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.

Ephemeral Tale 1.1.2 Changelog

• 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:

New Game+

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.

The (not-so) Great Palace rework

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.

Performance, performance, performance

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.

THE PRICE IS(n’t) RIGHT

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 on Steam, I hesitate to say “oh, this is how much it’s going up,” because that number is going to be different in every region (to be clear, I'm not entirely sure how it works here on itch.io).

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.

Next time, on Weekly Pupdate...

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