Check Out the Deep Savings We Have for You During the Emberlight Holiday Sale!
The entire team at Quarter Onion Games would like to wish everyone a Happy Holiday Season! Thank you for supporting Emberlight over the years. Grab our game during this 75% off sale for just $2.49!
May your holiday be awesome and We appreciate your support!
-The Quarter Onion Team
Emberlight's 2nd Birthday Sale!
Quarter Onion Games is celebrating the second birthday of Emberlight this week.
Emberlight is on sale at an 80% off discount during our anniversary on all digital storefronts for just $1.99. We invite everyone to support our studio and purchase our game on Steam and Xsolla.
Emberlight was the first game we released as a company. We are thankful for our supporters and fans who continue to play this unpredictable game.
Join us on our Discord channel to participate in our community and learn what is coming next in Emberlight.
Emberlight - End of May Sale
Emberlight is on sale on Steam and our other outlets for $2.99! That's a 70% off savings for the game.
Tap into some spooky savings with our Halloween sale on Emberlight. Discounted at 50% off with the final price tag of $4.99. Support local indies today!
Emberlight October Sale!
Emberlight is on sale this week! Get the game at a 50% off discount! Can you survive the corruption?
Emberlight Anniversary Sale!
Quarter Onion Games is celebrating the first anniversary of Emberlight this week.
Emberlight will be on sale with a 67% off discount (under $5.00) during our anniversary on all digital storefronts. We invite everyone to support our studio and purchase our game on Steam.
Emberlight was the first game we released as a company. We are thankful for our supporters who continue to play the game regularly and we appreciate all the fan input we received this past year. Our studio has given out over a million copies of the game in various fundraisers and giveaways to support charities during these tough times.
Join us on our Discord channel to participate in our community and learn what is coming next in Emberlight.
Emberlight 2019: In Retrospect - The State of the Game
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.
Ongoing Bugs
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.
Game Presentation
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.
Game Awareness
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!
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.
We start our studio self-critique with what went right. These are strong building blocks for future projects, and help to overcome the obstacles we faced. And why not start the new decade on a positive note.
Emberlight Launched
A major difficulty in development is knowing when to be finished. This seems like a trivial point, but game development is equal parts art and engineering. Emberlight taught us that while the design is organic, we need to hold to a core concept and build off of it.
We set the goal of August 13th of 2019 and ensured that we could meet that deadline with a quality game. While there is always room for improvement, we were very happy to see Emberlight evolve into the final result. We were able to turn an idea into something that hundreds enjoyed.
Bugs Squashed
This seems like a "duh" thing, but we quickly found issues that got through our QA processes at launch. There's no such thing as launching a game bug-free, and a launch overall is a risk versus reward scenario. High priority bugs are ideally cleaned up, while some known bugs may push through launch if they don't greatly hinder gameplay.
We worked diligently and squashed most of the largest bugs within that first week after launch. At the same time, we synthesized requests from our community to make the game a better experience. Overall, this experience has given us QA ammunition for future projects to have a more bulletproof launch.
Content Updated
There's nothing inherently special about pushing new content post-launch. Whether it's free content in an update, or paid DLC, these updates enhance the base game. In our case, our October update acted as an intermediary to the eventual DM build and both updated functionality as well as added a new character class.
The updated camera helped with the isometric nature of Emberlight, while the forest and sewers added variety to the runs. Many of the changes were requested by the community as well as allowed us to transition towards new functionality for future updates more seamlessly. This process also gave us insight in both working with the community to refine the game post-launch, and pushing larger updates.
Our next article will focus on our self-critique on how we can improve for the next project. Stay tuned!
Emberlight's October Patch Released!
The development team has made the following changes to the game in our October Patch Update. This patch is scheduled to go live later today.
Please read the patch notes below:
Ember Maiden class has been added to the game.
Turns that would hang on certain situations with summoning units that would cause the run to be abandoned has been fixed
The camera position has been moved back to allow us to increase the detail of each map.
All maps have been overhauled or updated due to the new camera settings.
All units have been spaced out to provide more variety in their sizes. Bosses are much larger than a regular character.
New character portraits have been added to the game for selecting quests and characters prior to launching the game.
The loading process for the game has been split up to speed up the game. A loading bar will show the progress when starting the game.
Forest and Sewer themes added to the game.
The first and second levels will randomly select from different themes. The first level uses either forest or ruins, and the second level uses caves or sewers.
You can now suspend a run and continue it at a later date.
An ability button was added to the game where you can move your skills around your characters at any time.
Please report any issues with the patch to us on our discord server or post in the discussions tab on Steam.
Emberlight Developer Stream with BoyAzazel68 on 10/4 at 9PM EDT
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.
