Apollyon: River of Life News

Welcome back to Apollyon, practitioners! Apollyon is still in development, much to many a person's surprises! In truth, the pace of development slowed down after EA release, yet here we are again with another 20,000 words of content. However, the focus of this update, 1.2, is not on the story (for the first time ever).

Welcome to the UI update!


Here we have a few new elements, including a simplified button to peek at the table, a new turn progression symbol with animation, and easy-to-read numbers by your statistics. The blips alone were not enough for some new players! There's one more massive change to this screen, however...

Looking at Apollyon's playtime stats, it seems that the average playtime is ~50 minutes, and the primary complaint is that the learning curve really slaps you in the face right away. The tutorial did not do enough, it seems! And so began the Lore page...


Here we have our new escape menu, as well as the lore page open! The new escape menu supports a library of lore, a condensed settings menu, and a new ritual info menu!


Gone are the days of bland off-black rectangles. Now are the days of pretty UI and in-text linking! As shown Limoseht will link through the lore/wiki to the new page!


Themes are also included in the lore page, with a vastly condensed and simplified explanation. This will help new players a great deal. Additionally, a radial UI will not only help to understand what the positions actually DO, but also inform more experienced players of exactly what tests and values the token position changes!

For example, Oliana in the Open and Physical position will change tests with dealmaking, trade, and talking to spirits!

Thank you to those who have been involved in the development and enjoyed the game so far. More is coming, as we get closer and closer to full release! Help Apollyon along by sharing with your friends and spreading the news, and always remember; summoning demons is more fun with friends!

-ApollyonDev

Hello players! Thank you for your patience with the development of Apollyon.

With this update comes a number of UI fixes, from the ability to minimize the chatbox, see another player's stats in multiplayer, and more! Additionally, the Twilight Projection Intention has been broken up and extended, with a new story arc for unlocking it!

Save the Cistern from an attack by the Empire!

Due to bug reporting on the Apollyon discord, a few minor bugs and quality-of-life issues have been resolved!

Most namely:
Load time on the initial loading screen nearly fully eliminated for those not using mods.
Game initialization time after the mods screen now ~15% of the delay it used to be. Should be less than a second now, in my tests, it was around a third of a second.
Spoiler-card blocking issues.
And a few other minor issues.

Found a few miscellaneous issues with controller support, and due to a bug report discovered an unusual issue.

Steam and Unreal perform startup on any VR device currently connected, if the VR plugin is installed within the game package (which it is so by default, even if it is never used). Nonetheless, as VR is not a part of Apollyon, I have removed said plugin and solved the issue.

On that note, those new and old to Apollyon are encouraged to report bugs to the developer here on the Steam community, or on the Apollyon discord. Replies and hotfixes will be coming within a few hours on weekdays, in this case!

Now then, have fun meeting only the darkest of spirits!

Due to a complaint I heard, I discovered that loading times were significantly worse upon lower-end PCs. This is honestly not something that should happen in a game like Apollyon!

Preloading the array of images and text files directly is an added step, but shaves nearly 30 seconds off of load time on lower pcs. It should be much snappier now!