YES! YES! YES!

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:

Ephemeral Tale 1.4.5 Changelog

• 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.

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