Launch Day! Update #10 - Achievements, Personal Quests, Session Stats
The time is now! Welcome to Eon Altar launch day, and what a launch day it is! We have Eon Altar Episode 1 on sale for 20% off for your playing pleasure, and we've also shipped a launch day patch.
Personal Quests are now available throughout each story level! Sometimes you'll be tasked with finding specific information; other times, dispatching enemies with a specific method. Sometimes you may even be required to swing a party vote in one direction or another. Keep them to yourself so your "friends" don't interfere, or share them to try and get as many completed as possible. But be forewarned, some character's goals may be in complete opposition with each other!
Said personal quests will also notify your controller app when you receive one, make progress on it, and complete it. The notification will disappear on it's own, but if you're impatient to get in your menu, or read your fortitude bar, tap to dismiss it.
Achievements are now available to be achieved! How far can you get in the Combat Arena? Wave 30? Our Studio Manager can hit Wave 34. How about on Madness?
We have character specific achievements for utilizing their special tactics enough times across all your campaigns and arena runs, and story-based achievements to mark your progress through the campaign!
Finally, we have 3 hidden achievements, but aside from their titles, it's up to you to find them: "Secret Keepers", "Walk it Off", and "Beat the Devs".
There are more features that await you in our release patch, and of course the usual round of bug fixes, including:
Marcus has a new model! Looks better than our former placeholder model, and he should stand out more from the other characters as well.
Session Statistics. At the bottom of the Stats screen on your Controller app, you can find session statistics for your character, including damage dealt, damage taken, effective healing, containers looted, corpses looted, skill checks succeeded or failed, and more! Use it to track how well you're doing or compare with your friends.
Tutorials have been overhauled! Overall they should be clearer, interact better, and have more detailed information when required.
We're still hard at work getting Episode 2 ready for prime time, and with it we'll continue to improve Eon Altar!
POOF There Goes Your Data
As a gamer we know you're familiar with how Beta’s work. You play, you level up your characters, and then BAM, somebody wipes out all your saved data and on launch day you start from the beginning again.
Welp, that guy is Talarian. All saves and preferences will be wiped when the launch patch is released, around June 23 this coming week. We don’t like it, you don’t like it, Talarian doesn’t like it. It’s just how things are in game development.
So we have decided to invite you all to our Discord channel to complain about it. Just click the Discord photo below to take you there. We can all be salty about the data wipe together, but more importantly we can play games together and share cat memes!
Surprise! We play games, currently a few of us have been getting that Overwatch grind on. What are you playing?
Oh! Talarian feels so bad about the data wipe he’s adding a ton of new updates to Eon Altar for launch day. You can look forward to new features, achievements and personal quests. So what do you say; Discord and chill?
We look forward to meeting you!
The Flying Helmet Games Team
#BlameTalarian
The time is Soon™: Eon Altar is coming out of Early Access!
Early Access has given us a chance to work with our community to develop the most rewarding gaming experience. Without you, we would not be where we are today.
The date is set. June 23, 2016 - Eon Altar: Episode One
Eon Altar is episodic and currently we have three episodes in stages of development for full release. We’ve had a zillion meetings on how best to thank our early adopters for their support. Taking you all to Disney was suggested but isn’t currently within our budget. Our next best effort is to give you a Season One Pass for your $4.99 Early Access purchase. You will receive Season One (a total of three episodes) and our eternal gratitude.
We have opted to keep Eon Altar as affordable as we can without having to sell our belongings on Craigslist for dollar menu items. We hope this encourages you to play and tell others about our really affordable, super fun RPG we made for you.
The price will increase to $6.99 (USD) per episode and we will also offer a Season Pass at $14.99 (USD) for the first three episodes. Which looks like this:
$6.99 Episode One - The Battle for Tarnum (Includes Battle Arena)
$6.99 Episode Two - Whispers in the Catacombs - Release Fall 2016
$6.99 Episode Three - The Watcher in the Dark - Release TBD
Season One Pass: All three episodes for $14.99 and at approximately 4 hours of gameplay per episode and endless Battle Arena fights that’s major bang for your gaming budget.
As a head's up for our Early Access players, we're going to have to perform a data wipe (saves and preferences) when we release. Sorry about that, but feel free to #BlameTalarian and head into our Discord to give us what for, then play games 'n things together until you forgive us!
Thank you everyone for assisting us in the first phase of this quest. We look forward to going with you on the rest of this journey, forever marching onward towards the Eon Altar, together.
Early Access - Update #9 - Follow Ally, TPKs, and Optimization
Another month, another patch! This time we have some much needed fixes, and more polishing to get us closer to a full release.
First of all, we've added Follow Ally. A new power for use in exploration only, you can select your friend and select Follow Ally and the game will keep you on their tail until combat starts or you use a power!
Rather have someone else control where you're going, or set up a marching order? Now you can! Also, if you're sitting in the menu long enough (~10s), and the camera nudges you back on screen, you'll now auto-follow the nearest ally, allowing the rest of the party to keep exploring. You can turn off this behaviour in the main game settings, “Menu Idle Auto Follow”.
Secondly, now when the party wipes (TPK, aka Total Party Kill), instead of just resurrecting you at the nearest Destiny Marker, we actually reload the game from the last checkpoint save. This prevents "zerging" encounters. An encounter too difficult for you? You can always turn down the difficulty in the Main Menu Settings.
Finally, as many have noticed, our game was in dire need of some optimization, especially around The Prologue. Well, we've taken a lot of time this patch to really get down to the nitty gritty and fix up our bottlenecks.
The Prologue has had significant art optimization done, making it run 2 - 3 times faster than previously on all graphical settings. Keepers and Pilgrims now have multiple LOD models which should make lower graphical settings run a fair bit faster at the beginning of The Prologue as well. Combined with a few systemic programming optimizations, and the game should run faster in general. Let us know how it feels!
Here are a few other fixes and improvements in this update:
Melee Line of Sight removed. Previously, if there was an enemy between you and your target, you'd have been limited to ranged powers only. We weren't communicating that very well, and it led to a lot of frustration and just looked like a bug to players. We're removing the restriction for now to test how that goes.
Interacting with things such as chests, dialogue nodes, skill checks, etc. should now be significantly more consistent. Already on the node? Should be able to activate it; targeted an ally first then the node? Should activate now; Destiny Marker overlapping interaction node? Should be able to activate it now.
Status Effects now show up in White above the character when being applied to make them more obvious. We also now show status effects falling off with gray text so it should be more obvious as to the lifetime of status effects.
Powers on the Power Wheel should now have a set spot and will never move, even if you purchase new powers or upgrade current ones. So if your top slot is Slice, it will always be Slice. No more dancing powers!
EON ALTAR is finally available on OS X! Many of you asked, and we have happily delivered. If you have OSX version 10.8.5 or newer and meet the minimum requirements on the store page, give it a spin. We'd like to hear more feedback, so feel free to drop a line on the forums.
We've also done a lot of polishing work around gear and the movement marker this update.
A big piece of feedback we've gotten was using items on yourself was a pain. Now if you want to just use that potion on yourself, press and hold the green-outlined equip button for a couple seconds, and voila, you've punched your ticket to potion city.
We've also made some changes around when the movement marker on your Controller App shows up and doesn't show up, as well as a few changes in how it behaves when snapping to other objects on the Core game. While it's definitely a polish feature, let us know how the changes work for you. Some behaviours we're not 100% sold on, but we'd like your input. Check the patch notes for more information!
Here are a few other fixes and improvements in this update:
Shasek can now properly request resources from Baryson. Whether the jerk will actually hand any over is another question.
On party TPK at the end of combat, we kill characters ASAP rather than making you wait for your timer to count down from 3. No more staring at your slowly dying corpses waiting for the game to realize you've all died!
Enemies now take note of their friends dying right in front of their eyes and jump into combat immediately. You can still stealth kill enemies if you one-shot them and their friends have their backs turned, but if they're staring right at the guy who's dying, they'll notice. No more staring vacantly at their friends' burning corpses.
When engaged, the movement marker on the controller now turns into a lock icon to show you are engaged, rather than a useless movement marker. You can also no longer drag it. It should be clearer that you've been engaged.
Early Access - Update #7 - New Playable Character!
"I've never met a coin I didn't like. Wish I could say the same for humans."
Shasek, the Tytheri Sellsword. Only two things count for Shasek; blood and gold. Years of debauchery have caught up with him, and he now must use his considerable skills as a sellsword to right his wrongs.
Explore the journey to the Eon Altar with the berserker warrior Shasek. Devastate enemies when you unlock his Primal Blood Rage. Double-Strike with finely crafted twin Tytheri Quickblades. And watch out for his berserker attacks, that can lay waste to team-mates as easily as your foes!
Shasek is a fully-playable character in the Eon Altar Story Campaign and Combat Arena, with new dialog and interactions with all characters. Start a new campaign with Shasek, or add him to a quest already in progress.
Here are a few other fixes and improvements in this update:
We now have difficulty settings! On the main menu settings page, you can alter how much health enemies have: less on Easy, more on Hard, or if you're feeling really confident, try out Madness.
Graphical settings should no longer suffer short-term memory loss, and actually take when you change them. This should help those on lower-end machines actually run the game at a decent framerate.
Checkpoint Saves have been one of the most asked for features since we launched Eon Altar in Early Access. This feature was always on our list and only slipped until post Early Access due to our limited resources. But it's here now!
When you approach a Destiny Marker, your game will be automatically saved. You can quit and reload to your last save any time, and return to any Destiny Marker to save again.
Here are a few other fixes and improvements in this update:
Powers that cause Engagement no longer cause Engagement when they 'Miss.'
Bloodguard Soldiers are less punishing to fight in Single Player.
Ambiences and Sound Effects no longer disappear after multiple reloads.
Lord Baryson, the Crusader, has improved specular mapping on his model so he's not so shiny and plastic!
Checkpoint Saves have been one of the most asked for features since we launched Eon Altar in Early Access. This feature was always on our list and only slipped until post Early Access due to our limited resources. But it's here now!
When you approach a Destiny Marker, your game will be automatically saved. You can quit and reload to your last save any time, and return to any Destiny Marker to save again.
Here are a few other fixes and improvements in this update:
Powers that cause Engagement no longer cause Engagement when they 'Miss.'
Bloodguard Soldiers are less punishing to fight in Single Player.
Ambiences and Sound Effects no longer disappear after multiple reloads.
Lord Baryson, the Crusader, has improved specular mapping on his model so he's not so shiny and plastic!
Checkpoint Saves have been one of the most asked for features since we launched Eon Altar in Early Access. This feature was always on our list and only slipped until post Early Access due to our limited resources. But it's here now!
When you approach a Destiny Marker, your game will be automatically saved. You can quit and reload to your last save any time, and return to any Destiny Marker to save again.
Here are a few other fixes and improvements in this update:
Powers that cause Engagement no longer cause Engagement when they 'Miss.'
Bloodguard Soldiers are less punishing to fight in Single Player.
Ambiences and Sound Effects no longer disappear after multiple reloads.
Lord Baryson, the Crusader, has improved specular mapping on his model so he's not so shiny and plastic!
Early Access Patch - Session 2 Ancient Gears Fixed!
Hotfix Patch 1.160315.0 (PC) is now released
Ancient Gears in The Portal Obstinate should now correctly work if you have collected all 4 of them. This works for both new campaigns and existing save games.
This took us a long time to pin down, so a huge thank those of your playing our Early Access builds who helped us track this one down!
