Abalon News

Thanks again for your feedback, patience and understanding. I'm working through your issues as fast as I can. Today's update focuses on localization:

1. Fixed bug where Asian fonts weren't loading correctly into the settings menu unless manually changing the language after the game had started. (Thanks BattleBrothers and ln11)
   
2. Updated the Spanish localization. This should be near complete with the exception of just a few passages. Another special thanks to Semaniel for his outstanding work.
   

Thanks again everyone for your bug reports! I appreciate your patience and understanding as I get the remaining bugs in the 1.0 build fixed for you. Here's todays changes:

1. Fixed bug where the AI could desync at the point of boss reaching critical health (Special thanks to BDALimey for his video that helped capture the repro steps)
   
2. Fixed bug where AI could desync after destroying tiles with multiple fire attacks
   
3. Fixed bug where AI could desync after simulation a gravity effect with a unit no longer on the game board
   
4. Fixed bug where AI could desync after attempting to face a target when it is no longer on the game board

More bug fixes are coming later this week, but I wanted to get this one out right away to help out player TolkienCat who's hard-earned adventure run was at risk due to a pesky Red Dragon.

This patch resolves a bug where an exception is thrown when a gravity spell (ex: Giant Meteor) is cast by the AI on a caster who then triggers a Celestial Barrier (or other defense) that nullifies the target. The game was trying to calculate gravity force vectors on a target that no longer exists, d'oh!

Thank you all so much for your reports and giving me the opportunity to get these fixed for you :)

My dear players, what a journey it has been! Abalon is the culmination of seven years development and an even longer history dating back to 2006 when we pioneered the card tactics genre.

Along the way, I’ve had my share of doubts, haters, and plenty of rejections from publishers, events, and content creators. Pursuing this project was a huge risk, but we had some great wins, too, like being selected for the Indie Megabooth, getting featured by PAX, and becoming a global champion in the Nordic Game Discovery Contest. What I think was our most meaningful win, though, was how our game touched and inspired others. To have volunteers from around the world translate our game in their language just because they believe in our project was something I never expected. To have members of our player community actively reach out to content creators on our behalf, provide valuable design insights, report bugs, and provide the emotional support I needed to keep pushing to the end brings immense joy. I’m truly grateful for these acts of kindness. And I’m awestruck that something I made has brought together and entertained so many people.

It has been an honor to develop this game for you. This is a work of passion and determination to create the best possible experience we could for fans of roguelike and tabletop games, and I hope you all have a lot of fun using cards, dice, and tactics to unleash your creativity and devise the most amazing strategies.


This update delivers an additional four Summoners, including an entirely new faction: the Magiscales. These are an ancient, arcane, technological race with uncanny abilities that include the power to control gravity, erect forcefields, penetrate enemy armor with psionic blades, and even shape shift into other units on the battlefield!

Also included are the long anticipated Void+Nature Summoners, and for that we have the beautiful and poisonous Botanical Sage and the hypnotic Deceiver. Finally, Nova, the sorceress from our first game, Hero Mages, joins the roster of Summoners in Abalon as a lightning caster who specializes in paving the way for a tactical assault with her allies.


I'm incredibly grateful for our amazing player community and all your feedback, suggestions, and positive reviews I've received so far. Our 1.0 is a key milestone that will set the stage for our future developing the Abalon series. If you're enjoying the game, please help support our launch by writing a Steam review, sharing the game with your friends, recommending it to your favorite content creators and posting on social media. Your support really does help make a difference :)


This launch is not the end, but the beginning of what I aspire to be a continuing development. I was hoping we'd be ready to drop our "treasure trove" of new artifacts into this build, but I decided to focus on the performance concerns instead. So, we'll have this coming in our next update, along with new thematic shops to acquire these items and Challenge Modifiers to further customize your difficulty and earn extra points on the leaderboard.

We're also planning another new biome - caves - where you'll be able to explore the dark underground populated by dreaded dark elves, conniving lizard folk, and other strange creatures.

And of course, I'll continue to listen to your feedback and improve the game. This truly is a community driven game, and I want players to feel like they have a real impact on where we take it next.


I'm excited to share Abalon will soon support Spanish thanks to another hero volunteer within our player community. Shout out to Semaniel, who is also a content creator, and will be covering the game on his channel as soon as the translation is complete. You'll find the Spanish language button option in settings if you'd like to play with the partial translation as this is being completed.

We're still looking for volunteers to support us localizing in other languages. Please feel welcome to contact me at the channels listed at the bottom of this article.

1. New Summoner: Krox, Gravomancer
   
2. New Summoner: Nova, Sorceress
   
3. New Summoner: Serpenta, Deceiver
   
4. New Summoner: Lilith, Botanical Sage
   
5. New Card: Blue Dragon
   
6. New Card: Reptaur
   
7. New Card: Psychic Screamer
   
8. New Card: Metamoprh
   
9. New Card: Auramancer
   
10. New Card: Graviton Warrior
    
11. New Card: Herald of Hope
    
12. New Card: Arch Angel
    
13. New Card: Muse
    
14. New Card: Spriggan
    
15. New Card: Centurion
    
16. New Card: Tribal Transmutor
    
17. New Card: Emperor Cosme
    
18. New Card: Empress Camille
    
19. New Card: Golden Dragon
    
20. New Card: Dwarf Blacksmith
    
21. New Card: Occuloid
    
22. New Card: Forest Energy
    
23. New Card: Rabbits Foot
    
24. New Card: Four Leaf Clover
    
25. New Feature: Added descriptions and difficulty guidance prompt for each biome
    
26. New Lore: 10 New Lore scrolls have been added
    
27. New VFX: Added new VFX to Flash Bomb and Necrotic Breath
    
28. Balance: Satchel cards that add surprises to units can now be stacked, persist across battles if unused, and are not removed if a new surprise card is placed over the unit. A unit can still only have 1 regular surprise spell card spell at a time (with the newest surprise replacing the previous).
    
29. Balance: Players now acquire Big Healing Potion and Anti-Venom from alchemy fate encounters. The anti-venom is no longer permanent - but last for one battle, just like the potion.
    
30. Balance: Zenon’s ability changed from "When you cast Arcane, draw a card. If it costs more than 1, it costs 1 less until end of turn." to "When you play a card for 2 or more mana, draw a card. It costs (1) less until end of turn." This change is intended to break the unstoppable 1-turn lethal "Miracle" spell sling combo where Zenon could win before the opponent ever has a chance to take their first turn. It also gives more flexibility to use his ability with his secondary magic class.
    
31. Balance: Li’s Spell Power (1) ability changed to Fire Power (1), making it so that she only adds damage to Fire Spells instead of all damage spells. This was balance all direct damage Li decks consisting of low cost lightning spells.
    
32. Balance: Gnome Scholar’s power changed from "Warcry: Choose 1 of your last 3 discarded cards and return it to your hand." change to "Warcry: Choose 1 of the next 3 cards in your deck and add it to your hand. " (Arcane Insight vs. grave dig) This was done to prevent infinite card cycling when combined with the Chronomancer
    
33. Balance: Conflagration changed from "Deal 2 damage to everything except caster." To "Deal 2 damage to everything but adjacent allies." This allows for Conflagration to work effectively as an opening move when beginning the battle with injured or low life allies.
    
34. Balance: Gravity Well given additional condition "Can’t affect Summoners your first turn." This is to prevent 1-turn lethal combo where player could cascade multiple gravity wells to pull an enemy Summoner into a lethal combo before they ever had a chance to take their turn.
    
35. Balance: Teleport given additional condition "Can’t be cast on your first turn." This is to prevent 1-turn lethal combo where player could use Krox to teleport behind Summoner in the first turn and push into allies for a lethal combo before the opponent had opportunity to take their first turn.
    
36. Balance: Resurgence’s cost reduction reduced from 2 to 1. This was to avoid the unintended exploit of deliberately discarding cards for mana, and then casting them at a discount.
    
37. Balance: Soothsayer changed from Draw card on range attack to Wreck: Draw a card. Far too powerful to draw a card for each attack; but this way keeps the spirit of the ability - gaining insight when enemy is defeated by any attack (physical or range).
    
38. Balance: Rogue changed from "If attacked unit has 2 or less life, attack again" to "If attacked enemy has 1 life left, attack again."
    
39. Balance: Ice Bomb damage decreased from 3 to 2
    
40. Balance: Melt Fire damage reduced from 3 to 2
    
41. Balance: Rust damage reduced from 3 to 2
    
42. Balance: Shadow Bolt cost increased from 1 to 2. Now heals ally Void 6 instead of 4.
    
43. Balance: Seeker Missile changed to "Deal 2 damage to any enemy. Deal 3 if it’s not a Summoner."
    
44. Balance: Demonic Lash cost increased from 1 to 2
    
45. Balance: Flash Bomb cost increased from 1 to 2 and changed from "Deal 3 Shock damage to an enemy and Daze them" to "Deal 2 Shock damage to units in 3x3 area and Daze them."
    
46. Balance: Drain Life damage reduced from 3 to 2. Heal increased from 3 to 4.
    
47. Balance: Screaming Skull damage changed from "Deal 3 damage to an enemy and give them -1/-0" to "Deal 2 damage to an enemy and give them -2/-2 until end of their turn."
    
48. Fixed Bug where rapidly clicking on the end turn button when it is glowing could trigger an AI Sync Error or soft-lock the AI.
    
49. Fixed Bug where AI equipping weapons like bow and arrow could trigger a sync error.
    
50. Fixed Bug where AI simulations calculated against a stealth unit (ex: Tiger) could trigger a sync error.
    
51. Fixed Bug where right clicking to view a card on a unit running away could result in an exception.
    
52. Fixed Bug where resizing the game window while moving could result in an exception.
    
53. Fixed Bug where the entire UI locks up if you hit the "replay" button just as the battle hud is rising up at start of a new battle.
    
54. Fixed Bug where game throws exception during startup sequence if no SoundCard is detected by the OS. (Thanks alexanderpt69)
    
55. Fixed Bug where exception could be thrown removing card from a deck. (Thanks Skooma Steve)

- Steam discussion board: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1681840/discussions/
- Discord: https://discord.gg/d20studios (RossD20Studios#2359)

Thanks so much!

~Ross

*Also applies to the Abalon Demo

Hi Abalon Fans -

With great appreciation for your numerous reports and feedback, I am proud to release this next update that addresses several of the performance and memory usage concerns. With a game as large and complex as Abalon, this is no easy feat - especially when each unique PC system configuration can manage memory and alter the experience in different ways.

Thanks largely to your reports, profiling, and a lot of time spent with my son recording play sessions and capturing data, we finally uncovered what we believe was the "major" lag build up issue and were able to fix it. Additionally, we identified and resolved several smaller instances of memory leaks, tuned and optimized to improve overall performance and even reduced overall application memory usage by around 40%. In total, we completed over 40 investigations and optimizations over the last two weeks. I had considered including the details of the fixes in our update, but I didn't think too many folks would be interested in scrolling through 10 pages of tech speak :P - so please just take my word that a LOT of work went into this update ;)

All hands on deck! I hosted a family LAN party on Sunday to help me find and fix the remaining bugs before we rolled out this update.

Of course, there is always still room for improvement, and to that end I've added an additional reporting feature to help us narrow in on any future performance related issues. By simply including the word "lag" in your in-game feedback report, the game will automatically capture a report of the game object usage (ex: number of characters on the board, number of listeners active, etc.) so that I better track down and eliminate any further leaks.

1. Performance: Vastly improved game performance by eliminating several memory leaks and optimizing memory usage.
   
2. Performance: Still experiencing lag? Simply submit an in-game report with "Share Feedback" from the main menu and include the word "lag" anywhere in your description to send us additional resource data to help get it fixed.
   
3. Satchel Card Control Improvement: The satchel card controls remain in tactical mode until the player clicks to move a character. This makes it much easier to play multiple satchel cards in rapid succession.
   
4. French Translations Updated several more of the English text into French.
   
5. Fixed Bug: where units could remain lingering on the battlefield if player skips just after defeating a summoner and just as the units start running away. (Thanks Wesley)
   
6. Fixed Bug: where the end turn gets stuck in disabled state if player opens the settings menu while the battle is starting. (Thanks Wesley)
   
7. Fixed Bug: where two phoenix spells cast in a row could throw exception Error: Clock cycle error: TypeError: Error #1009 at view.ui::HM_CardShower/showCard() (Most commonly found during the Red Dragon boss battle). (Thanks Meeky and many others!)
   
8. Fixed Bug: where the mana bar fill could sometimes appear slightly over the mana bar area.
   
9. Fixed Bug: where it was possible to walk diagonally through ice cubes and brambles.
   
10. Fixed Bug: where player's party was truncated after taking secret stairs to demon kennels.
    
11. Fixed Bug: where exception is thrown on Armature/_doAction in low frame rate situations where an armature is disposed because the child armature has been disposed but the clock hasn't yet finished running through current list.
    
12. Fixed Bug: When hovering over a card in collection, exiting collection, and then returning, the enlarged card remained on screen.
    
13. Fixed Bug: where the map, satchel and run score were visible when initiating a retreat prompt that required dice roll.
    
14. Fixed Bug: where resizing the window while in card collection would result in a black screen. Made it so that if player resizes in any screen but the main game view, it returns to the main game view upon completion of window resize.
    
15. Fixed Bug: Settings button should never be blocked by scrim

We're looking for a team of heroes from the community to help us translate the game in your native languages for the 1.0 release. Already, I have one such player to whom I am so grateful: Scribe, who has very generously provided our French translation. As a special thanks for his support, I'll be immortalizing him in the world of Abalon as a playable character in our next update.

The Herald of Hope is one of several new angel units that will perform a "miracle" when entering the battlefield when your Summoner is at critical health to help you turn the game back around in your favor.

If you'd like to volunteer to help translate the game in your native language, please reach out to me on Discord (details below) and I will get you setup with our localization kit.

[h2]Join the Discussion:[/h2]
- Steam discussion board: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1681840/discussions/
- Discord: https://discord.gg/d20studios (RossD20Studios#2359)