Here we are again, another month down, and I can for once actually say - it's been a quiet one. There's been a lot of new players and feedback so I've been largely focused on addressing balancing and the bugs raised. That said, here's a run down of the other stuff I did. If you haven't already:

Play Tales of Yore

(support on Patreon if you like)

More Steam!

The month started off very nicely with an image of Tales being played on a Steam Deck. It's always amazing to see the game being played by other people - even more so when it's on a new piece of hardware. The game is at its a core a web page, so compatibility in generally is quite high. It's been played on PS4, XBox and Switch without me doing anything - though on the Switch browser is particularly slow. 

Bending the rules for Chat

Since the beginning of the game's development I've been very keen on not breaking the style/pixels of the game. I had to bend a little bit on the in game text to give enough room to fit the dialogue on the screen. I lived with that, it wasn't good, but it was ok. When it came to creating the chat - since it's built as an overlay - it could have used any font or style. However, in my desperate need to make up for the fonts in game I felt I hade to keep the style in line with the rest of the game - so I used an all caps bitmap retro font. 

Fast forward, the game is getting some players and unexpected to me a really nice community of players is building up. Chat has now become incredibly important. Even though it's directly integrated to Discord, many players come to the game to chat to each and use the game's chat as the primary interface. 

The complaints! So many complaints! Why is the chat so hard to read? Why have you done this to us Coke? 

This month I finally gave in and realised the error of my ways, making chat a lot prettier and easier to use/read. I've consoled myself by using the 4th wall analogy. When you go into global chat, you're not in the game world any more, you're talking to each other as players not as actors in the game world. At least thats how I've quieted my inner voices!

Either way.. it's a lot nicer now and the complaints have stopped!

Another milestone

I thought last month was a peak in new players hitting the game, the Steam release had just gone out and that was feeding a lot of new players coming into the game. This month, it's just kept going. I've not done very much on the marketing social side - I'm not very good at it - but still theres a constant flow of new players slowly building into an awesome community.

And there it was, a little after a year of development from zero to game, 20,000 accounts have been registered!

One Year Old - Lets Party

This month also brought another significant date, it's been a year since I started the game's development. The game has been open to the public since about 2 weeks after I started (about when the network code started to work) - so I've had some players that have actually been testing things out for almost a year!

To celebrate the year we had a little party and the fair came to Aria town. There were custom unique items including the party blower (very annoying), party hat (very cool) and the balloon - which I now see taken into battle quite often :)  It was nice to see some old faces turn up as well as many new players enjoying the festivities.

Without getting too emotional, it's been a hell of a ride so far. It even caused me to go and make my first video dev log. The response the video has been pretty great so expect another one in a month or so. 

Even cooler, one of favourite bands turned up to do a gig ;)

Everyone is Able

The big feature add this month were "abilities". The game has long been known for having the mage massively over specced compared to ranged and melee fighters. In all honesty, this has been simply because spells were easier to make than anything else!. As of this month we have an equivalent capability for other types of players - Abilities. 

Abilities are trained around the world. They are fuelled by two different stats - rage and focus. 

Focus is gained by not being hit, by staying focused on a target. It allows ranged fighters to use abilities like dual shot and sharp shot, along with powering thief type skills - sneak for instance.

Rage is achieved by taking damage, each time you get hit gets you more angry and that rage can be channeled into abilities like war cry and shield slash. Rage is a brand new statistic added for the abilities but seems to fit nicely next to mana and focus. It's ended up rounding out the statistics quite nicely.

The Oasis Update

Finally I'm about 1/3 of the way through the next content update. I imagine it'll be a few weeks before it's done but it really nice to be back into the world building mode. I'm calling it the "Oasis Update" - party because theres a desert involved and party because I've been thinking about Ready Player One a lot recently. 

The scale of the updates are getting quite daunting so I'm trying to pace myself and not get too overwhelmed by everything. For more details on what's coming on the new release - well I'm not giving any here - Patrons have to get some perks, right?

It's been a good month and this one looks to be much heavier on the content side. As always appreciate any comments, feedback or suggestions for more topics to cover.