Ephemeral Tale News

Yo-yo-yo!

I hope that this Pupdate finds you well, dearest reader! Smaller notes this week, most of the patch this week falls into one of two categories: further fixes from last week's patch (that occurred over the weekend due to the whole translation-time-delay thing), and behind-the-scenes type stuff for the New Game+ overhaul (tracking numbers, adjusting things, yada-yada). Since that stuff is kinda boring and dry, I didn’t include it in the patch notes. With that said, let's dive into it, and then we can talk about the good stuff:

[h2]Ephemeral Tale 1.1.5 Changelog[/h2]

• Further UX improvements
  
• Further UI tweaks
  
• Bouldercrash has been more aggressively priced in MP, now costing 41MP at Level 50 (up from 32)
  
• Fixed a bug where the face icon wouldn’t render in the menu
  
• You can now skip the Dawdling Dog logo and Early Access disclaimer by whackin’ the “Confirm” button
  

Something that has become apparent over the last few weeks is how exceedingly powerful the Bouldercrash skill is-- due to this, it’s now more appropriately priced at the upper echelon of the level bracket. Really, it only becomes a BIG issue when running a crit focused build. With that said, considering that most players have a bazillion MP at level cap, and there being items to further increase MP or lower MP costs (or regenerate MP), I decided to increase the cost specifically to target users that otherwise focus on a crit build (and not a Magic-Crit build, just straight-ass Crit). Again, the goal here isn't to neuter it, just instead leave it as "hot damn that's good." To that end, it’s only a slight increase, and the damage hasn’t been touched.

Some of the back end changes that we've had in this patch and the last address issues with the various menus in the game. One of the long-standing bugs in Ephemeral Tale has been that the players face icon would just randomly not render in the main menu-- no rhyme, no reason, just wouldn't render. One of these back end changes is a preload for that particular sheet, so this issue should be resolved. If you experience it happening still, please let me know.

Game development generally has a weird ebb-and-flow to it, especially if you're an Early Access title. You're always trying to push "more-more-more," for your players to enjoy-- but at what cost? If the new player experience is rough, you can end up with an exclusionary title. If the content is incredibly deep, but super unpolished, you can turn someone off with a bad first impression. The point I'm getting at is that there are points of content focus, and points of polish focus. You can see this in most AAA titles: go look at the pre-release footage of Darksiders 3, and then compare it to the final! Whew, what an improvement that game made. But, you can also see how this has played out in Ephemeral Tale, too. No, really! Look:

1. Improved upon the presentation and polish (pre-Major Update #1 patches)
   
2. Content-focused patch (Major Patch #1)
   
3. Polish and presentation patches (pre-Major Patch #2 patches)
   
4. Content-focused patch (Into the Deep)
   

Keep in mind, this wasn't on purpose! This just... happened this way! Just an interesting little tidbit that I thought some of you might enjoy. TL;DR on this section is this: I'm focused on more than just adding content to the game. I'm gonna keep polishing it, and keep upping the ante, until you SLAP the HELL out of that "this game is great and I love it" button. And at that point? Maybe I'll consider slowing down for a bit. Or maybe not! Who knows. Wanna talk New Game+ now?

[h2]New Experience+[/h2]
A few weeks back (pre-Into the Deep, I believe?), I had said that we were gonna talk about New Game+ once I had a better grasp as to what the hell it was gonna be. Lots of discussion with our friends over at Something Classic and personal friends of mine has helped solidify what it will be. Right now, the focus of New Game+ from a design perspective is on making you think about the tools you're bringing with you to an encounter. Let's go over an example:

In New Game+, fights are harder. Enemies are tougher, smarter, and have more tricks up their sleeves. The Fairies from the Forgotten Forest, as an example, in NG+ have the ability to Heal their allies. This throws a wrinkle into a number of encounters, but also makes the boss fight for that zone a significantly different experience. Depending on how lethal your build is, nuking the boss first and adds later may no longer be an option for you. On top of that, since enemies are tougher across the board, you're going to be tested on your ability to survive harder, bigger blows.

Note: Does not cover co-pay.

This is, of course, only one of the new mechanics we'll have in New Game+. I hope this gives you an insight to the kind of work that I've been up to behind-the-scenes this week, however-- I want to make sure that when New Game+ hits, that it is able to challenge you to re-evaluate what kind of gear you're bringing with you, and that it brings new experiences in whatever forms that may end up taking.

We'll talk more next week, but until then, remember to have fun and wash your hands!

-- Ryan

What it do-do, my dawgs?

As always, there's a lot to talk about this week. A quick heads up about this weeks patch: these notes are a little funky, and may not cover everything that has changed. We're currently working on wrapping up a Spanish translation that will include all of the updates and content for Ephemeral Tale through today's update. Because of this, I had to wrap the update up earlier than usual (Thursday night, versus the normal Saturday or Sunday-- gives me time to catch last minute bugs). Due to that, there were a slew of issues that got solved, and then issues that cropped up due to those issues being solved that then had to be fixed, and it turned into a whole thing.

A big thank you to fmoo over at the Something Classic discord, and Ty as well, for their amazing help with resolving one of the major crashing issues that sprung up due to these changes! Couldn't do it without you, boys.

[h2]Ephemeral Tale 1.1.2 Changelog[/h2]

• Added flavor text to the Trident, and Shell of the Summit (whoops)
  
• Added a couple new secrets to the Forgotten Forest, as well as a universal secret
  
• Added a shadow to party members when in the Sunken Summit
  
• Some small UX improvements
  
• Further buffed Arcane Bolt
  
• Evasion Rate now takes more Agility to get the same rate (roughly 30% more)
  
• Fixed a bunch of grammatical inconsistencies
  
• Lowered durability damage to weapons by half
  
• Adjusted stat distribution of Scrolls of Power
  
• Fixed some bugs w/ Florence’s quest
  
• Fixed a crash bug involving gear durability
  
• Fixed an issue where Clarke could be unobtainable under certain circumstances
  
• Fixed more issues with tile passability (this is endless, I swear)
  
• Fixed some issues with Sunken Summit (pillars being misplaced, rendering order, and spritesheet swaps)
  
• Fixed an oversight where the Escape formula was using a test formula, causing Escapes to fail where they shouldn’t have
  
• Fixed an oversight where a certain animation file was missing, causing an “image not found” lockup
  
• Fixed a couple of issues with New Game+’s current implementation
  
• New Victory jingle (Thanks, Tyler!)
  

That last note there is super exciting for me on a personal level. The new victory jingle was written by Tyler Mire of Something Classic, the developers behind Shadows of Adam and publishers of the upcoming Pillars of Dust. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t quite happy with the old jingle. It was spliced from a longer track, and while it was a good fit in terms of tone, it had issues that stood out to me. The new jingle is in many ways, a much more classic style jingle that you'd expect from a turn-based RPG. I'm excited to have it in the game, and can't wait to see what you guys think of it.

A lot of the fixes you’re seeing this week are simple things caught in the post-update flurry, or have been long-coming changes. A few of them, however, are beginning to lay the groundwork for our next big update. I know, I know. “But Mr. Dev Guy,” you say, giddy with excitement, “we just got a sick-ass new update last week! Surely you can’t be planning another major update already?”

Well, my dear Strawman (or Straw-woman), I can be, and I am! While I have no clear idea when the next major update will drop, it’s going to focus on a couple of items:

[h3]New Game+[/h3]

While NG+ technically exists in some form, it’s not there yet-- and I said on the Store page that we wanted to do it properly, and that’s the case. We’re currently leaning towards NG+ having more difficult enemies, higher level gear rewards, and some new mechanics for enemies. If you’ve collected your perfect arsenal for destruction, the hope is for this NG+ to really stress you to your limits. Only the strongest will survive.

[h3]The (not-so) Great Palace rework[/h3]

The final dungeon of the game, the Great Palace, has a slew of issues at this point in time. Some of them are simple bugs, but others are more annoying-- the flow is weird, the layout is confusing, and it’s very easy to lose your way in this labyrinth of nightmares. I plan on addressing that by changing up the layout a bit, making some other tweaks, and seeing what we can do here.

[h3]Performance, performance, performance[/h3]

Since the game launched, there have been some performance woes that we’re hoping to address in this patch as well. Some of these are more complex than others, hence why it’s taken so long. I’m not going to go into specifics here, but the gist is that we’re hoping to increase performance across the board with the next major patch.

[h2]THE PRICE IS(n’t) RIGHT[/h2]

Now, here comes something that I generally don’t like to talk about-- the price of the game. If you happen to be someone that read the entire Early Access portion of our store page-- good on you! If not, cool. Here’s the skinny real quick: there’s a section of the store page that talks about the pricing of the game, specifically mentioning that over the course of development, that the price would go up. This doesn’t really particularly concern you, if you’re reading this, as you likely own the game already! So that’s a huge plus, here. Anywho, the plan is that when Major Update 3 drops, the price of Ephemeral Tale is going to go up. Because of differences in currency exchange rates, I hesitate to say “oh, this is how much it’s going up,” because that number is going to be different in every region.

So, if your friends have been on the fence, I'd encourage you to let them know to pick up the game before then and lock in at the current price! This isn't going to change anything about our relationship either, boo. I still got more content comin' your way, more features, more everything-- it's gonna be rad. If we go over what's been added so far (just through today, not the newly-announced content), we've had:

• A vendor rework
  
• Gear overhaul
  
• New secret areas
  
• New NPCs
  
• Balance overhaul
  
• New zone + all that entails (new enemies, equipment, boss, etc.)
  
• Over thirty pieces of gear added
  
• Narrative and world building fleshed out some (not a ton yet, but we'll get there)
  
• So many bug fixes that you'd think I was an exterminator
  

Alright, alright-- you make a good point, Strawman. I shouldn't count bug fixes as a list item. That's fair. In all seriousness though, the game is so immensely improved over where it was even just a few weeks ago. You can't attribute that to just me-- Dawdling Dog isn't just me (although, technically it is? not the point I'm trying to make here), it's all of us. It's Leogrim, the beta tester who finds more bugs than I thought even possible. It's Laminus, making cool builds that are mostly tank focused and showing me that numbers are a funny thing. It's even Diaperbaby, leaving a review that lists encounter rates as a bit high, leading to me lowering them a bit. What I'm saying is that I'm so proud of the community we've fostered here, and you guys make Ephemeral Tale what it is. So keep the feedback coming, keep the passion growing, and keep the loot flowing.

[h2]Next time, on Weekly Pupdate...[/h2]
We've really blown past what a Pupdate's length should be this week, so I'll keep the wrap-up short: there are some tweaks coming to UI and UX over the course of the next couple of weeks, with some coming in today's patch, some in next week's patch (with any luck), and potentially some in the patch after that. This is mostly stuff that has been in the "COSMETIC ONLY" section of the Bug Reporting thread, but there's some other issues that are being addressed as well. So we'll be sanding some rough edges, getting things smoothed out, and hopefully helping you guys enjoy the game even more as a result. The UI may be how you interact with the game, but that barrier should ideally be as small as possible-- that means more, and better, visual feedback, culling any menus that aren't needed, and trying to ensure that everything is properly spaced and sized for readability purposes. As these changes come in, we'll go over them in more depth.

Oh, and Diaperbaby (if you read this Pupdate, and make it all the way to the end): autosave will be making a return to Ephemeral Tale soon. It got disabled due to a performance cost in certain situations, and due to feedback from players that it could feel bad (mostly in situations where a player wanted to save-scum something). But rest assured, fam-- I gotchu. We'll get it worked out for ya.

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

Here we are!

After working crazy hard to get this done on time, I am absolutely wiped. I'm typing this at 10:15PM, just under two hours before the scheduled release time for this patch. In our internal tests, the new content took roughly 30 minutes to an hour and a half to complete. Your time will vary heavily based on how quickly you find the way into the Summit, and lots of other factors as well (skill, gear, that sort of stuff). With that said, here we go:

[h2]Into the Deep: The Changelog[/h2]

• Zombobbers have had their timers tweaked, they now return after 2 turns instead of 3
  
• Jellados now appropriately uses Spark
  
• Other various tweaks have been made to enemies to make them more interesting and varied
  
• An additional SFX pass has been done
  
• Item sell values have been increased based on rarity and level
  
• Splinters status effect now causes a defense/magic defense debuff as well
  
• Faerie Fire now causes Ignite
  
• Spark now has a chance to cause Paralysis
  
• DOTs (Damage-Over-Times) can now kill enemies
  
• Double Strike has been more aggressively priced in MP, now costing 31MP at Level 50 (up from 16)
  
• Arcane Bolt’s MP price has also been adjusted, now costing 3MP at Level 1, and 20 at Level 50 (down from 5, up from 14)
  
• Similar adjustments have been made to other MP costing spells and abilities, but as these are the “basic” ones, I felt it crucial to include them in the patch notes
  
• The Sunken Summit is now available… for those who can find it
  
• As such, there’s a handful of new enemies to fight, and uniques to find (& farm!)
  
• How you gain entry to the Summit is a secret for you to figure out (Hint: the Oasis holds something new. I heard... She sells sea shells by the sea shore.)
  

Last week, we had discussed how this update would have Ephemeral Tale at 1.0.0, but due to various last minute changes, we're at 1.0.5. Again, nothing to worry about on your end-- this is a housekeeping change to make things easier for me. I suspect y'all will break this update in strange, unexpected ways, so next week will most likely be mostly bug fixes. Also, one last thing before we go, we've begun testing a Spanish translation of Ephemeral Tale! If you'd like to test it out for us, please reach out on our discussion boards. If you'd like to see the game in a different language, let us know! As I'm a one-man team, translating everything myself is nigh impossible (especially with the frequency of updates), but I'm trying to look into ways that I can open up the process for you guys to help out in some way, should you want to see the game in your native tongue. With that, I am exhausted, and need to now go play the FF7R demo.

Until next week, have fun!
-- Ryan

Another week, another hello to you guys!



A few weeks ago, I had mentioned that we were going to start a conversation on difficulty in Ephemeral Tale, and that time is on us. When the game launched, there was no doubts that Ephemeral Tale was a challenging game. However, since the beginning of February, things have changed. This leads us into this weeks patch, and the general focus of it: balance and bug-fixing. Not the most exciting thing, but one of the more necessary ones!

[h2]Patch #12 Changelog[/h2]

• Fixed a bug where Florence would always lose his hammer in the Oasis (he can now misplace it in the Forest, or Castle, too!)
  
• Fixed a graphical bug with the Forest’s sun rays
  
• Fixed a bug where Upholstergeist’s combat message was the wrong color
  
• Fixed a bug where Jellies could be accidentally consumed
  
• Fixed a bug where the player could be invisible after beating the game
  
• Boneshard Shield now grants +15% ATK/MATK, -15% DEF/MDEF (from 20%)
  
• Oog-Boog Hammer now grants +15% ATK, and is the Oog-Boog Mallet (from 25%)
  
• Steadyshot now grants +20% ATK/MAT (from 50%)
  
• Devourer's Edge now grants 25% HP on a critical kill (from 50%)
  
• Vengeant Whip now triggers from being
• Combat has been sped up a tad (removed "dead frames" in some animations, less delay between actions)
  
• More feedback to the player when an item breaks (NOTE: Not finished here, will do more in the future)
  
• Autosave has been disabled to address concerns of load times on transferring between maps (NOTE: Saving the game will still cause a momentary hang for lengthy save files)
  
• Another SFX pass done
  
• Enemies are now slightly tougher, universally
  
• The players core stats have been lowered slightly, universally
  maps
  

The last item is to address some concerns, both internally spoken and externally spoken, that the game may have swung too far in the other direction from our previous balance patch (Major Update #1). Rather than make big changes and reeling them in, we’ve opted towards smaller tweaks. For example, players used to get 5 points for every level in the core 4 stats (atk/matk/def/mdef)-- they will now get 4. As for enemies, their HP now scales more aggressively to stop them from getting cake-stomped as much as they were. Plenty of stomping should still occur, just ever so slightly less.

These last two changes will also have the impact of making gear choices more important, as by altering how many points the player gets per level, we shift the balance of “where the hell are the points from?” more towards gear. Additionally, a few stand-out items have been toned down to be more reasonable. Boneshard Shield was creating issues when paired alongside certain other items, same goes for the Oog-Boog, and Steadyshot. As such, these guys have been tuned down to being "very freaking good" from "holy cow, these are unquestionably the best." Vengeant Whip has also been buffed in order to get it to proc more frequently, in an effort to improve its value.

This list of changes can easily come across as a drastic change to the sandbox balance, but to be perfectly clear: it's not. While it may have a more moderate impact on builds focused around stacking stat bonuses using multiplicative values, those really are few and far between, and are much more reasonable now. So, while this balance sweeps is minor, it's an important step in the right direction. This will become increasingly important in the future, as more balance changes occur, as new uniques get added, and the general sandbox changes. One sandbox change that will be occurring at some point in the future is the addition of New Game+ to Ephemeral Tale, for example. I've mentioned this in the past, and try to be open about the fact that I'd like NG+ to have value to it, but I'm not sure what that necessarily means at this particular moment. If I add content that is exclusive to NG+, it could be viewed as adding play time to the game-- or it could be viewed as locking the content behind an artificial wall. As a gamer, I want to provide you guys with cool experiences. But as a developer, I want to treat all of you equally, which is also not really fair to those that are dumping more or less time than everyone else. So, over the next few weeks I'll be doing research into how some of my favorite games have approached New Game+, and start to walk the path of developing that feature.

Internally, there's still discussion occurring over the idea of multiple difficulty levels in order to better accommodate players of varied skill levels. While I'm not quite ready to talk about that, we'll surely discuss it again in the future. Time will ultimately tell whether or not we can create a universal experience that speaks to all players, or if I need to give better options to you guys. Speaking of the future, let's talk about the next patch, Into the Deep! As a major patch, there are going to be a slew of changes to the sandbox-- new enemies, items, The new zone that you will explore in this update lies deep underwater, in a lost section of the old world: the Sunken Summit.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Rumor has it that a spring of vitality at one point lied at the heart of the Summit, but who knows if it's still there today? A quick heads up in regards to the release date of Into the Deep: this update should launch next week, March 3rd! We're finally putting the update through its paces now in our internal tests, and want to make sure that everything is nice and ready for you guys. If the update isn't ready for technical reasons, it may be pushed to March 10th, and in that instance we'll swap the (currently planned) March 10th patch for the 3rd instead. Both should be content patches, so we'll see how things pan out. Game development is always a wacky thing, after all.

One last thing before we call it for the week: when Into the Deep drops, we'll be switching to semantic versioning. What does that mean? Nothing much for you guys, to be honest. Just means instead of a patch cycle looking like .99a, .99b, .99c, etc., it would be closer to like 0.9.1, 0.9.2, 0.9.3, so on and so forth. We'll be calling Into the Deep 1.0.0, but that's just because I worked myself into a corner w/ the .99 weirdness. We'll still be in Early Access, still releasing content patches, balance patches, and bug fixes. We'll just have a shiny new system for determining what "version" the game is currently on. Simply put, this change makes things easier for me to manage.

We'll be back next week with another fun patch so until then, have fun!

-- Ryan

Ayy! What's crackin', fellow puppers?



Lots of ground to cover this week, so let's start with this week's patch, shall we?

[h2]Patch #11 Changelog[/h2]

• Various changes to enemy defenses to account for changes in magic system
  
• Added a new default magic spell, Arcane Bolt
  
• Arcane Bolt is effectively the default attack, but Magical instead, and as such will be more effective against certain targets
  
• A small batch of unique items has been added to the game
  
• These unique items introduce new spells and abilities for the player to use
  
• Fixed passability issues in a multitude of spots in the Corrupted Castle (Thanks, Laminus!)
  
• Fixed an issue w/ how a particular map rendered in the Corrupted Castle
  
• Fixed an issue where Jellies couldn’t be eaten​
  
• Added a few new secrets :)
  

The list this week is a bit more concise than previous weeks, as I'm trying to balance between letting you guys know what has changed, and keeping the list interesting! No one wanted to read 25 lines of "well I changed the formatting of text in this very specific instance," now do they?

Anywho, the goal of this week's patch and these changes was to encourage more diverse builds, and a wider build variety than existed before. Consider this a first pass on magic. We'll do more as necessary, but it felt important for these changes to be the foundation we build on. To delve into it a little bit more, there are already quite a few unexpected items that can be used for magic builds (Turtle Shelmet and Swiftstrike, as examples), but I felt it necessary for magic users to have different options than normal damage dealers. Specifically, I targeted archetypes that didn't exist prior to this update for builds, and aimed to fill some of those.

Without giving any item spoilers, there's a new spell that will enable Magic AOE builds. You can now be a more dedicated Healer than before, as well. Between existing spells and new spells, a Magic glass cannon build should be plenty viable now. I'd also like to note that last week, I had mentioned that I was considering the player being able to learn the signature abilities of the companions. That did not make it into this patch, but isn't out of the question for a future patch-- it's just about ensuring that if we go that route, we do it right, and that we do it in a way that adds to the game. The short of it is "I want to do it right, and didn't have enough time to put it together in a week." Any feedback that you guys have on Magic, or item requests, feel free to drop 'em on me! I'm open to any suggestions that make the game better :)

[h2]Into the Deep[/h2]
You guys have been so patient with me, as I've worked out the kinks of the game and continue to build onto it! I told you a couple weeks ago that I like to be transparent (to a degree) about what's coming next, so I think it's time we unveil the next major patch, titled Into the Deep.

Major Patch #2: Into the Deep is our first major content patch for Ephemeral Tale, bringing with it a new zone, new enemies, a new boss, and a handful of new pieces of equipment! This will be the first optional zone of Ephemeral Tale, and won't be the last. I'm not quite ready to reveal everything about this update yet, but here's a screenshot to hold you over for now:



Next week, you and I will talk more about Into the Deep, and we'll start a conversation about difficulty in Ephemeral Tale, NG+, and how it all ties together.

Until next time, have fun!

-- Ryan