We are hosting an Emberlight Game Giveaway! 15 copies of Emberlight for Steam are up for grabs. This giveaway is open worldwide where Steam keys are allowed to be claimed. Rules and information can be found on the widget. Good luck future Ember Knights.
Category: News
Latest Tech News
-
Two Weeks Down: Steam Achievements, Cloud Saving And More!
Rounding out two weeks since launch, we’ve made a lot of progress. This last update added Steam Achievements. Players can join the Knights of the Ember Order and collect all 49 milestones ranging in various difficulties. Other additions over the past two weeks include:
- Cloud saving for persistent corruption across all supported platforms
- Daily and lifetime leaderboards for the Daily Challenge mode
- Purity mode which allows players to access “good” endings per run
- Revamped quest system to better showcase the run being selected
- And a wide range of fixes and tweaks based on feedback from the Emberlight community
Along with this feedback, we have also adjusted our future plans with Emberlight. Originally planned for a December release, Dungeon Master mode has been shifted to a late October, early November launch.
Dungeon Master mode adds the ability for stories to be created in a simple but feature-rich toolkit within Emberlight. These stories can be shared on a public marketplace or hosted with friends. Players can then access these stories in single player story mode, play these with their friends in the upcoming co-op mode, or join DMs in hosted experiences.
Dungeon Master mode looks to provide a virtual tabletop experience while the simplicity of the story creator means that constructing a story should be equivalent to planning a pen and paper adventure. The hands on (DM controls entire game) and hands off (DM spectates and can make changes) then allow different ways to interact with the party in a story. And with the aimed support of the mobile and Switch platforms, DMs and players alike will be able to bring this experience anywhere.
We’re super excited for Dungeon Master mode as a major milestone not only for development, but something we’ve wanted for a long time ourselves. Some of the team are tabletop players, and have wanted a way to be able to play with friends worldwide in a system closely matching what they’d do on their Friday night sessions. Hopefully we can bridge the gap between the open imagination of a pen and paper game with the story creator and gameplay mechanics emulating that as closely as possible.
Join our popular Discord Community Server at www.discord.gg/quarteronion to discuss Emberlight.
-
Updated Patch Notes for August 26 – Steam Achievements Added
The development team has made the following changes and updates to the game in the latest Changeset 826 update. Steam Achievements are now live! Earn 49 new badges for your steam profile with these new achievements.
- Updated the ground on surface and caves to help with feedback where the characters blend too much due to similar color scheme
- Adjusted the quest screen tutorial to help with some confusion on quest selection
- Added a tutorial in-game for purity mode explaining what it does when active
- Added cloud saving of corruption points, corruption levels, and all corrupted bosses. This is paired to whichever platform you’re currently logged into (Steam has highest priority, and Discord is secondary). Bonus points if you have the same display/username between Steam and Discord as it will use the same backend. This is also the same system that determines name on top left of main menu.
- Updated leaderboard system to now show “today’s leaderboard” which clears when challenge resets, and “lifetime leaderboard” which shows highest score. This also uses new backend with cloud saving which unfortunately wiped out all lifetime scores to date.
- Updated trap room effect due to graphical artifacts and performance issues
- Removed light around treasure in treasure room
- Resolved issue where, with the game log turned off, it’d flash on and off in rooms as messages were passed to it
- Resolved issue where, with purity mode, if you exhausted all corrupted bosses in pool, you could still select a corruption quest and crash in boss room
- Gambling chance now 50/50 (originally 70% chance to lose). 10% chance for jackpot stays the same
- Added wolf/werewolf hurt and die sounds
- Updated sounds for critters (especially rats which made everyone’s ears bleed)
- All units now have variance in their stats and health instead of just the level’s base balancing amounts
- Voice now has its own sound category in options
- Achievements added to the game. Currently only in Steam. Eventually will show in the encyclopedia.
- Rooms with doors now properly highlight both the frame and door when hovered
Join our popular Discord Community Server at www.discord.gg/quarteronion to discuss Emberlight.
-
Updated Patch Notes for August 21
The development team has made the following changes and updates to the game in the latest Changeset 825 update.
- Resolved issue where diminishing returns/hard cap on crowd control was not working properly. It now properly recognizes dimishing returns (there is a test per attempt to use) along with a hard cap (after 10 full uses in a room, CC will not work). This should help with a few encounters that overloaded CC (wolves and werewolf encounters, critter encounter with 3 rats, and Ratman miniboss) as well as corruption fight with CC-heavy party members.
- Raised floaty text above the status effects area. It will also raise higher with many status effects.
- Resolved issue where the Blaze Knight, when having multiple turns in succession, didn’t rotate back to starting rotation in between turns. This was fixed before launch, but accidentally commented out in a recent update.
- Leaderboard numbers now start at 1 position as opposed to 0.
- Added roadmap image as a clickable button to bottom left of main menu. This opens browser to the State of the Game article for details on the future of Emberlight.
Join our popular Discord Community Server at www.discord.gg/quarteronion to discuss Emberlight.
-
Updated Patch Notes for August 19
We just made updates, changes, and some fixes in the latest build for Emberlight in Changeset 821. Please read about the new purity mode for those wishing for a “good ending” in options as well as the other updates to the game.
- Rebuilt quest screen to help resolve confusion in determining which quest was selected and how long the quest will last
- Fixed a few grammar and spelling errors
- Resolved issue where the persistent corruption bars did not properly update the bar portion
- Resolved issue where the windowed option was flipped
- Unit portraits (in abilities window, town portal, and above units on screen) now show stats window when hovering over
- Traits have all been shifted as status effects to make them more apparent. We’ll see how this plays out in later levels where many more status effects are applied and whether we’ll need to present the traits differently.
- Various tweaks to the tutorial messages to align to recent changes
- Pushed the updated options window
- Quest window now defaults to highest accessible quest. It can still be cycled.
- Updated method for hovering over unit portraits as it was occasionally flipping the toggle
- Resolved issue where somehow clicking through tutorial windows in quest and party screens allowed the back button to be hit leaving the tutorial window up indefinitely.
- With traits now in status effects, reduced size of each icon to be 6 wide to handle traits, drinks, and any active status effects.
Purity Run Explained
- When defeating the final boss, if none of the party members received any corruption (relying solely on town portal abilities), the corruption fight is skipped and a different ending is earned. No corrupted boss is created. This was in response to feedback requesting a “good” ending.
- Is Purity Run added to options menu. When set, if any party members have 0 corruption but a corruption fight must happen due to another member having corruption, the system will pick a 0 corrupted party member in the fight. This was in response to feedback requesting a “good” ending.
- If at least one corruption fight occurs, but the survivors are not corrupted, the second ending is earned. No corrupted boss is created. This was in response to feedback requesting a “good” ending.
-
Updated w/link – Join our Emberlight Reddit AMA on /Games on Sunday at 8 PM EDT
Emberlight AMA has ended at 11 pm EDT. We will continue to all your answer questions on the thread as they come in.
Have you watched the launch trailer, or better yet tried the game on Steam/Discord/Itch.io, and wondered what was going through our heads when we created Emberlight? Why am I killing off my own party? I have to kill my old corrupted Pyromancer with his Brutal Charge, Meteor Strike, and Nova?!
Well fear not, because we don’t know what was going through our heads. But we have the next best thing to answering these and other questions you may have! We will be hosting a Reddit AMA on /Games at 8pm EDT (GMT-5) on Sunday (August 18th). We will post the full Reddit link prior to the chat on Discord, Facebook, Twitter, as well as update this post.
While you wait, you can listen in on the interview we had with Fragments of Silicon on July 3rd.
- The Quarter Onion Games team
-
Updated Patch Notes for August 16
Thank you everyone for supporting Emberlight. Here is a list of things we added or changed based on the community’s suggestions.
Here are the highlights
- How to play removed from encyclopedia due to tutorial system ingame. Defaults to locations tab.
- Resolved the abilities and town portal windows still having the rare case of an icon being stuck on the screen
- For effects with absorb and mirror image which stay active until used up, duration now goes down to 0 versus negative before
- Adjustments made to better support multi-monitor setups
- Added Windowed mode back into options. Seems stable, but we’ll need more testing to be 100% (Need to check the box then uncheck it to enable. Will be adjusted in next update)
- Finally, maybe, hopefully resolved the rare wander creature bug
- Tweaks to order of operations when handling death to see if this resolves the rare bug where sometimes an enemy is at 0hp and yet doesn’t die with the turn system getting stuck
- Potions now function the way they worked before where multiple can be used in a cleared room
- Tooltips for potions button are now always active to show potion amount regardless of situation or if there’s 0
- Game log can now be disabled in the options menu if you find it intrusive
If you have any more suggestions, feeling chatty, or need support, simply join our community on Discord to speak with us.
— Quarter Onion Games
-
Emberlight – State of the Game
So we have finally reached the finish line (of sorts) for Emberlight. What does that mean for Emberlight over the next few months? And more importantly, what is up the sleeves of our team over the next year or two? Read on, dear reader, and we’ll go down the path of Trinity.
We had posted the Emberlight Roadmap a few months ago due to questions about what was happening after August 13th. And while this roadmap details a lot of the cool content and features we have planned over the next year, it doesn’t really go into detail about how we will continue to build up the core functionality we have in Emberlight now. So where are we going with Emberlight?
First off, we know there’s still plenty to tweak. We took in valuable feedback during our pre-launch period from the many streamers and YouTubers that helped iron out flaws we were overlooking. There’s still some glitches, including a few we’re having a helluva time to recreate (resurrection instantly killing the resurrect party member which might be a feature, the Blaze Knight moonwalking which is most definitely not a feature, and those pesky snakes not going away properly when ending a run), but these will be cleaned up.
As many will attest during the pre-launch period, we will work rapidly to get these fixed. We’ve done what we could to alleviate the vast majority of issues. These last few mainly stem from an inability to recreate on the development side making it very difficult to resolve them without potentially breaking the game for those without the issues. We will continue to tweak areas to see if it resolves itself, but it’s one of those areas where we may just need new eyes looking at the code base as we start rounding out the team for this and future endeavors.
Of particular note is additional platforms we plan to support. We aim to be on iOS and Android by the end of October with the Co-op mode update. We then, publisher permitting, aim to be on the Switch by the end of December with the Dungeon Master mode update. At the moment, those are the only platforms we’re aiming for long term but we are open to suggestions from our community (please come talk to us on Discord, we don’t bite…).
Project 2 (It really needs a name…)
So we’ve briefly discussed what is after Emberlight, which will get touched on in more detail below, but the current goal is for project 2 to be a tactical RPG. Keeping with the tradition of Emberlight pulling from our nostalgia of Final Fantasy X and XI while attempting to modernize it with a few twists, Project 2 will pull specifically from our nostalgia of Ogre Battle. This project will fall within the same timeline as Emberlight, and this becomes important with Trinity.What is Trinity?
Trinity is basically a framework that will connect Emberlight, Project 2, and a third concept (a side scrolling city simulator) into one persistent shard. The point of Trinity is continuing the charm of single player games (you do not directly connect to any players within the shard you are playing on), but the actions of each playthrough have lasting consequences on the shard. Emberlight players completing quests will see those regions have a smaller evil footprint. Project 2 players will secure the borders as countries vie for power and territory. And the city sim players are the engine that fuels the other two games, providing quests and resources respectively.Is this ambitious? Most definitely. And this is why we want to focus on each game as its own project. We want to build these to the highest quality possible. Trinity basically forces us to. Even as we shift gears into the 2nd and 3rd projects, we are still having to work on the previous games to ensure they all pair up properly.
Just as Dungeon Master mode in Emberlight comes from our yearning for that tabletop experience in the games that we just feel hasn’t quite been achieved yet, Trinity builds off of our desire for a most interactive experience for players in all genres. That ability to play a game that is underappreciated in the industry and yet have it interact with those that are.
Can we pull all of this off? We sure can!
– The Quarter Onion Games team
-
Emberlight Launches!
From a simple concept in 2017, to humble development beginnings in October of 2018, Quarter Onion Games is excited to announce that we have made it to the finish line with Emberlight! You can experience Emberlight through Steam (PC/Mac/Linux), Discord (PC), and Itch.io (PC).
Emberlight features the esteemed voice actress, Lani Minella, as the Grandmaster, as well as voice casting talent from No Studio In Particular produced by Reece Bridger.
What is Emberlight?
Emberlight is a true roguelike dungeon crawler, set in a world where the Gods have given you a great gift – and a great curse.
Explore procedurally generated dungeons as a Knight of the Ember Order. Conquer the quests set out before your party, and uncover the lore of the land. Grow your strength by absorbing the abilities of your slain enemies and collecting the powerful traits of dungeon bosses.
Become strong, become quick, become immortal – but be warned – as you fight using unstable Ember powers, they will begin to corrupt and twist your very soul. Every gift of power has its sacrifice; every ability has its cost.
As the Gods fight for control of their creations, you must decide what is good, and what is evil. To protect your people against the dangers of Ember power, you must use its power to your advantage. Will you conquer the dark, or will you lose yourself to corruption?
</center What’s next?You can check out the Emberlight Roadmap which goes into detail about what’s in store over the next year. We will have a “State Of The Game” post tomorrow that will expand upon the roadmap including future platforms, future games, and more!
For now, the Ember Order awaits you! And let us know all about your adventures on our Discord server!
- The Quarter Onion Games team
-
Updated Patch Notes for August 9 (Ready for Launch)
Emberlight is now ready to release on both Steam and Discord on August 13th. We made the following tweaks to the game in the latest patch build .818.
- Tweaked quest selection tutorial due to recent feedback to be more explicit in how the window works.
- Tweaked the entrance room tutorial that pops up to have a quick tip on navigation as folks have gotten stuck on this in multiple streams/videos. The tutorial for navigation still gets added as well.
- Locked quests on the quest window now are grayed out but still allow tooltips (to show corruption level to unlock) and cycling through them.
- Added Steamworks fully to launch build. Will eventually support achievements and cloud saves. For now, it will grab the display name to show in top left (previously either randomized a name or grabbed the Discord display name).
- Debug mode has been disabled for launch build.
- Adjustments to game UI to ensure that no input can happen during either an enemy’s turn, or with a party member that is charmed, confused, or stunned. Still working to fix the character getting stuck that occasionally happens.
- Adjusted damage shield tooltip text to say that it reflects damage back onto attacker.
- Adjusted reflect tooltip text to say it reflects all abilities back onto attacker.
Join our popular Discord Community Server at www.discord.gg/quarteronion to discuss Emberlight. We are ready for launch!
