Book of Travels News

[h2]Dear Traveller,[/h2]

It’s been a while since one of these community updates were posted. Since last time, the team has been busy with ironing out bugs (as usual) but also with getting our first Skill and Achievement Packs ready for you. We’re pleased to announce that they will be released today! As you are aware, we refer to our Early Access period as “Chapter Zero”, and as such we like to call these content drops “Pages”. This is the next Page.

Let’s talk skills first. There are six of them in today’s content drop, two of which were designed by backers of our Kickstarter campaign! Being able to invite our audience to directly participate in molding Book of Travels with us is one of the wonderful benefits of having done that campaign, and we’re very happy with how that collaboration has taken shape so far.

So without further ado, here are the new skills that your Traveller will be able to learn from now on:

Glitterfall
Wind: South
Type: Knot

This spell sets the air alight with a glamorous waterfall of sparkles. Credit goes to Ashley Corkill for coming up with this spell.

Summon Spirit Familiar
Wind: West
Type: Knot

This spell summons a travel companion from the spirit world to the binder’s side. Credit goes to Dennis, Savinien and Kaz Floyd for coming up with this spell.

Keen Eye
Wind: East
Type: Passive

Your sharp eyesight allows you to highlight collectibles around you more often.

Knot of the Infamous
Wind: West
Type: Knot

This spell permanently changes the knot binder’s eye colour to a random hue.

Rain Ward
Wind: East
Type: Passive

The natural power of rain resonates strongly with you, strengthening your resolve and raising your Ward as a result.

Knotbinder’s Fervour
Wind: North
Type: Passive

The mystical energies that surround you sometimes makes your knot spells take effect instantly.



Now, how you actually acquire these skills for your Traveller is going to remain a mystery. And you wouldn’t have it any other way, surely? We are going to say that these skills will be in the possession of certain inhabitants of Braided Shore, and we do encourage you to share your findings with your fellow Travellers on popular meeting grounds such as the Steam forums or our Discord server.

How fast will you be able to claim them all?

[h2]Achievements to mark your accomplishments[/h2]

Like already stated, the Skill Pack isn’t the only thing to get added to Book of Travels today. We also have the first Achievement Pack. Below you will find a list of the ones that the game gets right now. We won’t tell you how to achieve them though! There will be more to come as we continue fleshing things out during the Early Access period.

Note: Unfortunately, these won’t be unlocked retroactively if you already have fulfilled the requirements. They will need to be earned from scratch.

• Survived Character Creation!
  
• Journey Started
  
• Reached Safety
  
• Bat Saha
  
• Dandelions
  
• Learn Vellan
  
• The Dandelion
  
• First Trade
  
• Gather Your Party
  
• Party of Heroes
  
• A Bag of Riches
  
• Robbers Delight
  
• And other, hidden achievements!
  

Lastly, I would once again like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support. We believe in the vision of this game, and it’s incredibly gratifying to see so many of you doing the same. Needless to say, this batch of content is the tip of the iceberg of what we’re planning for Book of Travels and its future. Have fun with these new additions in the meantime, and we’ll talk again soon.

Best wishes, Oliver & the team at Might and Delight

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1152340/Book_of_Travels/
[h2]Help us bring Braided Shore to life![/h2]
[h3]

• Share on Twitter
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[/h3]

[h2]Want more info?[/h2]
[h3]Become a Traveller[/h3]
Sign up on our mailing list for news about our game at www.TMORPG.com.

[h3]Unique Stories[/h3]
When you play Book of Travels there is no linear questline, instead every player will have their own journey and stories to tell. Find out more about how our game design works to make your journey unlike any other...

[h3]Revealing the Early Access World[/h3]
Book of Travels is now available in Early Access on Steam. In Chapter Zero parts of the Braided Shore will be open, and among the places to visit is the gem of the region – the city of Kasa. Read more here.

[h3]Join our Discord[/h3]
Join our super friendly Discord to exchange ideas on all things Book of Travels as well as art, games and books. Join here.

Dear Traveller,
Today, at 14:00 CET (06:00 PT), we're updating Book of Travels with a host of various changes and fixes. As usual, anyone that's online playing at that time will be disconnected as the patch is rolling out - so try to plan your playtime accordingly.

[h3]General Changes[/h3]

• Players can now cancel casting knots and brewing teas by walking.
  
• When using a skill that requires you to target a character, hovering over a targetable character will now highlight them. Untargetable characters will not be highlighted even if they have interactions while in this state.
  
• Level transition buttons now align properly to passages and portals in the world.
  
• Implemented new animations for musicians.
  
• Various new text descriptions for skill items, skill effects and reagents added.
  
• Removed direction text for indoor gates.
  
• Polished the look of the Flower Kettem texture.
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Fixed various bugs that caused the player to teleport on click instead of walking.
  
• Prompt messages no longer get queued up if the same prompt is already set to display in the queue.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused skills to not be able to target other characters.
  
• The cave wall in the Jade Urn no longer fades from inside the cave.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the Careful trait to trigger a prompt when close to a non-hostile NPC that the player could duel with.
  
• Fixed the "New Foundry Special" item name that was mentioning it to be a bread, instead of a beverage.
  
• Added missing icon for Fake Pearl Studs.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the name sign of a hovered character to flicker.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused notes on the map to be placed in a horizontal line when logging out and back in. They should now always stay in the position they were placed in.
  
• NPCs gambling animation should no longer sporadically twitch.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused Kelim's Gate to be available outside of Nomad's rests.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the "out of breath" audio to play when running out of stamina while in animal form.
  
• An equipped Offhand item should now properly toggle off when using the Deep Rest skill.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused items to move around in the inventory after swapping the places of two equipped rings.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused having the ‘Cheap knotted cord message’ in your inventory to break certain UI elements (such as tooltips, or using skills).
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the ‘Party’ tutorial to show up for all party members if at least one member had not yet seen the tutorial.
  
• Map notes are now properly removed from the database when their text contents are removed.
  
• The ‘Learn’ button on skill cards is no longer interactable if you already have the skill in your skillbook.
  
• Fixed various culling issues with background clouds.
  
• Players should no longer clip through the train when sitting down while travelling.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused hostile NPC name tags to not show up when pressing Tab.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused textboxes to not properly pre-scale to their largest size in an interaction. This created instances of the text box being different sizes in one dialogue, and making the “next” button jump around to different places.
  

Best wishes,
Oliver & the team at Might and Delight

Book of Travels stream.

[h2]Dear Traveller,[/h2]

I hope this little update finds you well on this fine Monday. Last week I sat down with one of our programmers, Arvid, to talk about the work the team is doing to make Book of Travels a little better every day, as well as how your valued feedback reaches them.

Now, for anyone who is wondering what Arvid does I’ll make a quick introduction. He is in charge of the user interface (UI) and player interactions. The UI is incredibly important since it’s pretty much the visual language through which you, the player, engage with the game. Just like I’m sure you’ve experienced yourselves, I have been turned off from otherwise interesting games because of their UI’s being too complex, too cluttered or even visually unpleasing – so it’s definitely one of those things that absolutely needs to be just right, and even though I personally think Arvid’s done an excellent job with Book of Travels’ UI so far it’s still an ongoing process.

And as previously stated he works a lot with making player interactions smoother and more efficient. An example of this was how he made lighting a fireplace better since its inception. Previously it worked like this: you clicked on the ground to spawn the fireplace, and your character had a little fireplace construction animation. However, the actual fireplace started to form after this animation during which your character would just be stuck in a standing position. When the fireplace was put where you wanted it, you had to click on it again to light it on fire, which had its own little animation. Arvid made it so that putting up the fireplace and lighting it was fused into one player command rather than two. So that is one example of the work he is focused on.

Screenshot captured by: Con

[h2]Sometimes you need to do some firefighting[/h2]

Speaking of fireplaces, after launch we discovered that some players was using them to grief other players. Since we didn’t want Travellers to be able to stand in the fire, they were made into solid objects that you can’t walk over. This fact was abused to essentially trap others in corners and against walls. That is an example of how the community made us aware of a problem we didn’t foresee, and we made sure to fix that as soon as possible. Right now, you can walk right over it but Arvid told me that they plan on making it so that you take damage if you for some reason would willingly stand still in the fire.

And as we’re on the subject of player feedback making its way to our team, I thought I’d take the opportunity to clear up how that process works. I’ve had some of our more dedicated members of our community approach me with concerns about it. Doesn’t the more critical feedback get buried in less urgent issues? Is the latest piece of feedback the one to get looked at last in the pile?

The short answer is no. We’re always primarily looking for “good” feedback, so if someone reports an issue that is completely detrimental to the experience, whatever that may look like, and provides us with lots of useful information on how this issue occurs – we will look at that before smaller problems. Our QA department is in charge of going through all feedback we receive. They look at an issue, try to replicate that issue with the information they get in the bug report, and then they pass it on to our programmers, who in turn start working on fixing that problem.

One might also ask questions like “I’ve reported bugs X and Y weeks ago, why aren’t they fixed by now” and the answer is that not all of our programmers are specialised in every field. Arvid, for instance, would be the one to look at bugs related to the UI, whereas a combat bug would go to someone else. In other words, we don’t often have large groups of programmers working on the same thing. Furthermore, some problems take longer to solve for various reasons. So don’t worry, we are hearing you and we’re working tirelessly to optimise, bug fix and otherwise make Book of Travels better and better. It just takes time.

If you’ve managed to get to the end of this post, I thank you for your attention and I hope I could provide some clarity to what our work flow looks like in regards to your feedback. Until next time!

[h3]Best wishes,[/h3]
Oliver & the team at Might and Delight


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1152340/Book_of_Travels/
[h2]Help us bring Braided Shore to life![/h2]
[h3]

• Share on Twitter
• Share on Facebook
• Follow Book of Travels on Facebook
• Follow Might & Delight on Twitter
• Follow Might & Delight on Instagram

[/h3]

[h2]Want more info?[/h2]
[h3]Become a Traveller[/h3]
Sign up on our mailing list for news about our game at www.TMORPG.com.

[h3]Unique Stories[/h3]
When you play Book of Travels there is no linear questline, instead every player will have their own journey and stories to tell. Find out more about how our game design works to make your journey unlike any other...

[h3]Revealing the Early Access World[/h3]
Book of Travels is now available in Early Access on Steam. In Chapter Zero parts of the Braided Shore will be open, and among the places to visit is the gem of the region – the city of Kasa. Read more here.

[h3]Join our Discord[/h3]
Join our super friendly Discord to exchange ideas on all things Book of Travels as well as art, games and books. Join here.

Dear Traveller,

Twelve hours from now, on November 16 at 9:30 AM CET (12:30 AM PT), we're rolling out a new patch. It is mostly made up of fixes for fishing, but it contains a couple of other things as well. Here it is:

• Fixed an issue that could result in a faulty intro and create further problems regarding placing the character onto the starting level.
  
• Fixed a possible issue that prevented certain events from spawning.
  
• Fixed an issue that could prevent showing speech bubbles.
  
• Fixed various bugs regarding fishing:
  - Fishing animations and lock time are now faster overall.
  - Fixed issues with the fish prop being visible during an animation transition.
  - You should now always finish fishing when the fishing timer is full.
  - Off-hand items should disappear properly while fishing.
  - Clicking to walk away while fishing should no longer put the character in a gliding state.
  - The Fishing skill card will no longer show as "inactive" when you have a full inventory, but will still prevent you from fishing and give a warning prompt.
  
• The daytime issue should now be solved, and server time should be set according to the regions time.
  
• Fixed a case of items disappearing from both the inventory and pockets. Please report if you are still losing items.
  

Best wishes,
Oliver & the team at Might and Delight