Ah, now I see.

It must be that time again, yes? Where you sit down, curious what wonders have come to the world of Ephemeral Tale, and sip your favorite beverage of choice. Well, my child, let me learn you some insight of our process developing content, and how weird things can be behind the scenes. Well, after this message from this weeks changelog, of course!

Ephemeral Tale 1.7.3 Changelog

• Adjustments to the main menu have been made, including a replacement of the face sprites with full body sprites
• Similar changes have been made to the save menu
• Targeted enemy highlight will now show above enemy portraits in the turn window
• Text should be less squished in combat windows now
• Small balance adjustment to enemy hit rate when the player doesn’t have a party member present
• Merlin has been given a significant adjustment pass:
• At Lv. 15, he will learn Gust, a single target damage spell that deals 1.4x damage
• At Lv. 25, he will learn Storm, an AOE ability that deals 0.75x damage
• At Lv. 40, he will learn Arcana Surge, an ability that gives him a buff to MAT for a few turns
• Additionally, he has received an HP buff (from 830HP at Lv. 50 to 1,000HP at Lv. 50)
• Enemies of the Forgotten Forest have received a balance sweep as well:
• Enemies of the Forgotten Forest are now weaker to their weakest elements (Fire, Spirit) by an additional 20%, bringing the weakness up to 40%
• Chunkier mobs now have slightly more base HP and a fair chunk (10) more base DEF
• Bibbity has been given more Magic Defense and Magic Attack
• Floryn has been given more Defense and Magic Attack
• Bootwalla has been given more Agility
• Boldude and Boldozer have been given more Defense
• Bobbity-Boo has been given more Magic Defense
• Adjustments to various scenarios of improper ellipsis use (you’re welcome, Tyler)
• When in New Game+, the quality of in game drops is now increased

Generally, whenever I begin to develop content for Ephemeral Tale, it's in a bubble. It's always *technically* in the game, but is never accessible to you guys (until I make it so). The best way of explaining this is with an example: the Sunken Summit. Work on the Sunken Summit actually began long before Ephemeral Tale was even on Steam, as the first technical tests for it were done in early December of 2019! The game wouldn't actually hit Early Access until almost a month and a half later, in mid January. By the time the game released into Early Access, the Sunken Summit was about 60% done.

You see, something that I've brought up before in these Pupdates is the ever-changing nature of development and how my approach has had to change to accommodate the needs of the players first and foremost. In my head, I assumed (foolishly) that due to how strenuously my circle of testers had run the gamut of the game, that launch would be relatively smooth (spoilers: it wasn’t). In my head, I assumed that I would fix a few bugs the first few days, and then within a week transition to weekly updates while cracking away at the Summit.

This is not at all how things played out in reality, of course. The game came out, and had a slew of issues with balance at launch, gear was meaningful the first time you acquired it but never again, crazy difficulty spikes out of nowhere, and a metric ton of bugs that had never been seen or caught in the hundreds of hours of testing! While I won’t go through the kit and kaboodle of repeating how I addressed these issues (with lots of help from you guys and friends!), this served as a great lesson for developing with a lead of sorts. To put it simply, I generally attempt to stay one or two weeks ahead of what you guys see in these updates. For example, I’m writing this Pupdate on May 7th, but it likely won’t go live until the 19th! This allows me some degree of flexibility if I’m in need of extra time. See, above I mentioned that content is developed in a bubble, but it’s incredibly difficult to maintain that bubble for technical changes-- things can (and do!) accidentally slip through the cracks all the time. For Major Update #3, keeping the changes for the Great Palace separated would have not only required literally remaking the dungeon, but then properly transitioning to that new iteration of the dungeon when the time came. That’s simply put, not feasible for developing weekly patches.

That’s where the lead comes into play: if I need time to test something that sits on the edge of both new content, and big technical changes, having a week or two of leeway can be make or break for it. The two new bosses implemented in last week's patch, for example, required a new approach to how I was treating certain aspects of the game (mostly in regards to event occurrence), and as such required a bit more time than I would have otherwise had if builds were released as they’re ready. Additionally, this lets me try things that are potentially controversial: if Merlin swings too much in one direction after this week, I can see and be able to adjust him or other changes as quickly as needed, without impacting (too much) the update schedule. We’ve been able to have a weekly patch every week for a few months now, and the lead approach is a big part of how I’m able to do that while still actively changing things daily.

With the New Game+ changes that hit last week, there were quite a few snags along the way. Gear didn’t properly scale, enemies were doing weird things, mechanics didn’t function as intended, etcetera-- without the ability to test these things both internally and externally (beta branch folks, y’all the best being my guinea pigs), it’s impossible to ensure that you guys are getting the best possible gameplay experience when a patch hits. Another area where we faced challenges was actually in the performance sweep! As I’ve mentioned time-in and time-out, I’m not much of a programmer. We’ve had a performance sweep underway for some time now (still, even!) that has been pushed back due to the scale of things. What started as a simple “hey, let’s see if we can get a couple FPS here and there” quickly evolved into an entire restructuring of the engine from the ground up. While Major Update #3 was able to deliver on some great performance gains (and thus free me of my guilt of not being able to deliver on time), they were not actually the changes originally intended! So yes, there will be another performance sweep at some point in the future, but as per the norm, I won’t be disclosing when *quite* yet.

I've spent a great deal more time working on Ephemeral Tale the past few weeks than I normally do (about 60 hours a week, as opposed to 35-40) trying to get some upcoming stuff ready for all of you. While I'm not ready to talk about it quite yet, I am confident in saying that there's a solid concept of what the road ahead looks like, and what it means for the game. We'll talk about that in more depth soon. In the interim, you can join me and some of my friends & colleagues over on our new Discord server! Share your loot finds, bug reports/feedback, or just chat with us! We'd love to have you.

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