Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Hack and slash/Beat 'em up, Adventure, Indie
Fabular: Once upon a Spacetime
Development update
Hey all, it’s Fabular update time with the developments of the past few months.
New playable class Manticore is done
The Manticore is a faster, busier class than the Paladin and we can’t wait to get it into your hands. This ship can be equipped with daggers that have the highest attack speed and critical damage in the game, and glaives that are somewhat slower but cover a larger area in melee range. Both weapons can apply malfunctions to targets which is a damage over time effect that can be upgraded in interesting ways.
Its special equipment is Holo-decoy that gives you a short range dash move. When dash is executed perfectly (just before an enemy hit reaches you), it leaves behind a holographic image of your ship that attracts enemies for a short duration. You can also swap your position with an active decoy, so it’s a quite versatile tool of survival and engagement.
We’re planning to add an additional weapon type for the Manticore, but otherwise the class is finished, together with its upgrade tree.
Upgrade trees for both classes finalized
Speaking of upgrades, in addition to the completely new tree for the Manticore, we’ve revised and finished the full upgrade tree of the Paladin as well.
The Manticore’s governing main attribute is Speed, and most of the talents are clustered around that. You can specialize broadly in two directions; enhancing your holo-decoys or enhancing malfunctions in different ways.
The Paladin’s governing attribute is Power, providing talents that focus on blocking with the shield and being tanky in general.
The Paladin class also has more passive talents which is nice if you prefer a more methodical and slower playstyle, while the Manticore can be very flashy and rapid if you invest in the right upgrades.
Upgrades Beta test in progress
Now that the upgrades are in place we only have to find the right balance for them (how much do they cost, is any of them over- or underpowered, should they be an early- or late game pick and such). In order to properly test this we need more eyes and hands on the game, so we’ve started a Beta test that focuses on the upgrades.
We’ve started with a few select members of our Discord server, but in September we’d like to broaden the number of testers, expect more news about this later.
New realm, enemies and game content
The fourth realm of the game is coming along nicely. We’ve finished all regular enemies and one of the two battle scenes of the fire-themed Sky-high Mountains. Let’s check out some enemies in detail:
Iron Warrior
Since the Iron Brigade is the enemy faction in realm 4, to increase the difficulty, even their most basic warrior has an additional special attack that can stun the player if it hits. In addition to this, all enemies of the faction go out with a damaging fiery explosion when they die, posing a threat even after you’ve bested them.
Iron Archer
This faction’s archer enemy launches a projectile that spits out smaller firework-like sparks that makes dodging it much harder.
Iron Besieger
This larger enemy tries to stay in the background and launch globes of molten lava at the player from afar. The globes explode leaving an area of damaging fire behind for quite a while.
Iron Acolyte
Acolytes are the archetype of a mage or warlock that buffs other friendly units. The Iron Acolyte channels a lava-beam towards a fellow enemy ship which creates a fire aura around it that damages the player. The beam also enhances the speed of the ship it channels onto and can damage the player when crossed. Nasty!
Scorcher Automaton
These small automatons launch from acolytes in regular intervals. They periodically leave burning fire in their wake and try to circle around you and surround you with a wall of fire. They are quite nimble and hard to get to with melee weapons... real pesky ‘fire-flies’. :)
Royal Acolyte
The Hinterlands (realm 3) has also received their version of an Acolyte. This one has a healing beam that slowly replenishes the armour of a friendly unit and increases its attack speed.
The Royal Acolyte also has a short range ‘zap’ attack that activates when the player is in melee range.
New battle scenes
One of the two Realm 4 scenes is finished (Lava fields, top-left) and we’ve also made a new scene for the Marauder-filled Realm 2; the desolate Thornroot forest. You can see 3 variations of the latter below as well:
Additional stuff
There are lots of other small additions and tweaks we’ve made, here’s a few of them in no particular order:
Revamped player-bar with hit display (portion of bar turns white to indicate the damage of a recent hit):
Introduced variety to Royal and Marauder warrior type ships:
Starmap consumable items now have a visual effect when they’re used:
That’s it for now, have a pleasant end-of-summer everyone! Oh, and do check out this video that features Fabular as a ‘Top 10 BEST Upcoming Action Rogue-lite Indie Game’. :)
[previewyoutube="Vaorcx2kBVw;leftthumb"]
Fabular Live Stream
As part of the Steam Game Festival we'll be live streaming the updated version of Fabular's demo today (see event details on the exact time).
We hope you'll tune in and we'll be glad to answer your questions in the chat or on Fabular's Discord server:
Fabular free demo 2.0
Hey all,
As you may have noticed, we've updated the free demo version of Fabular to reflect the development change since the last festival. We've received lots of useful feedback from you and we've tried to implement most of them into this current version of the game.
As part of the Steam Games Festival - Autumn Edition, Fabular: Once Upon a Spacetime's freshly updated demo is available to play for everyone. Just head to the store page and click on the download demo button. If you've played the demo before, you just have to let Steam update it to the current version.
Major changes:
Enhanced tutorial with starmap mechanics
An additional playable realm with new enemies and a bossfight
Re-balanced gameplay with a smoother difficulty curve
Re-balanced progression with more tokens obtainable from regular runs
We hope you'll try the new version as well and give us feedback so that we can make the game even better for the Early Access release! You can leave comments on our Steam forums or drop by our Discord server for a chat:
Have fun and don't forget to wishlist the game if you like it!
Hey all, Batowski here with the latest Fabular development news. After the Steam Festival and the successful demo launch we’ve collected some excellent feedback from the community. In the past months we’ve tried to integrate this feedback into the game while building towards an Early Access release at the same time.
Tutorial 2.0
Building a tutorial for the gameplay basics in the demo seems to have paid off, but a lot of feedback indicated that it wasn’t covering all aspects and some confusion still remained in the minds of first-time players that needed to be addressed.
Thus we’ve enhanced the tutorial to include the starmap gameplay besides the battles to teach players about movement between nodes, the repercussions of having no fuel and teleportation on the minimap. We hope to have covered all bases with this.
The Cosmic Chart
With the Early Access build looming on the horizon we felt it would be useful to show players where they are in the current run’s progression. Enter the Cosmic Chart that comes up at every realm transition (and at game start) indicating the player’s progression on an ‘overworld’ map.
New realm: Sky-High Mountains
As the previous image might have conveniently spoilt it for you, we’ve begun the development of a completely new realm with its unique enemies, events and combat scenes. We’ll see how far we can push it until the Early Access, but our current plan is to include this realm even if its content is not fully finished or polished.
The realm is built upon the idea of fire, steel and industry and so far we’ve managed to build all basic enemies you can encounter there:
The characters and locations also explore the same theme:
Realm 1 bossfight
After coming up with the final realm set for the Early Access we felt that the first realm of the game needed to be a more introductory one that can be enjoyed by the less hardcore players, so we’ve toned down difficulty there somewhat and created a bossfight that is more straightforward. Since we didn’t want to ‘demote’ one of the Black Knights (dubbed Void Lords as of late) we delegated the realm 1 boss title to a treacherous former knight of the Kingdom - Sir Dax the Deserter.
New playable ship: The Manticore
One recurring criticism about the game’s combat has been that the controls are somewhat sluggish, which is true, but partly because we’ve only had the Paladin in the game so far which is deliberately the slowest of the ship classes. So far there was nothing else to compare it to, but we’re going to change that with the inclusion of the Manticore in the Early Access.
The Manticore is the fastest playable ship class focusing on movement, hit-and-run tactics, maiming enemies and critical hits. It’s special ability is the Holo-decoy that projects a convincing holographic image of your ship onto the battlefield in order to confuse enemies. Your position can also be swapped with the decoy's at any time during its lifetime effectively serving as a movement skill.
As the stereotype of the rogue/assassin characters this ship class uses daggers and similar ‘cutthroat’ type weapons which provide the fastest melee attack speed in the game. Daggers also deal an increased amount of critical damage, so if you find a way to get behind your enemies you become more effective with them. Executing a perfect hit with a dagger causes internal damage on the opponent which is similar to traditional bleed effects (ticking damage over time).
Development of the Manticore is only halfway there at the moment, so there’s little we can show you right now, but we’ll provide a more in-depth look on it in the future for sure. For now check out this sneak-peak of the aforementioned realm 1 boss versus an early Manticore “prototype”. :)
[previewyoutube="SDw1M6V2Epo;full"]
A wild contributor appeared!
The Steam Festival has had another positive effect on the team: we’ve gained a new contributor who helps out with additional game design and art tasks besides giving relevant feedback on almost every aspect of gameplay. He’s a fellow Hungarian in a similar age bracket so communication is quick and effective, and almost everything in this update already bears his mark in some way. So say hi to the 2nd Peter in the team. :)
Another festival?
Speaking of the Steam festival we’ve nominated Fabular to the Steam Game Festival Autumn Edition as well and decided to update the demo with the latest additions to showcase there. The festival will be held from October 7th - 13th, so you’ll have a chance to try most of the new stuff we’ve developed before the release of the Early Access. The demo will be limited to the first two realms and the Manticore class will not be playable, but otherwise it will contain the latest features of the game.
Keep in touch!
Just a reminder that If you have any questions, suggestions or just want to get in touch, the best way to do that is to join our Discord server. I pretty much hang in there all the time bar sleeping so you can send me a message or fire away on one of the public channels.
That’s it for now, we’ll get back to you with the details on the next Festival and the demo soon.
-- Batowski out
Fabular Live Stream
Hey everyone,
As part of the Steam Game Festival we'll be live streaming Fabular today (see event details on the exact time). The version we'll stream is not the demo but the current development version, so you can expect some new stuff even if you've played the demo before.
We hope you'll tune in and we'll be glad to answer your questions in the chat or on Fabular's Discord server:
Fabular Developer Q&A
Mountain-sized mushrooms?!
A ginormous castle in space shooting lasers?!
Ominous and quite-a-bit-mad-looking techno medieval spirit knights?!
A space-king surfing the spiritual realm in a mini-mancave-sarcophagus?!
A talking horse-head on a stick that contains all the knowledge of the kingdom?!
If you are confused / intrigued / shocked / delighted / moved / baffled / flabbergasted or feel that your thoughts have been provoked in any other way after being confronted with Fabular, there is a place for you to vent.
Join the official Discord server of the game when the Q&A event starts and pick the brain of two of the developers about how they came up with all this wacky stuff.
Or just drop by to say hi and stuff it always feels nice to hear your thoughts about the game.
See you around!
Fabular demo + new trailer available
Hey all,
As part of the Steam Games Festival - Summer Edition, Fabular: Once Upon a Spacetime's demo is available to play for everyone. Just head to the store page and click on the download demo button.
To celebrate this occasion we've made a brand new trailer to showcase the game. Check it out below:
[previewyoutube="DJ2vn_4xggQ;full"] If you do take the demo for a spin, please come by our Discord server and share your opinion! It is always nice to get in touch with our players.
