ONE AT A TIME!

Ah, yes. Here we are again! As the days pass, so do the Pupdates! This week, I brought the balance changes that we tested out last week into the rest of the game. Additionally, we've got some tweaks to tutorial prompts to better the presentation, and a few changes to drop rates as well as status effects in order to make them more consistent! Additionally, I'd like to give you an update on a bug we've been tracking.

There's currently a bug in the menu system that can cause the menu to enter a "timeout error" upon using a consumable item. This is perceived as a "hang," where your input locks up entirely and you can't do anything about it. This is a tricky bug to squash, as it doesn't consistently appear-- additionally, it's appearance seems to be hardware based rather than software based, so short of us building whatever rig causes this to occur, it's difficult to nail down why this is occurring. Right now, the plan is to simply re-write the portions of the menu that are causing problems. The code is some magical, black-box voodoo trickery at the moment, and when we re-wrote the portion that caused problems (that we were aware of), it broke other stuff. So we're now playing whack-a-mole with the menu bugs!

Now that we've discussed that, into the changelog, and then we can discuss a point of feedback that you guys gave us through the demo: loot!

Ephemeral Tale 1.18.1 Changelog

• Brought balance changes from last week to all remaining (and future) zones, including:
• Forgotten Forest, Corrupted Castle, Occluded Oasis, Great Palace, Sunken Summit, and Mute Mountains (+ future zones)
• Those changes ensure that if the player is under a certain level (15), the likelihood that an enemy will “wait” for their turn is significantly higher. This should allow for newer players to get used to the different pace of the game, as this will gradually lessen as you approach level 15
• Fixed a bug where under certain circumstances, the above protections could be turned off early or randomly turned back on
• Added additional tutorial prompts to guide players understanding of the game
• Added an additional room to the large tree in the Mute Mountain
• “Ignite” state (Faerie Fire burn) now lasts a set 3 turns (instead of a variable 3-5), and has a new icon to differentiate it from Bobbity-Boo’s “burning” state caused by her boss mechanic
• “Poison” state (Hurf’s enraged attacks + others) now lasts a set 5 turns (instead of a variable 3-5)
• Adjusted colors on a few icons for various equips
• Lowered drop rate of the Scepter of Worlds slightly
• Lowered drop rate of Goldbloom’s Manabranch slightly
• Lowered drop rate of Cape of Magician’s Envy slightly

There’s been quite a few folks that have remarked on wanting there to be a wider variety of loot w/ effects available. I actually find myself in agreement with this general concept, while disagreeing on specifics. Let me explain myself here.

When we released into Early Access, loot was very simple-- each enemy had one item dedicated to them-- if you wanted that item, you farmed that guy. An example would be the Burning Ring:



This item drops (almost) exclusively from Bibbity, an enemy found inside of the Forgotten Forest. You can also get it in some rare circumstances via a Mimic or some other “treasure goblin”-esque enemy, akin to a Dablin or Bunnet (or randomly from Sabrina). In general though, the easiest way to farm for a specific item is to identify what enemy it drops off of. This is incredibly difficult to do at the moment due to the “world” loot pool.

When we dropped Major Update #1 way back in February (I think?), I added a large amount of items to the game that had no abilities attached. This was done for a number of reasons. For example, one of the issues that plagued the game initially was the lack of sense of mystery to loot. Since each enemy had one item that they dropped, you only saw new drops as frequently as you saw new enemy types. Additionally, for the same reason, players felt that loot was overall too sparse and infrequent, with you getting a piece of gear once every few fights.

The new items that were added were added into a separate loot pool from the individual enemy drops, and that list is currently shared across the various zones of the game. That loot pool currently holds 24 items. In order to further improve the “feel-goods” (a very in-depth, technical term that means “thing feels good, oog boog”), I’ve got some ideas that I’m going to start really hammering down over the course of the next few weeks.

First, I’d like to lower the amount of items in that world loot pool. Not drastically, but enough to improve the “ooh, nice” element of getting a new item. Right now, I’m leaning towards lowering it to about 18. I’m also looking to break the world pool into a zone-specific pool, as this would allow for better theming of items to fit a particular zone. Take, for instance, the Leather Gloves:



Is there really a need for these to be available in a zone like the Corrupted Castle, where Floryn’s aren’t present? Ideally, I would be able to replace these with something more directly themed to the Castle, or whatever zone you’re currently exploring. This would also allow for more “storytelling through flavor text” opportunities, which is an added bonus!

Lastly, I’m leaning towards adding a handful of special (i.e., they have effects) items into these pools. This would mean that overall, you might get slightly less loot in your pocket, but it would be able to better serve the needs of the game (filling in lore, gaps in builds, etc).

I’ll likely begin to plot this out during the upcoming week. Something I’m also looking to address is the general view of difficulty in the game-- that could be a whole pupdate in-and-of itself, but the gist is that Ephemeral Tale has some presentation issues that cause the difficulty to feel completely wrong to some folks. A lot of this comes down to expectations: I imagine a fair amount of you started the game, got whapped in the mouth in the Lost Caverns, and were kind of taken aback by this. It’s intentional, and indicative of the rest of the game’s difficulty curve, but also rather misleading.

The game doesn’t get fundamentally too much harder than it starts off at, but rather maintains that flow throughout, while increasing the number of mechanics thrown at you (and as such, maintaining that difficulty level). This doesn’t really jive well with the traditional difficulty curve of JRPGs (which goes back to those Souls roots that the game once had), and can feel bad if you’re not properly made aware of those expectations.

As one person said in a Steam comment, they came in expecting a cute, relaxing experience and got the ever-living snot kicked out of them, repeatedly. They weren’t mad about it, just kinda… shocked. The goal is to properly set those expectations moving forward, and I think that's where the tutorialization is currently failing. So I plan to change that more as we get closer to release! As always, if you have any feedback feel free to chuck it my way!

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