Eterra Monthly: January 2025 Edition

Hello Travelers! It’s time for another recap with January 2025’s Eterra Monthly! Let’s see what we have in store!

Hotfix Rollout

We released two fixes in January, one that fixed a minor menu-based UI issue and another that fixed an issue that caused low FPS under certain circumstances.

Eyes on Eterra

In preparation for Season 2, we are continuing to squash bugs and have made some changes internally like the following (this isn’t all of them of course, just a little appetizer):

Changes

• Character stat sheet entry for Less Damage over Time Taken

Fixes

• Fixed the Character Stats UI entries for “Less Damage Taken” and “Less Damage Taken from nearby enemies”
• Fixed a bug causing the extra spears created from the Divine Fury node or the Sierpin’s Fractal Tree item while the Siege Barrage node was allocated would not be fired from the correct position when cast onto large enemies.
• Fixed a bug where Smoke Bomb with the Cloaked Incursion node allocated would not visually expand
• Fixed a bug where closing the Bug Report menu with the Esc key after selecting the input field would result in being unable to control the character until closing the menu with the X button”

Mike Twitch Teasers

If you missed out on any of Mike’s streams, no worries, we’ve collected all the little juicy tidbits he shared on stream!

01/03/2025

Mike blessed us on the new year with a UI update sneak peek!

01/10/2025

Starting the new year strong with more fun screenshots - this time showing new inventory tabs and key storage! He also gave a glimpse at Conviction being a little different than it used to be

01/17/2025

Mike shared with us some…. charms?? Key rings? What could these be used for? Hmm~ how charming. (Ave made me do it).

01/24/2025

Oh ho, what’s this? Mike showing what looks to be a sprite for Hausprix Orian? And is that a new quiver sub-type we see

Community Build Spotlight

Welcome to the Naughty List by Lohk utilizes the Stygian Coal Unique that can take Travelers from early Monoliths into 60 second Aberroth kills, all while using low LP uniques! With the power of spamming Drain Life and Rip Blood you don’t have to worry about defenses and can focus on stacking your health, in fact, the more health you have - the more damage you do!

The gear recommended to use is a Stygian Coal with 1 LP (slammed with Critical Strike Chance, Spell Critical Strike Chance, or Cast Speed), 2x Phantom Grip with 1 LP (slammed with Intelligence), and a Mad Alchemist’s Ladle with 1 LP (slammed with Spell Critical Strike Chance).

What are the pros and cons of this build? Well, the pros are that as soon as you equip Stygian Coal the build is ready to go and can be played with few modifications. You also can use Reaper Form to give yourself a “get out of jail” free card when you may die. However, one of the cons of this build is that Reaper Form constantly drains your health along with Mind Over Body - so you would need to keep moving and killing.

Meet the Team

I was able to sit down with our Lead Combat Designer, Sam, and get a little more insight into the world of VFX!

• Hi Sam! Could you tell us a little about your job and what it includes?
  • My official role is “Lead Combat Designer” but that maybe doesn’t tell you much. I primarily work with monsters, player skills, and VFX. I help design the attacks and plans for pretty much every monster in the game, all the way from the lowest spider to the pinnacle Aberroth. I’m the guy who makes player skills in engine, directing animation and then tuning speeds, hitboxes, etc in game. I also do a lot of VFX, or at least helping the VFX artists and moving them along. Making LE is a very collaborative process, so while I do all the things above, often times I’m working with several other people, getting feedback or discussing ideas.
  • For monsters, in addition to doing the design and writeup for them, I’m one of the guys in Unity implementing abilities, tuning animations, adjusting timing, buffing/nerfing attacks, and overall working on the in-engine part of making monsters fun and challenging to fight.
  • On the VFX side, I’m more in a guidance position at this point, but still get a chance to work on some VFX from time to time. Since I’ve been working on LE for quite a while at this point, I know a thing or two about how to make VFX for the game, so part of my job is passing on as much of that info as I can to the other VFX artists.
  • I’ve been with EHG for what, like 7 years? I joined the team soon after Kickstarter, so I’ve been here a while.

• What inspired you to get into game development and how did you end up at this studio?
  • Partway through college in one of my game courses, they were dividing everyone up to work on different aspects of game development. We had Character Artists, Environment art, C# dev, game design, sound, VFX. Nobody signed up for VFX, and I figured I’d try to be a team player and signed up for that. A couple weeks later I had my very first VFX reel (mostly me, I also put a couple things made by others in here simply for ease of presenting at school). A few weeks after that I posted another reel with some more VFX work, and would you look at who commented!

  • At this point I’d been doing VFX for not that long and you can see for yourself that my skills were not very good, so if someone was willing to take a chance on me, I was certainly willing to give them my best effort. Within a few days of that comment from Judd, I was in the project working on a new level up VFX and a warpath update (if I remember right). I still had 2 years of school left, so I worked on LE and went to school, and after graduating in 2020 I went ham on LE.
  • Since that time I’ve gotten a tad bit better at making VFX and the game has grown into a success. It’s been pretty cool to see the game and myself grow over the years.

• How do you balance working from home with your home life?
  • This one is tricky and one that I’ve had to work on constantly. It’s very easy to let work bleed into all parts of life. Slack (or Discord) apps on my phone make it easy to keep in touch but maybe too easy, and my work PC is the same as my gaming PC. Some things I’ve done is making sure to take breaks throughout the day, take time to step away from my PC and play with my kids for a few minutes. Immediately after work in the evenings, I make sure to take time away from the computer for at least 30-60 mins, usually eating dinner and chatting with my wife. This kinda simulates “going home from work.” I’ve turned off notifications on my phone for Slack. The app is still there, but its just sitting there waiting for me, instead of trying to poke me. If my kids come in wanting attention, as long as I’m not in a meeting, I’ll make sure to take a minute to spend time with them. Trying to keep my real life and family as the top priority and hoping that they’ll feel that. Or at least look back later and realize it.

• How do you balance creativity with practical constraints like time, budget, or technical limitations?
  • Something I’ve learned is that a large amount of the quality, maybe 80%, comes from the first bit of work, maybe like 30-40%. Then the last 20% of the quality comes from the remaining 60-70% of the work. There’s a sweet spot where your work is “pretty darn good” but hasn’t taken loads of time to make, and the remaining effort to get it to “practically perfect” just isn’t worth the time. Basically, I’ve found a sweet spot between speed and quality that gets the most bang for my buck. This does take a bit of practice and understanding to really get down, but I feel that’s how I was able to function as the sole VFX artist on the project for several years. Technical limitations are tricky and force creativity. Part of it is understanding the ins and outs of the program you use. The more I understand Unity, the more creative I can be with the various tools and options available.

• What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned while working in indie game development?
  • Be flexible, and willing to jump in to help wherever its needed. For example, when I started as just a VFX artist, I did that for a while, but soon noticed that the monster side of the pipeline was headed up by one person who also had a ton of other responsibilities. So I stepped in and started learning monster stuff, just experimenting a bit on my own. With a lot of trial and error and some guidance I eventually became pretty good at making monsters, and now I’m the go-to guy when there are bugs or questions about any specific enemy.
  • Going along with being flexible, at school I learned to rig and animate, and both of those skills came in very handy in earlier Last Epoch days. At one point I got a monster from the modelers, then I rigged it, animated it, put it in the engine and made the abilities for it, and then made VFX for it before sending to sound. One that comes to mind that is still in the game is the Desecrated Flesh, though I believe there are still a few others.

• How do you stay motivated and creative, especially during long or difficult projects?
  • Part of it is that it’s just my job, if I don’t do my job, I don’t get paid and then that can impact my family. So that’s fairly motivating lol. One thing that really helps me is sharing the cool stuff that I work on. Seeing other people excited about it gets me excited to make more. The week after Aberroth’s release was one of my favorite weeks working on LE. Learning something new helps motivate me too. There’s always a new technique, tool, shader, etc that I can learn more about. The VFX world and community is growing and learning all the time, and there are countless awesome VFX artists out there. Its really fun to see what they make and what I can learn from it. There were many times throughout development where I saw a post and thought “oh that’s cool, I wonder if I can do that in LE” and then I would experiment and find a way.
  • I feel rather lucky, because my context for “long” projects is different from other studios and games. Sometimes other games will work on things for years before players get to see anything. Look at big games announced that take 6+ years to make, the devs there are working on things behind the scenes the entire time. For us, we release a patch slightly more frequently and my work gets shown and we get an influx of positivity and excitement for the game. So for me, I always know that a new project might be just a couple months away if I’m not enjoying my current one.

• What kind of feedback from players do you find most helpful or motivating?
  • Like I’ve mentioned before, I love seeing people enjoy the game, particularly my work. It really energizes me seeing people excited and enjoying our game. Seeing metrics and numbers that people are playing our game is great, but there’s something very energizing about a streamer trying out a skill for the first time and going “oh this is cool.” For example, Runic Invocation was a big project of mine, designing all the skills and doing some of the VFX for them, and it was quite fun to see everyone experimenting and trying out all the different combos when it released.
  • For critical feedback, being more specific is helpful. For example, saying “oh the performance in this game sucks.” is not very useful or helpful. But saying “My framerate drops when I spawn a whole bunch of volatile zombies at once and they all explode on the same enemy” is much more helpful. Basically, the more detail and specificity you can give, the better. Same thing goes for boss feedback. “Lagon’s eye laser is hard to tell which way its going to come from” is much better than “Lagon op plz nerf”. I do appreciate all the feedback that we get from players, even if I don’t personally spend a lot of time in Discord or reddit reading through feedback. I find I’m too sensitive to the negative/toxic feedback, and its not great for me to spend too much time sifting through that stuff to find the good stuff, but other people have done a good job of funneling useful, actionable feedback to me.

• What’s a feature or design choice you’re particularly proud of that you’ve worked on?
  • I really love Aberroth. I spearheaded the design of the abilities, and built them all in engine. While I didn’t do any VFX work for Aberroth, I did direct both animation and VFX . I’m the guy who adjusted anticipation timings, hitbox sizes, attack speeds, etc, and built out the different eras and their mechanics. I think overall this boss turned out stunning visually, and the difficulty hit about where we wanted for a pinnacle boss. Something I’m really proud of for myself and the team is that we made such a difficult encounter that feels FAIR. That’s something really important to me/us when designing bosses and enemies, I want to make sure that you always feel like you have a chance. The goal is that you never say, “well that was stupid, I had no way to avoid that” when you die, but rather go “oh I can play better around that next time”. Obviously we aren’t always perfect at this, and particularly some older content struggles to hit this goal. We are constantly making improvements though, and if you have feedback about any particular enemy or boss, please say something, we do try to read it all and fix what we can. Overall I think we did a pretty good job of that with Aberroth. I know it gets chaotic in the final phase of the fight with so many things to pay attention to, but I think we did a good job of still making it feel fair and reasonable, if very difficult.
  • Several years back we introduced the Rogue. I love rogues and that whole archetype in any game, so I was very excited to work on her in our game. I am the skill prototyping guy. If there is a new player skill, I’m the one who will put it together, tweak timings, projectile speeds, critique animations, etc until we have a skill that is feeling good and is fun to use. I got to do that all over for the Rogue, and it was a blast. At that point I was also the only VFX artist, so I worked a lot on the design of the skills, then handed them off to myself to make them look pretty. Was a really fun time, and I think the Rogue turned out very fun to play in addition to being one of the most cohesive classes across all her skills.

• What advice would you give someone who wants to get into this industry?
  • Be good to work with. Someone who is very easy to work with, give feedback to, talk to, etc is so important. Try to be someone that other people think is fun to work with. Sure, you won’t get along with everyone perfectly, but generally people shouldn’t dread having to talk to you, or wonder if you’ll actually do what you say you will, or cause an argument.
  • Going along with the previous, be open and seeking feedback. Early in my career I didn’t get this as well, and thought that if people gave me feedback that I sucked at what I did. I needed to be so perfect that my work was impossible to critique. But I’ve flipped my mindset all around, and now if I get feedback its just an opportunity to get better at what I do, and I’m happy when there are things to improve on.
  • Find what you love. I will say I’ve been extremely lucky in my career. I got a job before I finished college that turned out to be a real career still several years after college. I got to do what I love from the start basically, working on VFX and then discovering a new love of monster design. That first step, the discovery, is really important. Early in my career plans I wanted to be an animator and work on like Dreamworks movies, but over time I discovered VFX and monsters and dove into it headfirst. Be open to new opportunities and learn whatever you possibly can. Especially when starting out, try all the different disciplines, learn some modeling, rigging, animation, sound, level design, anything, just to see what your favorite is.
  • Now a dose of reality. I know its hard to get games jobs right now. Like I mentioned above I’m very blessed and grateful for the opportunities I’ve had. Not everyone will be so lucky. So with that being said, play it safe, don’t quit your day job to work on your game dev skills without a plan. Realize that perhaps being a game dev as a career isn’t going to work out for everyone, and maybe just as a hobby is more realistic.

• Is there anything else you’d like to tell our readers?
  • If there is desire for it, I can compile some useful VFX resources for anyone looking to learn VFX for games. We could possibly do some demos or more in depth VFX blog breakdowns if there is interest. (and I can get approval to post something like that).
  • Be kind to each other. The world is a scary place, and games are all our break from reality. All the people working on LE (and I would argue most devs working on their games) love the game they work on, and want nothing more than to make the players have a good experience. I know its easy to be toxic behind the anonymity of the internet, but the extra effort we put in to be good to the people we interact with makes the community, internet, and world a better place for everyone.
  • Thanks all for reading all of this, I hope some of it was interesting, and if you have follow up questions or would like VFX advice, comment below or find me on Discord, I’d love to chat more!

Thank you again to Sam for taking time out of his day to answer some questions for us! And if you’d love to chat a little more with him or ask for some pointers his Discord handle on the Last Epoch Official Discord is: EHG_Sam!

Community Spotlight

As a reminder we have two posts up asking for your guys’ input! We’re giving our forums a facelift and want to know what kind of profile icons you’d like to see as well as wallpaper suggestions!

Forum Player Profile Icon Overhaul - with contest! Hello Travelers! As part of our ongoing overhauls both in game and out - we are updating the Forums Player Profile Icons! While the current roster contains some long standing favourites, the skills they represent - and the in-game icon representing those skills - have been updated several times, so now it’s time to do the same here. Along with new Skill Icons, we’ll be adding some other in game icons such as the Egg of the Forgotten and Class Icons, though we know individuality and representa…

Wallpapers - What would you like? A huge part of what we love from our community is the want for more! More Skills, more Classes, more gameplay, more music and - as is the topic today - more wallpapers.

Do you all remember that amazing woodwork by Vezidoroga we shared last month? Well they sent us even more progress and it looks amazing!! They said they still have antiquing and painting to do and we are just blown away by the detail and dedication. We’re so excited to see the finished piece!

What’s Next

Our teams are in the home stretch for development of Season 2 and are finalizing and iterating on new systems and changes alongside feedback from our CT program! If you are in our CT program please be sure to log in and give us your feedback if you haven’t already. Every little bit helps us along the way!

Oh also here's a little something else 😉

https://youtu.be/3_5OnoWKuP8

Closing Remarks

This has been Eterra Monthly; a report on the happenings and changes in the world of Last Epoch. We hope you have enjoyed this month’s report and will see you all again soon.