busy crackin' away at Major Update #3. There's some stuff I want to squeeze in there, but I'm not quite sure how yet. We can talk about that more after patch notes, however. TL;DR? Mostly QOL changes this week. More flexibility in difficulty settings, slight balance tweaks, changes to dialogue-- everything got a tiny bit better.
Ephemeral Tale 1.3.2 Changelog
- Second wave of changes made to The Great Palace, mostly pathing changes
- Slight tweaks to dialogue and story presentation here and there
- Enemy Strength cap in Options menu is now 200%, up from 150%
- Enemy Toughness cap in Options menu is now 15, up from 12
- Tweaks to the Difficulty options, to allow them to wrap around in either direction
- Fixed a bug with the Recall Runes not erasing a particular visual effect (IT NEVER ENDS)
- Updated the icon for the Yellow Bandana since some keep mistaking it for a gun (will only apply to fresh drops)
- Fleshed out Companion “Recruit” texts (failure state, specifically)
- Adjusted the player HP curve to give more substantial gains up front, and less in the back half (addressing concerns w/ difficulty spikes in the early stages of gameplay)
- Made some adjustments to a hidden property to help smooth out the spike in difficulty between the first dungeon (caverns) and the second (whichever you choose)
- Further back end changes to prepare for Major Update #3
- Added social buttons to title screen, as well as an option to toggle them
Before going into more Major Update #3 stuff, I want to take a moment to address some of the patch notes (as per usual). There's been slight changes to dialogue and story presentation here and there to help refine the flow and course correct some of the mistakes that happen when you write a story by the seat of your pants over the course of two years or so. The reality is that while Ephemeral Tale is in many ways a JRPG, the story has been approached from a very minimalistic standpoint, and for simple reason-- I don't feel that I can write the things that would grip my attention very well. Because of that, I instead focus on the gameplay, and telling a serviceable story. Ideally, I give you enough that you can piece together something that invokes your own creativity to fill in the gaps, and through that, the world of Ephemeral Tale becomes yours in its own way. With that said, I'm making an active effort to continue to refine and expand upon the world in ways that leave you (hopefully!) satisfied.
The other big changes this week are some balance adjustments, and the new social buttons. Last week, we launched our new Options menu that overall gives way more flexibility over to you as a player to customize your experience with the game. Whether that's window color (if you're visually challenged or colorblind, for example), changing your keybindings for a custom setup, or disabling certain visual effects to eek out performance improvements on older hardware, that's something that I feel strongly that you should have these options open to you. One piece of feedback that keeps looping around is that Ephemeral Tale can be a challenging title, and this is a tough one to address. In my personal opinion, I find that the game is best enjoyed when you don't know if you're going to be able to push through the rest of the dungeon in a run. At the same time, I recognize that designing things solely around what I want would be a fools errand-- why be in Early Access if I'm ignoring feedback? Where this becomes tricky is that I've also gotten consistent feedback that the game is too easy, as well.
Wow, much social! Very button.
Wait, how in the hell does that work? It's too hard AND it's too easy? What?! Well, the reality is that everyone plays and engages with games differently-- this was the primary reason why we added the difficulty options in last week's patch. By allowing you to customize the difficulty, you can decide if it's too challenging or too easy .With that said, I focused on ironing out kinks with difficulty spikes in this patch, mostly in the early game. I'll continue to make adjustments as needed as time goes on, as per usual. With the social buttons, their goal is simple enough: I'm hoping that I'll be able to gather more feedback from you guys as to what you like and dislike about the game. By putting it directly in the game, I lower that barrier of entry just a little bit. But fear not, dear reader! There's a toggle in the Options menu. You can totally disable it, no worries. I wasn't gonna let it ruin my beautiful title screen, after all.
Major Major Major
In my continued efforts to be as transparent as possible with you guys, I'm going to spoil some of the surprises I've been working on. Don't want spoiled? Quick, shoo! Go! Flee! Be free!
Alright, you sure you wanna know? Let's get transparent then, baby.
Currently, I've got two (well, one fully-finished, one kinda-sorta-done-but-needs-tuning) bosses ready to go. They have unique drops, unique mechanics, are fun, and are (for the most part) ready to be put in the game. The original (and still holding) plan was to put one or both of them (depending on if the second is ready) in Major Update #3 as a surprise, along with a secret method of discovery. And then COVID-19 happened. This complicates matters for me, morally-- I feel almost obligated to shift focus to developing fresh content for you guys, to entertain you during our mutual Quarantine. At the same time, releasing content that is sub-par seems sketchy, and just plopping out unpolished, half-baked ideas that have issues is not something I'm keen on doing. When I add stuff to the game, I want you to be able to engage with it, not for you to be sitting there focusing on the flaws it has.
In truth, I don't suspect that I could develop a sizable portion of content quickly enough for you guys without completely trashing the weekly update schedule. I've been toying with the idea of "mini-dungeons" as well, these 5-8 room experiences that I could (ideally) get done in a week or so of focused effort, and then deliver to you guys as fresh content that buys me valuable time to work on polishing things up, and planning things out. But (in case you haven't noticed), the Traveller's Respite is not the most flexible of spaces-- so without some clever planning or some reworking of the map, finding a new place to put these things can be rather difficult. There's ideas I'm toying with for solving this issue, but ultimately it will take more time until I have a solution that I feel is worth using. I'm still dedicated to getting more content into the game (obviously, I'm still designing bosses and enemies), it's just a matter of finding the most seamless way of doing that.
With that said, I've gone on a bit long this week! We can totally talk about it more next week, or you can reach out to me directly if you have questions/feedback!
Until next week,
-- Ryan