Greetings once again, brave adventurers!
The plague ravaging our lands has begun to subside, so this seems a good time to peek our heads out of the game-dev bunker and share some of the awesome things we’ve been working on. Let’s start with the new content that is now live and then we’ll run down some of the goodness yet to come.
New Quest: Take a Hike
One of the player challenges in Epic Tavern comes a few weeks in, when most new heroes you hire start off many levels below everyone else on your roster. One of the ways we’re addressing this is with special Training Quests, where you can send your low-level heroes away for training in a safe-ish environment to acquire piles of new skills and experience.
The first Training Quest now unlocks on Day 35, and offers an opportunity to send 2-4 low-level adventurers off for an intensive day of survival and wilderness training at the hands of famed ranger Alicaine Fletcher. Will your fledgling heroes successfully complete the challenges, earning unique items along the way, or will they crash and burn (but still come home with enough experience to level up multiple times)?
New Quest: The Winter’s Brawl
This quest is only available to taverns that succeeded in Mother Winter’s Wild Ride, and the invitation to compete will arrive a few days later. Travel to the keep of the mad dwarf, Kraven, to compete in Beor’s craziest winter event since the Frozen Games.
You’ll compete against rival tavern The Hungry Huntsman, newcomer A Twist of Fae, and the Kobold Labor Union to be the first team to climb an icy ziggurat to reach the flag hanging 10 feet above the top tier. No magic is allowed, but cheating is encouraged. And yes, the fine print does mention something about a member of the losing teams being sacrificed to She Who Sleeps Beneath the Mountain, but pay no attention to that. I’m sure you’ll be fine.
Bug Fix: Custom Items Now Rewarding Properly.
There are around a hundred quests/encounters in the game where random rewards just wouldn’t cut it, so I made a custom item(s) as a reward with a description that mentions how you received the item. Unfortunately, the system wasn’t giving you those special items. It was just spitting out random stuff instead. That has been corrected and all the rewards that were designed for specific occasions are now awarded properly.
UPCOMING FEATURES
We have a GIANT pile of exciting new features already working in our test build that will bring us very close to delivering our full intended gameplay experience and allow us to exit Early Access. We’re currently debugging and designing the user interface for the following features…
Upcoming: Trophies!
You will very soon be able to unlock trophies in your travels, that you can use to decorate your tavern! Susie and Rich have been hard at work creating dozens of trophies and the interface that lets you cycle through them to find the best look for your tavern! These are already fully functioning in our internal test build.
Upcoming: Quest Action Tuning
As part of our revamp of the adventuring process, the different types of rolls each character can attempt will have varying spirit costs, adding another factor to your decision-making.
Upcoming: Travel Breaks
As management of supplies and spirit on the road becomes more important, with it comes the ability to stop and rest. Twice a day, you’ll be offered a chance to stop and recoup for a bit or forage for supplies. We’re also looking to expand this into encounters that happen while your party is camping for the night.
Upcoming: Engine upgrade
We have updated the engine we use to make Epic Tavern, which will bring with it performance improvements and faster load times starting with the next patch.
Upcoming: Skill Checks!
I’m outright giddy about this one, as it was the last big missing piece of the puzzle to create an authentic tabletop experience. This new feature, which is already implemented in our testing branch, allows for a single character to make a roll against one of their skills. This opens the door to a host of classic tabletop experiences, like...
Perception Checks!
“Roll for perception” is coming to Epic Tavern. A successful perception check before an encounter might lower the difficulty, whereas one after the encounter could mean the difference between finding all the available loot or not.
First Aid and Healing Checks!
Currently, if I want to use a healer’s abilities, I have to write an entirely separate version of that result that automatically inflicts less damage if you have a healer present. With skill checks, we can now have a pop-up box that will allow your healer/medic to roll to decrease the damage sustained by the party.
Locked Chests/Doors!
It’s now easy for us to insert locksmith skill checks that affect rewards or even story branching.
Saving Throws!
This is the big one. We can now insert a saving throw pop-up after the result has displayed, but before damage has been assigned. Agility Check for half damage from a fireball or falling rocks, Endurance Check vs poison, and the dreaded Save vs Death are all coming soon to Epic Tavern.
Upcoming: An Epic Tavern Comic Book?!
I’ll babble your ear off in a separate update about this soon, but Hyperkinetic Studios is teaming up with Scout Comics to bring Epic Tavern to your local comic-book shop this October. Stay tuned for more details!