ANOTHER WEEK, ANOTHER UPDATE!

What's up, fellas? Hope this Pupdate finds you well! This week, I've spent a lot of time working on the upcoming "haunted forest" zone. It's nearly done! About one room left to get finished and it'll be ready for internal play-testing! More about that after the jump.

Ephemeral Tale 1.22.1 Changelog

• Made how to summon the boss of the Sunken Summit more transparent
• Additionally, there is a vague warning text now that should help indicate that a battle is about to occur
• Added a visual indicator to some objects in the Sunken Summit to better indicate that they were interactable
• Fixed a number of grammatical errors throughout the Sunken Summit
• Fixed a couple of grammatical errors throughout the Mute Mountains
• Fixed a number of grammatical errors throughout the Jelly item events
• Fixed an issue with tile passability in the Occluded Oasis
• Fixed an issue where a particular ladder would slow the player in the “dark” variant of the Respite
• Fixed an issue where two particular chests in the Mute Mountains could repeatedly award Frozen Keys

Big thanks to Neoterrar for his feedback for the Sunken Summit! Was incredibly helpful in upping the quality there.

Like I mentioned earlier, this week has been mostly spent on one particular section of the upcoming Major Update #5. The "haunted forest" zone now has a name: the Graveyard Grove! I don't have anything particularly mind-blowing to talk about this week, so how about we take a look at the process?


A nice before & after of the mapping process.

This is one of the maps that was most time consuming in the Grove-- between trying to manage the space of the various surrounding rooms, ensuring I wasn't repeating patterns too much, and accomplishing everything necessary for the map itself, I've spent probably around a full eight hours on this one alone.


Oh look, it's an mspaint rough draft of the zone! Fascinating!

If you've ever wondered what a map looks like during the planning stages, here's a nice look for you! It starts with an MSPaint drawing, getting down the general shape and flow, and then I move onto an aesthetic test in-engine, and finally start mapping the area.


So that's what it looks like!

Once an area is mapped out, I can put it into the game and apply any necessary post-processing! That's how we end up at this final result. It's a time consuming process, but necessary to make sure that things are as consistent as possible. Next week, I plan on addressing a piece of long-term feedback with regards to encounter rates in the Forgotten Forest, and (hopefully) finally getting around to the world pool sorting that I spoke about a few weeks back. If I don't get around to it then, I'll still be working on it (I swear, don't hurt me!) in the background.

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this look behind the process! Maybe next week I can show off some of the combat for the upcoming areas? We'll see what happens! Until next time, have fun and stay safe!

-- Ryan
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