Hello, Taverneers! Everyone here on the Epic Tavern team is very excited to roll out Epic Tavern’s Harvest Update for y’all!! Also, if you get a chance, we'd love to be considered for the "Defies Description" Award in the Steam Awards. It'd be super sweet if y'all consider nominating us via the purple section on our store page. Click this pic to go there now!
The update includes a bunch of great new story content, some critical bug fixes for issues reported by our community, and the beginnings of what will be our team’s push for more player agency: Our goal is to give everyone the power to make more meaningful choices and decisions that will greatly impact the success of your Heroes and the future of your Tavern. We are having such a blast interacting with everyone through our Twitch stream as we develop and through our Discord-- thank you all for making Epic Tavern one of the best experiences we’ve ever had. Oh, before we forget! Take a minute to stop in and check out our Roadmap, so you can vote on what’s important to you and help influence the future of Epic Tavern. Without further ado, our Harvest Update details!
TL;DR
- New Quest Chain! The Dark Rift: An earthquake opens a rift beneath Beor Bay, unleashing strange new creatures, disrupting shipping lanes and sinking a transport ship bound for the capital. Join infamous pirate Tzarina Darkmane or beloved explorer Corinth Newbury in competing salvage missions to the edge of The Dark Rift!
- New Quest Chain! No Rest for the Wicked: In this follow-up to quest chains Still Life and The Curse of Blackheart Manor, the heroes are called back to the manor to help Rodrick access the sealed lighthouse at Blackheart Point and the old smuggling tunnels beneath. Explore the estate and solve the murder of Raven Stormswept for an epic loot cache.
- Enhanced Character Management:
- Introducing Character Stance Choices: Aggressive, Balanced, and Cautious.
- Stances are the beginning of a larger push toward more meaningful choices during questing.
- Improve messaging for negative and positive effects on your heroes
- Equipment UI and functionality fixes
- Improvements to the Beginning User Experience:
- Unlocking the Infirmary Quest Chain one turn earlier,
- Comb-through skill checks in the first 20 turns,
- Rewrite first 20 quests to make sure objectives in key stages are clear and in line with our best practices,
- Provided and tweaked early tooltips and pop-ups where applicable,
- Prologue dialogue improvements.
- Provided more clarity and balance to/for:
- The start of the turn,
- Spending AP (action points) and money in the Tavern,
- Increased AP cost for offering goods to patrons
- Stock amounts displayed correctly and match throughout UI
- Quest Sequence messaging and set up for player agency
- Building Long-Term Gameplay:
- Enhancing the Patron Spawn logic inside the Tavern (i.e., how many new patrons visit vs. previous visitors visit each turn)
- Ensuring all adventurers in the player’s roster come to the tavern every turn (unless they are out adventuring)
- Fix and clarify major UI contexts inside the Tavern:
- UI polish to menus and tooltips
- Fixes to buttons/tooltips and their functions/placements
- Font size adjustments across multiple tooltips/menus
- Lots more Bug Fixes!! See details below!
New Features in Detail
Feature Work:
- Converted broken Effects/Recovery tooltip to custom solution in line with Equipment and Goods tooltips (applied to roster list item, facilities roster list item, character sheet portrait, and character interaction portrait)
- Recovery indicator is now also a button that displays Facilities UI when clicked
- Added placeholder VFX for reputation and gold gain
- Added "Preparing" portrait indicator when adventurer is assigned to a quest
- Removed Base Income from all UI and game logic
- Patron Drunkenness now amplifies all relationship gains and losses (x1 for Sober, x2 for Tipsy, x4 for drunk, and in case it happens x0 for Passed out)
- Patron Spawning code has been reworked to ensure ALL of your current adventurers will show up in the Tavern as long as they are not Dead or Out Adventuring.
- The Wine Cellar now grants 1 additional Tap slot, plus an additional 1 for each upgrade
- Adventurers now have three Stances: Aggressive (Higher Skill Power, but raises Encounter Difficulty), Balanced (Standard Skill Power and Standard Encounter Difficulty), Cautious (Lower Skill Power, but lowered Encounter Difficulty)
- Simultaneous pending quests now execute sequentially rather than all at once
- Questecution list has been removed (visual history ribbon will be brought back in some form when there's time)
- Much larger party portraits with various elements redesigned/rearranged
- Portraits have Buff / Affliction indicators with tooltips, dynamically refreshed upon relevant events
- Portraits have Equipment icons with tooltips
- Empty party slots are now displayed rather than hidden
- Party slots are visually divided into front and back rows, in prep for further design
- Quest details and Play/Roll UI have been redesigned to utilize the right half of the screen, framing the map "window"
- Added fade transitions in between sequential quests
- Added Dark, Light, and Colorable variants of equipment Icons
- Clicking a menu item in the Turn pop-up (empty or occupied) now brings up the Tavern Management UI
- Added mouseover highlights to Turn menu list items
- Improved visibility of price slider scroll background on Turn menu list items
- Added tavern gold, money earned last turn, and current day/turn UI elements to Top-of-Turn pop-up
- Added current day/turn to top right of Questecution panel
- Parties traveling back home now display "Returning in Triumph" or "Returning in Defeat" according to Quest status
- Minor redesign of portrait to make weapon slots to more "flat", miscellaneous tweaks
- Added support for weapon icons of neutral color; integrated into questcution weapon slots
- You can now select which stance you want each hero to have following a skill roll stage
-Quest Chain: The Dark Rift. An earthquake opens a rift beneath Beor Bay, unleashing strange new creatures, disrupting shipping lanes and sinking a transport ship bound for the capital. Join infamous pirate Tzarina Darkmane or beloved explorer Corinth Newbury in competing salvage missions to the edge of The Dark Rift. Story spans 28 quests and 40+ encounter stages, with 5 Player Choices and many, many possible endings. 16 new artifacts, new tavern menu item, introduces new enemy race: Rift Elves, Multiple recurring characters introduced.
-Quest Chain: No Rest for the Wicked. In this follow-up to quest chains Still Life and The Curse of Blackheart Manor, the heroes are called back to the manor to help Rodrick access the sealed lighthouse at Blackheart Point and the old smuggling tunnels beneath. Explore the estate and solve the murder of Raven Stormswept for an epic loot cache. Story spans 9 quests and 25 encounter stages, five powerful new artifacts to be found.
-Quest Rewrite: Stomp now plays out differently on second attempt
-Quest Rewrite: Pick Your Poison now plays out differently on second attempt
-Quest Rewrite: Back for Seconds now plays out differently on second attempt
-Quest Rewrite: Thatch What I Call Roofing modified to clarify reward
-Quest Rewrite: Re-Animator modified so briefing reflects success/failure of I Smell a Rat
-Quest Rewrite: Sending a Message modified so briefing reflects success/failure of I Smell a Rat
- UI polish pass on Stance buttons
- Questeuction panel portrait initial state is set to empty (temp bandaid for questecution scene loading ugliness)
- Made tooltip text size static rather than best fit to avoid occasional weird tiny text
- Improved brightness of green party contribution buff highlight color
- Interactivity of menu list items in the Management screen and Turn pop-up are improved with larger slider hover zone, hover-highlight distinction between the slider and main body, and tooltip tweaks
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed "Out Questing" portrait indicator showing up when it shouldn't
- Ripped out legacy effects tooltip elements
- Level-up button no longer displays on characters who are out adventuring
- Level-up button no longer appears on portraits during quest completion pop-up
- Fixed: GV Pop up clipping off screen on smaller resolutions
- Patrons no longer warp to their seats after picking up a drink
- Drunken effects have had their shader corrected and now display in color instead of the borked texture magenta
- Drunken effects have been lowered to a more reasonable height above the character's head, making it easier to tell which adventurer is feeling sauced
- The Infirmary will now be retroactively unlocked for anyone who completed the required quest before the unlock functionality was implemented.
- Updated Goods Icons to uniform 1:1 aspect ratio
- Removed sub-tabs from tavern management panel
- Converted context header to TMPro, improved formatting and positioning
- Added mouse wheel scroll passthrough to Turn menu list items so they'll scroll (prepared for more menu items later)
- Removed redundant "in stock" suffix on menu list item
- Fixed some race conditions related to tooltip initialization
-Rewrote prologue to reflect Thorgrin starting game in bathhouse
-Rewrote one-off quest A Colorful Story, turning it into a chain that tests hero-assignment formatting
- New Turns do not reset correctly if there is an adventurer in the Infirmary
- Skill gains trigger the appropriate callouts during questecution (avatar icon and quest log indicator)
-[ET-703] Goods offer changes from 2 AP to 3 AP
-Goods stock amounts now display more sane values and match throughout UI
- Toggle Button for Free cam in Settings menu no longer wigs out and jumps out of it's box when clicked
- Prologue dialog fix
- Effects tooltip pivot changed so panel expands upward only (prevents tooltip flicker on multi-effect display)
- ET-1058: Game breaks when sending a party of two on quest and one dies
- Patron spawning readjusted to correctly fill extra space with half returning Template characters and half returning Proc Characters
- Resolved ET-1057: divvy loot display initializes and resets to full amount instead of party count divide
- Equipment tooltips in Questecution properly display to the lower right of the mouse
- Fixed unlock conditions on multiple quests
- Quest Completed pop-up: clicking the XP bar no longer calls level-up
- Fix for ET-870 Character: Skill points are not showing in character UI (skill focus badges)
- Expansion purchase button: Replaced Arial font with Shocard
- Dark Rift quest chain fixes and Paralysis now addressed by infirmary and "Proove" spelling fixed.
- Removed Focus button from death pop-up, additional minor cosmetic tweaks
- Resolution safe Equipment and Effects tooltips mean you can see what’s up, regardless what rez you run
- Quest fixes
- Quest data fixes
- Data Fixes
- Quest unlocks moved to proper places.
- New Turns do not reset correctly if there is an adventurer in the Infirmary
- Skill gains trigger the appropriate callouts during questecution (avatar icon and quest log indicator)
Wow, you read this far? Impressive. We are thankful for your determination :D
HAPPY THANKSGIVING, EVERYONE! Enjoy the Harvest!