Emberlight is on sale on Steam and our other outlets for $2.99! That’s a 70% off savings for the game.
Emberlight is a true roguelite 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.
As we continue with areas that we are actively looking to improve in the future. There will always be places where we can do better, both working together as a studio, and each person that is a part of this experience. We fail as a studio when we can’t identify where we failed.
Nobody likes bugs, least of all the developers of your favorite games. As games get more complex, bugs will express themselves in new and “exciting” ways, and the team is always looking to resolve them. We’ve had a few rare bugs that continue to elude us, particularly a rare turn bug, and it’s been a tough one to crack.
For the non-coder type, most of the code of a game tends to interact in some way with everything else. Making changes that may seem benign will suddenly break another system. While some fixed can be straightforward with some elbow grease and focus, others are a lot more complicated, and we’ve built a stronger QA and unit testing process for future projects to help us identify and resolve issues early.
Consistent feedback we received from the community focused on a lack of user feedback within Emberlight. Whether this was confusion within initial menus, or a lack of direction with something as important as navigating the rooms on a level, we needed to do a better job at conveying information to our community. Efforts such as tutorials we’re not enough to properly ease players into the game.
As a team, we have a major focus in the current project to ensure the user feedback is properly designed out at the start. We can’t assume that a new player will simply get it, and therefore the game needs to provide appropriate direction for a player that needs it. At the same time, we cannot force a player down a lengthy tutorial, so it’s a balancing act that we’ll refine with the demo we’re working on.
While this isn’t directly related to the game development itself, getting awareness for future games is crucial to build our community and push us to continue building quality games for everyone. This was a learning experience for us, and we have new tools in the tool belt for our future projects. Particularly both how to get the game in front of more people, and to ensure that our presentation properly represents the game.
We had many great reviewers, streamers, and YouTubers play our game and provide feedback on it, and it was a humbling experience to hear everyone’s views on Emberlight. From the reviews we received, we averaged around a 7 out of 10 which is average to us. Nothing less than a 10 out of 10 is good enough, and we have a blueprint on how to achieve that goal.
If you have purchased the game, please leave a review so the Steam algorithm can index our game properly.
Our final article will focus on our next project. We’re super excited to finally unveil our recent work, and where we’re going in 2020. Stay tuned!
Read the first article here.
As we walk into a new decade, the experience of creating and launching a game has given us a lot of insight into how to move forward confident in our abilities as a studio. We’ve grown this past year with Emberlight and our wonderful community with well over a thousand folks that have given us a chance so far but there’s always room to improve. We strive for a 10 outta 10 with our future games, and it starts with self-critiques which we’ll breakdown in a three-parter leading into our new game in production.
Join us on Friday, October 4th at 9 pm EDT, for an Emberlight Developer Stream with BoyAzazel68, on Twitch at https://twitch.tv/boyazazel68. Our Lead Developer, Vaernus, will be offering his commentary as they play the game together on the stream. We plan on giving away game keys to the lucky winners during the stream. We will also be discussing the new and upcoming changes coming to the game, Dungeon Master Mode, Single Player, Co-op, and Multiplayer Mode.
The development team has made more improvements to the game. Read the updated changes in the patch notes for changeset 1.0831 below.
Join our popular Discord Community Server at www.discord.gg/quarteronion to discuss Emberlight.
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:
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.
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
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).
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?
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!
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.
Join our popular Discord Community Server at www.discord.gg/quarteronion to discuss Emberlight. We are ready for launch!
The development team has made the following changes and updates to the game in the latest changeset 813 update.
Join our popular Discord Community Server at www.discord.gg/quarteronion to discuss Emberlight.