Weekly Pupdate (9/22/20) -- Patch #42

What's good, my puppers? Been spending a large, large portion of this week working on the script for the upcoming "dark world" dungeons! Two of the three are nearing test-ready, with the third well into development as well! More on that after the jump. For now, patch notes!

[h2]Ephemeral Tale 1.25.2 Changelog[/h2]

• Added a new side quest, it can be started deep within the Mute Mountains
  
• After completion of this side quest, the reward can be farmed for off of Snowbros inside of the Mute Mountains
  
• Added a new chest to the Lost Caverns, along with some text to (hopefully) improve the new player experience
  
• Added a dialogue interaction w/ Dabby in the Occluded Oasis to better guide players towards the overarching goal of the zone
  
• Fixed a bug where a Twitter promotional text had accidentally been left in the game

[h2]THE DARK APPROACHES[/h2]

The Graveyard Grove and Bayou Bog are both nearing completion, with work on the final "dark world" dungeon well underway (tentatively called "Crown Castle," but that will change in the future). So, how will you access the dark world dungeons?

Same same, but different.

When the dark worlds drop, the Great Palace will house them, just as it does the normal worlds! This will be in the twisted version of the Great Palace that currently serves as the final dungeon for the game. That is also what the 4th door in this sneak-peek will lead to! After completing the three dark worlds, the true path into the Great Palace will open, and you'll be able to move forward into that final dungeon as per usual.

To better help you guys understand how the design process generally works for these zones, here's an example of a "rough draft" map I use to plan out the general pacing:

MSPaint da bomb.

From there, I can start to use the aesthetic tests (which I've posted on Twitter before, these serve as explorations to find the best fit of visuals for the zone) to build rooms, and eventually expand these into the full zone. Once complete, these generally look roughly like something along these lines:

Wow, this is outdated already. Darn my desires to keep expanding these zones!

Along the way, I'll be checking that everything feels right through short playtesting sessions (these are the source of the vast majority of the pre-release screenshots as well). Once all of this is done, I'll finally enable the random encounters, and do a full play session through the zone!

For the Graveyard Grove and Bayou Bog, these zones are roughly at that final point. I need to design boss fights for them, but after that I can send them towards the beta testing crew for thorough breaking, fix all of those, and we'll be that much closer to the next version of Ephemeral Tale!

For now, that's all I've got to talk about this week. As always, keep an eye on the game in these Pupdates, in our Discord, or over on Twitter!

Until next week, stay safe and have fun!
-- Ryan
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