State of the Game: AprilWelcome to the Embers Adrift newsletter. Our servers are now open every weekend starting Fridays at noon CT/6pm UTC for our pre-order players. If you think you’d like to support our indie dev team please visit our website to pre-order and join the fun! You can also find our living soundtrack on Bandcamp which grows as more music is put into the game, buy once, get 70+ tracks over time. Embers Adrift can also be purchased as a gift; nab it for friends and/or family so they can join you in game. April was a very exciting month for Embers Adrift, let’s jump right in.The World Breaker event was a huge success, however we did not break the world. There was some minor initial client-side lag experienced while clients rendered in a large number of players, but the servers held up very well with no breaks or interruptions; a testament to our networking stack. We will be taking the data and using it to consider our next moves for server infrastructure and we’ll be building that out, then we will have another World Breaker event - so if you missed out the first time around you’ll have one more chance before launch. Keep an eye out for news on that, join us for a free weekend of Embers Adrift, and to nab the “World Breaker” title and the Ember Sword. |
We’ve started some of the polishing necessary for player animations, both in and out of combat. We’ve even managed to stop breaking players arms when they have their 2-handed weapons out and begin performing a non-attack action, and butt-sliding? A thing of the past! Along with that animations and audio for blocking/parrying have been added as well as a slew of audio and amination improvements for enemies. We’ve added a new notification system that will let you know if you’ve received a friend invite and other social notifications. More will be added to this system as we go forward. Some new environmental features have been added. You may find that walking through certain things will give you a status effect - careful where you step, players have reported feeling itchy or slower. More to come of this as we go. Crafting has seen more upgrades. You can now use Ember Flux to improve your crafting results. We’ve also balanced crafting (ongoing) so that dropped loot and crafted loot both feel fun. We are being very careful to maintain the feeling of joy when you get a new drop while adventuring and the rewarding feeling from working hard to craft gear. A new creature is entering the animation phase. This little guy has broken through an evolutionary barrier and has grown much bigger, can use tools and build shelters, and has organized a basic society - even utilizing warcraft against the Marauders (hint hint). Keep an eye out for their arrival. |
We’ve also added some other evolved, but less civilized creatures like the Basilisk and a (very protective) Giant Spider - this one comes from our nightmares. Happy Hunting and beware. Several new equipment pieces have been added or are being worked on. I really like this new shirt (See below: it changes color depending on the favorite color you select at character creation or when you edit your appearance in the login scene, here I show black and white). All of the “favorite” items in our game change color depending on your selected favorite color. There are several other new pieces of armor featured here too, but I took the chest armor off so we could see the shirt. For those of you not familiar, Embers Adrift features a unique equipment system wherein you can wear clothes and wear armor over those clothes. Only the armor items contribute to your weight allowance and both sets of equipment feature stat bonuses. New armor, clothing, gloves, helms and more have been added in April. |
You can also see one of our ground torches in this screenshot. One of the themes in our game is light vs. dark - darkness matters in Embers Adrift and the feeling of seeing light far away when you are running in the dark is quite special. That being said, we’ve greatly improved the usability of our ground torches to combat the darkness. The cooldown has been greatly reduced, the execution time has been greatly reduced, and now if you are dungeon crawling you no longer need to get out of range of other previously placed torches when you move forward with your group, a newly placed torch simply replaces and removes nearby old torches as your group progresses. This sounds simple, but it has made a huge impact in gameplay. |
We want to thank our tester for their involvement and feedback. Your patience is appreciated as our small indie team works to bring more content and polish into Embers Adrift. If you would like to support us and our launch we would greatly appreciate it; visit our store to pre-order or purchase for a friend today! Thanks for following our development; we really appreciate your support and interest! Join our discord server to share your feedback & ideas, and to interact with the dev team & community, and then head over to our forums to dive deep into the news, lore, and discussions about Embers Adrift. If you don’t have a previous account, please sign up! If you’ve pre-ordered a Stormhaven Studios product before that means you already have beta testing access to Embers Adrift and we’d love to see you in game and in our discord on Wednesday nights at 8pm Central and on the weekends. Your account has been carried over to our new website where you can download the client from the account page after logging in. |