Ephemeral Tale News

And just like that, we've got ourselves another Pupdate. This week has been rather hectic, let me tell ya. The power line attached to the house (as I work from home, yay!) came down, my internet went out (making updates hard to push), it's been a wild ride. In fact, the internet went down Monday night, so last weeks update was pushed over my cell phone! So, let's hop into this week's changelog, and then we can discuss New Game+ some more!

[h2]Ephemeral Tale 1.4.7 Changelog[/h2]

• Lowered default “Enemy Toughness” modifier from 6 to 5
  
• Updated several battle sound effects & animations
  
• Very, very small performance performance improvements
  
• Added a sound effect cue to indicate a file has been saved (Thanks, Leo!)
  
• Adjusted the visual prompts for recovering at the Fire and after deaths (Thanks, fmoo!)
  
• Added visual prompts to a few of the more abstract puzzles
  
• Slight tweaks to social buttons
  
• Changes to dialogue in the Caverns zone to better present the gameplay loop to new players
  
• Fixed a bug where controller inputs could repeat infinitely on the menu
  

The changes this week are almost entirely due to feedback from you guys, gameplay videos (yes, those really do help!), and refund (sad-face) data. For example, someone this week put in their refund report that they felt the level scaling felt uneven, and that RNG caused certain areas to feel locked out. While I wish they had come to me directly with this so I could work on the specific issues they had, this is still great information to have, and will certainly help me as I move towards future balancing changes.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Last week, Design Doc put out a compelling video about New Game+ (linked above). One of the points they made was that New Game+ locking out content can be frustrating for players, and I tend to agree with that expression. So while New Game+ will still have the new mechanics (as discussed in prior Pupdates), it will no longer have exclusive content. That content will become available to all players with the release of Major Update #3. The reality is that Ephemeral Tale is a shorter experience anyway (I mean, it quite literally means short story), so having more side content available for players (like yourself) to enjoy isn't a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination.

One thing I'm toying with at this particular moment in time is changing up how the Jelly rooms work. For those not in the know, there is a chance whenever you kill a rare mob (each zone has a specific one tied to it), that they'll drop a Jelly of sorts. This consumable item opens up a portal in a random location in the dungeon (for example, Jelly acquired in the Forest will only up a portal in the Forest), and that leads to a loot room of sorts. I've been toying with the idea of replacing these Jelly rooms entirely with a set location in the dungeons that would open up, and these would serve as challenge rooms. Go in, fight a bunch of dangerous stuff, collect a bunch of cool loot, get out. That may be something I work on this week, as I feel it would help tighten up that specific part of the game.

I said last week that we'd talk about Major Update #3 this week-- first, I'd like to apologize for the update taking longer than usual. We had about a month to month-and-a-half gap between Major Update #1 and #2, but we're nearing a two month gap between #2 and #3. You see, while I dabble in coding, I'm merely a dabbler-- the performance overhaul bit of the patch is being handled by a professional. That's been delayed due to their work load being increased immensely from COVID-19 (as their day job is web-based). As the final dungeon changes have been rolled out over the past few weeks (well, most of them), it felt like it would be flip-floppy of me to push just New Game+ as the major update, considering that I've publicly stated that the performance overhaul was part of the patch. On the other hand, if that overhaul is delayed for too much longer, I'll be put into a situation where I have to release it in that form, and push the performance overhaul to a future patch. I don't want to do that, but we'll see what happens in the next week or two, and I'll keep you guys updated.

Lastly, thanks to reports from a few of you guys that Ephemeral Tale was flagging their anti-virus software, I got in touch with the guys over at Avast and we've gotten Ephemeral Tale on their white list. If any of you continue to have issues in this regard, please contact me so that I can reach out to the right folks and get that sorted out! In the mean time, you can safely add the game to your personal white lists-- Valve likes to keep us developers in check as far as "is it safe to download from Steam?" goes. Whew-- We'll talk more next week (bunches of fixes in the pipe for that one), same pup-time, same pup-place!

Stay safe and have fun,
-- Ryan

What's up, everyone? We're back with another HUD-based Pupdate this week. I've been hella busy this week getting these changes ready for y'all. I hope you guys enjoy the visual sprucing up that's occurred! So, let's jump into the changelog real quick, and then we can talk about what I've been working on in the interim:

[h2]Ephemeral Tale 1.4.5 Changelog[/h2]

• Major & minor tweaks to the combat HUD (specifics below)
  
• New player HP/MP containers (Thanks, Tim!)
  
• New Enemy/Boss HP/MP containers
  
• Bigger text for HP/MP
  
• Changes to render method for non-bitmap font texts (Thanks, fmoo!)
  
• Adjustments to text for various moves
  
• Fixed a bug when using a Scroll of Power in the Sunken Summit
  
• Fixed a bug where one of the Sunken Summit’s visual effects would persist after defeat
  
• Fixed a passibility issue in the Sunken Summit
  
• El Cabones will now show up in the loot window that appears post-battle

The changes to the render method for non-bitmap font texts may cause some small performance differences-- in my internal tests, it added 0.01ms of latency to the frametime. This shouldn’t have too much of an impact in practice-- by default, drawing text takes 0.02ms to 0.04ms to do. With the new render method, the range is 0.03ms to 0.05ms. In practice, this is mathematically insignificant. To achieve 60fps, the game would have to render each frame in under 16ms. So, this change adds 1/16th of a percent of latency to the game overall (or roughly 0.000625 seconds). With that said, if this impacts you in a negative way, let me know (I'll probably ask for receipts, though).

So in the off chance that you're someone who reads these weekly but skipped last week (how dare you, if so), here's the skinny on the HUD changes in recap form: Skills and Status Effect icons used to have some weirdness going on with them. TL;DR, inconsistent sizing of pixels creating a weird "feel" to them. Tim from Something Classic heard my pleas for help on the winds that echo (echo, echo), and spent a day or so redrawing all of the icons in the game from scratch. This improved the legibility of the icons tenfold. Unfortunately, after that, the icons looked so much better than the rest of the HUD elements that we actually teamed up again and re-did the containers for the party members! They look amazing, and I can't wait for you to get in-game and see them for yourself. After this, I ended up re-doing all of the enemy containers for consistencies sake, and here we are!

Let's talk about the future, shall we? But to do that, we need to first look back. Waaaaaay back. In fact, so far back I had to use ctrl+F on the Pupdates to figure out when the hell I last mentioned it (February, as it so turns out). In the past, we had spoken about changes to companions and the fact that I would have to figure out what that entailed. Well, due to the magic of e x p e r i m e n t a t i o n, I can now say with a degree of confidence that there are big changes coming to the companions of Ephemeral Tale! This week, let's talk about Merlin.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

You see, each of the companions falls into an archetype: Clarke is the Healer, Merlin is the Damage Dealer, Siegfried is the Tank. These aren't very well projected, and that's on me. That's my fault, to be perfectly honest. There's no real reason for you to expect that Merlin is the DPS (DPT?), and that Siegfried is the Tank, unless you've personally spoken to me about it. Clarke is actually pretty straight forward, due to her signature ability being Heal, but the other two I've right mucked up. Also, Mr. (Or Ms.) Strawman, the player is whatever you want them to be. So don't sass me, okay bucko? You'll hurt my feelings. One of the ways I'm looking to change up companions is by making their overall goal more concise. Merlin is a great start for that, as these are abilities that I've wanted to squeeze into the game anyway.

Merlin is meant to be a Damage Dealer first and foremost, and as such, his abilities need to represent that. With the additions of Storm and Gust as abilities, he'll now have access to the three primary element types (Fire, Spirit, Shock), and be able to exploit the weaknesses of enemies in any zone. Storm is also notably different than his other 2 abilities (and Shock!) for one small, but important reason-- it's an Area of Effect move! It will hit all enemies on the battlefield. Whew, nasty. When these changes go live, Merlin will also have a fourth and final ability. What will it be? A surprise, for the both of us! I still have to figure that detail out, naturally.

I'm not sure quite yet when these changes are going to drop at the moment. While part of me wants to hold them back until they're all ready to go and push it with some other companion-focused ideas of mine as Major Update #4 (as in, the major update after the upcoming New Game+/Final Dungeon/Performance Overhaul), I also know that my development style wouldn't mesh well with that. So we'll probably see these changes roll out over a period of a few weeks after Major Update #3 drops. We'll talk more about that update next week, by the way. There's been bumps in the road (as expected), so I'm glad I didn't just go spouting a release date for that patch that I couldn't realistically hit. With that said, lots of exciting stuff to come in next weeks update, and the updates to come as well!

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

Another week has passed, and development continues. I spent most of the week working on a new side quest that is in this patch. Granted, it's hidden-- but DAMN if I don't dig this one. I got to write some absolutely ridiculous lines of dialogue, to be honest. So, let's go over the patch, and then we can talk about some other changes coming real soon.

[h2]Ephemeral Tale 1.4.1 Changelog[/h2]

• Found the Fullscreen button hiding in a bin somewhere, put it back in the Options menu where it belongs
  
• Completely new icons for every Status and Skill in the game (Thanks, Tim!)
  
• New hidden side quest added
  
• Adjusted dialogue for an existing quest & character to better fit the new side quest
  
• Further adjusted miscellaneous lines of dialogue to smooth out rough edges
  
• Adjusted the trigger thresholds for the dog secret to be more easily discovered
  
• Further back end changes to prepare for Major Update #3

The side quest wiped me out this week, y’all. I suspected it would be a relatively painless process to create, but whew, was I wrong. It involved significantly more dialogue writing a fair bit more programming than I was expecting. With that said, I figured another party member was a worthy addition to the game this week. We also have a HUGE upgrade to the Status and Skill icons, courtesy of Tim from Something Classic. The goal with these icons was to increase the readability of the icons. In caveman terms, “OOG BOOG, FIRE MEAN BURNING. WATER MEAN WET.”

P H O T O S Y N T H E S I S

These icons are so much freaking better than the prior ones. This helps with the flavor of these enemies immensely, as you being able to visually understand what they represent is massive-- Take the above, for example. You can clearly gather that it's vines-- so if you see vines on that Floryn, and then see their HP go up every turn... "Oh, maybe it's a photosynthesis kinda thing?"



Yeah, that wasn't really clear from the old icons. Additionally, this addresses another minor issue with the icons that has bothered me for some time-- inconsistent sizes between pixels. The old icon has the border being represented by pixels of one size (2x2, to be exact), while the actual art is represented by pixels of a different size. Ideally, every element on screen is represented equally. This helps improve the presentation of the game, the feel of the game, and even how you interact with it in cases like we just spoke about. This is such a small, tiny detail-- but hot damn, I'm excited about it. In next week's patch, #19, We're actually taking this a step further:

Top: Old//Bottom: New

Tim was also kind enough to lend his talents for another portion of the HUD, so we have a new HP/MP HUD for Ephemeral Tale! It maintains the spirit of the old one, but is much cleaner, and has a couple cool details that I'm a big fan of. Patch #19 is largely a patch focusing on making these kinds of HUD changes, as they require a lot of pixel art-ing, changing where stuff is drawn/how it's drawn (sometimes in code, but thankfully not very often), and testing. I suspect that will take up the majority of this week, but it'll be a fun time. These are what I feel to be crucial changes, and likely won't be the last batch of changes of this type. These sort of things have been bugging me for a while, so being able to address them is a huge relief!

I'm hoping to roll out this second series of improvements next week, along with some other changes! Lastly, before we call this Pupdate complete, I'd like to apologize for the delay on the Spanish translation. The update is mostly (95%-ish?) done, but the whole COVID-19 situation has thrown everything into disarray. I'm more than happy to release it in its current form if it's something that people want, but I don't feel that it's ready quite yet for prime time. However, sometimes a global pandemic that asks people to stay inside (and as such engage in entertainment consumption) forces your hand, I suppose.

Next week, we'll talk about some planned changes to companions that I'm starting to work on. It'll be a fun time. Until then, stay safe and have fun!

-- Ryan

This week, I've been busy crackin' away at Major Update #3. There's some stuff I want to squeeze in there, but I'm not quite sure how yet. We can talk about that more after patch notes, however. TL;DR? Mostly QOL changes this week. More flexibility in difficulty settings, slight balance tweaks, changes to dialogue-- everything got a tiny bit better.

[h2]Ephemeral Tale 1.3.2 Changelog
[/h2]

• Second wave of changes made to The Great Palace, mostly pathing changes
  
• Slight tweaks to dialogue and story presentation here and there
  
• Enemy Strength cap in Options menu is now 200%, up from 150%
  
• Enemy Toughness cap in Options menu is now 15, up from 12
  
• Tweaks to the Difficulty options, to allow them to wrap around in either direction
  
• Fixed a bug with the Recall Runes not erasing a particular visual effect (IT NEVER ENDS)
  
• Updated the icon for the Yellow Bandana since some keep mistaking it for a gun (will only apply to fresh drops)
  
• Fleshed out Companion “Recruit” texts (failure state, specifically)
  
• Adjusted the player HP curve to give more substantial gains up front, and less in the back half (addressing concerns w/ difficulty spikes in the early stages of gameplay)
  
• Made some adjustments to a hidden property to help smooth out the spike in difficulty between the first dungeon (caverns) and the second (whichever you choose)
  
• Further back end changes to prepare for Major Update #3
  
• Added social buttons to title screen, as well as an option to toggle them
  

Before going into more Major Update #3 stuff, I want to take a moment to address some of the patch notes (as per usual). There's been slight changes to dialogue and story presentation here and there to help refine the flow and course correct some of the mistakes that happen when you write a story by the seat of your pants over the course of two years or so. The reality is that while Ephemeral Tale is in many ways a JRPG, the story has been approached from a very minimalistic standpoint, and for simple reason-- I don't feel that I can write the things that would grip my attention very well. Because of that, I instead focus on the gameplay, and telling a serviceable story. Ideally, I give you enough that you can piece together something that invokes your own creativity to fill in the gaps, and through that, the world of Ephemeral Tale becomes yours in its own way. With that said, I'm making an active effort to continue to refine and expand upon the world in ways that leave you (hopefully!) satisfied.

The other big changes this week are some balance adjustments, and the new social buttons. Last week, we launched our new Options menu that overall gives way more flexibility over to you as a player to customize your experience with the game. Whether that's window color (if you're visually challenged or colorblind, for example), changing your keybindings for a custom setup, or disabling certain visual effects to eek out performance improvements on older hardware, that's something that I feel strongly that you should have these options open to you. One piece of feedback that keeps looping around is that Ephemeral Tale can be a challenging title, and this is a tough one to address. In my personal opinion, I find that the game is best enjoyed when you don't know if you're going to be able to push through the rest of the dungeon in a run. At the same time, I recognize that designing things solely around what I want would be a fools errand-- why be in Early Access if I'm ignoring feedback? Where this becomes tricky is that I've also gotten consistent feedback that the game is too easy, as well.

Wow, much social! Very button.

Wait, how in the hell does that work? It's too hard AND it's too easy? What?! Well, the reality is that everyone plays and engages with games differently-- this was the primary reason why we added the difficulty options in last week's patch. By allowing you to customize the difficulty, you can decide if it's too challenging or too easy .With that said, I focused on ironing out kinks with difficulty spikes in this patch, mostly in the early game. I'll continue to make adjustments as needed as time goes on, as per usual. With the social buttons, their goal is simple enough: I'm hoping that I'll be able to gather more feedback from you guys as to what you like and dislike about the game. By putting it directly in the game, I lower that barrier of entry just a little bit. But fear not, dear reader! There's a toggle in the Options menu. You can totally disable it, no worries. I wasn't gonna let it ruin my beautiful title screen, after all.

[h2]Major Major Major[/h2]

In my continued efforts to be as transparent as possible with you guys, I'm going to spoil some of the surprises I've been working on. Don't want spoiled? Quick, shoo! Go! Flee! Be free!

Alright, you sure you wanna know? Let's get transparent then, baby.

Currently, I've got two (well, one fully-finished, one kinda-sorta-done-but-needs-tuning) bosses ready to go. They have unique drops, unique mechanics, are fun, and are (for the most part) ready to be put in the game. The original (and still holding) plan was to put one or both of them (depending on if the second is ready) in Major Update #3 as a surprise, along with a secret method of discovery. And then COVID-19 happened. This complicates matters for me, morally-- I feel almost obligated to shift focus to developing fresh content for you guys, to entertain you during our mutual Quarantine. At the same time, releasing content that is sub-par seems sketchy, and just plopping out unpolished, half-baked ideas that have issues is not something I'm keen on doing. When I add stuff to the game, I want you to be able to engage with it, not for you to be sitting there focusing on the flaws it has.

In truth, I don't suspect that I could develop a sizable portion of content quickly enough for you guys without completely trashing the weekly update schedule. I've been toying with the idea of "mini-dungeons" as well, these 5-8 room experiences that I could (ideally) get done in a week or so of focused effort, and then deliver to you guys as fresh content that buys me valuable time to work on polishing things up, and planning things out. But (in case you haven't noticed), the Traveller's Respite is not the most flexible of spaces-- so without some clever planning or some reworking of the map, finding a new place to put these things can be rather difficult. There's ideas I'm toying with for solving this issue, but ultimately it will take more time until I have a solution that I feel is worth using. I'm still dedicated to getting more content into the game (obviously, I'm still designing bosses and enemies), it's just a matter of finding the most seamless way of doing that.



With that said, I've gone on a bit long this week! We can totally talk about it more next week, or you can reach out to me directly if you have questions/feedback!

Until next week,
-- Ryan

This week, we have a very quality update. That's a quality of life joke, get it? Look, I'm writing this while suffering from a massive migraine. Gimme this one and just laugh-- if I think about the way Salt and Vinegar chips smell right now, my head might explode from pain. Anywho, this week is full of goodies. We'll talk about the patch notes, some cool stuff I wanna do, and then some more stuff to expect in the future! My home state may be under quarantine, but that doesn't stop me from cracking away at these updates for you guys. ːsteamhappyː

[h2]Ephemeral Tale 1.2.1 Changelog[/h2]

• Options menu has been remade from scratch
  
• Difficulty settings added for a more flexible gameplay experience
  
• Window tint options added for the differently-abled, or those who just like different colors
  
• You can now disable most of the visual effects filters (for low-end or older PCs)
  
• Autosave is back, this time as a toggle-able option in the settings
  
• There is now a minimum threshold of steps required between encounters
  
• Several tweaks have been made to the font to increase legibility
  
• Fixed a bug where Bootwalla wouldn’t properly animate
  
• First wave of changes made to The Great Palace, mostly bug fixes
  
• Some slight performance optimizations
  

This week is a bit of a more substantial update than usual, due to a major feature upgrade. A few weeks back, I'd spoken about the idea of difficulty settings coming to Ephemeral Tale-- they're here! As part of the New Game+ changes will be in difficulty, multiple portions of the code base had to be altered to take into account a scaling number (so that enemies could do more damage, drop more Power, that sort of thing). The result was that I was changing these settings anyway, and while I had an inkling that I'd end up being able to expose them to the player (you), I wasn't entirely sure until the time came to throw it together. So irregardless of whether or not you're someone who needs a lighter challenge, or a heavier one, you can customize various elements of the gameplay experience to suit your particular desires. In the future, I hope to flesh out this menu even further. One idea I’m tossing around is the idea of a “rogue-like” mode, where there would be an increased drop amount (maybe quality?), harder difficulty, but when you die those items disappear. If this is something that sounds appealing to you, let me know! If not, again, let me know! I’d rather not spend development time working on something that you guys don’t particularly want. Another concept would be to let you decide the minimum threshold of steps required between encounters, effectively setting your own encounter rate to your personal pleasure. That one should be (hypothetically) easy enough to do, so expect that in a future update (unless I forget, then please remind me).

If you keep up with me over on Twitter, you’ll be aware that I’ve started development on a new boss fight! This will be something added in New Game+, alongside the other changes coming in that Major Update (which is #3, as a reminder). Progress is slow, but consistent on that front. I’ve been spending some of my free time (and business time, really) learning some basic programming in order to better accommodate the needs of Ephemeral Tale as necessary. I’m really excited for New Game+ to be ready, and I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I’m enjoying planning and creating it. You can check out that boss preview over on our Twitter if it piques your interest, or you can just wait until it's ready to go!

Lastly, before we part ways for the week, let's talk about The Great Palace changes that are coming. Normally, for an update for existing content, I'll make the changes in a vacuum-sealed build, wait until everything is ready, and then throw it all in at once. Due to our being in Early Access, and the Great Palace already being accessible content, I'm tossing the changes for that dungeon (that are part of Major Update 3) in as they're ready. The first wave hits with this patch, today-- more will come as they're completed and tested. This is a bit of transparency, that way anyone who gets to the Palace between now and then isn't shocked if changes that have occurred as part of this process are pitched as part of that update. I don't feel that it would be right of me to hold back these changes until they're all ready, as that dungeon suffers from how deep those issues run.

I hope you guys enjoy this patch, and stay safe out in the wild. We'll talk more next week.

Until then,
-- Ryan