Greetings players! I’ve got a few new changes for both beginners and veterans to have fun with! Read below to see some fixes and some new features!
Fixes:
• Mortar and Pestle and Shovel are officially added to be crafted! Check your workbench and human crafting window! New features • The first part of a magic system has been implemented! Can you tame the energies of TerVarus? Read below for more info • Double the resources for double the fun! We have increased the spawn rate of all types of resources! Get molting, building, and other things twice as fast now!
Magic!
Tame the elements of TerVarus by reaching out to an energy to attune yourself to it, then to capture it! In order to even see the elements though you’ll need to craft special rings which you can find in the forge! Get your crafting on as you’ll need nuggets and special gems to craft a ring to contain the magics in the land!
Exile is back online!
As always I don’t want to over-promise, I’d rather over-deliver. Straight to the good news, everyone, Exile is back online! Also, for a limited time, Exile will be on sale for $8.99 starting December 17 before moving to a permanent price of $9.99! And those that have already purchased Exile will not have to purchase it again-you're free to play it already!
After emails, Discord DMs and message ravens, I’ve had more feedback than expected about Exile and I hear you all loud and clear. Those who bought or wishlisted Exile want the game brought back online, post haste. I’ve made some time to do just that and am hosting a master server.
With that said, the news is bitter-sweet as the future development of Exile is still going to be touch and go while I focus on Trials of Ascension, though if continued support and requests continue I’ll place more focus on Exile. All purchases of Exile will be used to help fund Trials of Ascension until such time I can put more focus back on Exile, however again, if more interest is shown in Exile I will put greater emphasis and money into Exile.
For information on the progress of Trials of Ascension, join the Discord channel, follow on Twitter and Facebook, and keep an eye on the website as news will be posted there.
Thank you and see you soon in TerVarus!
Open Letter to the Purchasers of Trials of Ascension: Exile
Hi All, I’m Parthuin, the owner of Dragonfire Entertainment and the new holder of the Trials of Ascension intellectual property rights. I’ve written, re-written and written again this letter and after a lot of thought, I decided it’s best to be honest and somewhat blunt.
Over the past two decades, Trials of Ascension has changed from an idea to a game in development, then that development was canceled. The project was resurrected, altered, compromised and yet again canceled. Reasons for those changes and eventual demise of the original Trials of Ascension are many and beyond the scope of intent for this letter with the initial founders of the project selling the IP to me with heavy hearts.
With that short history and explanation, I want to rip the band-aid off about Exile. The development of the game will resume at some point if there is sufficient demand. Those of you who bought the game are rightfully disappointed, upset, angry or a combination of. I do WANT to continue the development of Exile in earnest for all of you, to a point the game is as close to bug-free and stable as possible, however, I cannot say when that time will be. It may be in a week, month, or 6 months, but I don’t want to make promises I cannot keep, so I will not say the game will never be developed again, but for now, my attention is best utilized elsewhere. However, some internal testing has taken place and it isn't totally out of the question that the servers themselves for Exile may come back up and those that purchased it will be able to play again. This isn't guaranteed, so again, I won't promise that Exile will come back up, but it's a possibility in the future. If it does come up in the future though then the revenue from Exile will be used to further the development of Trials of Ascension.
All is not lost, though! I didn’t acquire the rights to Trials of Ascension to sit by and do nothing, quite the contrary. We have decided to focus on some of the original intentions set for the game, a multiplayer game with 3 initial races that all play very differently in a world full of lore crafted over many years by some very creative people. Some of those who crafted the lore were even fans of the game spanning back over those two decades. It wouldn’t be moral to scrap all of the love and dedication to start fresh with only my own ideas, because I’m a fan too! In fact, Trials of Ascension is already in a state of a late prototype with an early Alpha just around the corner!
The reason we were able to get a working prototype so quickly is that the original game we at Dragonfire Entertainment started on, an ambitious multiplayer game called Dragons of Ramrys, was halted when we learned that ToA was in trouble so we could figure out how to help. Some of the underlying framework and great knowledge gained from that initial project are instead being used to bring TerVarus to life. I’m a college-educated programmer working full time on ToA, in-excess 12 hours a day at times. We have a superbly talented animator and 3D artist, an awesome web developer, a project manager who is also a professional QA who used to work for Apple, Inc. and a video editor on board, though all part-time and some working pro-bono for now.
We want to save Trials of Ascension and Exile, we welcome you to be a part of the journey with us.
So, for those that would prefer the TL;DR version.
Trials of Ascension: Exile development is on hiatus with an unknown schedule to re-start development so we can work on Trials of Ascension closer to its original vision.
For more information, check out the revamped website: https://trialsofascension.com/
Ringing in 2019!
What a rollercoaster 2018 was for us! Just six months ago we Early Access launched ToA: Exile, and it has been an exciting journey since. In that time we have welcomed new team members, parted ways with a few others, and received a great deal of fantastic feedback from our community that has helped us improve the game as well as determine where to focus future development.
The team would like to share the departure of two team members with the community. Michael “Dyer3D” Dyer, one of our 3D artists, has decided to start down the hard road of creating his own studio. Meanwhile, one of our programmers Jesse “emrys90” Norris accepted the opportunity to pursue his passion for VR programming. We wish them both the best of luck and thank them for their contributions to the project.
Now that they have had a chance to settle in, I am excited to announce our new team members. First is David “KaliGS” Partouche. He joined the team as a programmer and has previously worked on AI at Atari and Frontier Development. We are very excited to have him on the team and David has already made solid contributions to the game’s development. Our second new team member is Corbin Reeves, who filled the position of Game Designer. He teaches game design at a university during the day and spends his evenings reviewing our game design documentation and improving the design. We’re eager to begin implementing several of his changes in the coming months.
We’re also looking to expand the team further! If you head over to our Hiring page, we have postings for a C#/Unity programmer, an Environmental Artist, and an Audio Specialist. If you have the skills for the job and think you would be a good fit for our team, you can send your application to contact@forgedchaos.com.
During the last two months, a few members of our art team have been busy working on a major upgrade to our customization system. Once all their changes have been fully implemented, players will be able to customize their character at a whole new level. Character height, shoulder, hip, and waist width, and facial characteristics will be customizable for humans. We are still determining what kind of customization we can include for raknar and dragons outside of the basics.
Additional steps for the dragon nests have been implemented and are in testing. More bugs have been tested, confirmed, and fixed as well, including the odd one that allowed for tree climbing.
Our first goals for 2019 include upgrading Unity to allow for greater native support, implementing several much requested improvements to the user interface, and the continued work on the dragon systems. We also want to make it so that the tutorials are less intrusive, correct some of the inconsistencies with interactions, and move the inventory to a grid system, so that icons won’t overlap anymore.
We haven’t forgotten the dragon gameplay improvements we promised! As much as we want to start adding additional content to the game, we feel that it is equally as important to fix any issues that exist in our current content. If he hasn’t started already, Corbin will be going over the the new dragon mechanics we’ve designed and look for anything we might have missed, find better methods to implement our goals, and so on. As we continue to develop the game, we will be looking into ways to permit design edits so that we could possibly allow modding of the game in the future.
A roadmap that outlines those mechanics, and other future mechanics, should be up soon on the website for you all to follow. As with the old roadmap, there won’t be any dates, but it will allow our fans to follow along with our progress and see the direction we want to go in the future.
Speaking of new features, that brings me to a few changes we are implementing now in the New Year in regards to updates. We had originally wanted to release a new build every month and include whatever we had finished in that time. However that wasn’t working well for us as a team and now we are instead going to release themed content updates with fully completed features. So that means that we will not be releasing a new build until the mechanic we are working on is completely implemented and as tested as we can get it in-house. The only exceptions to this will be patches to fix bugs that are discovered after the build is released.
The focus of the last two builds was on improving overall gameplay, fixing quality of life issues that rose up, and on laying the groundwork for the dragon improvements we have planned. But since most of that work is very programming-centric, the art team has been working on what they do best; models and animation!
They started with new customization options for the raknar and dragons, giving our players more eye and skin colors to choose from when they create a new character. My personal favorite is the green skin for the raknar and the charcoal color for the dragon. I’m still undecided on my favorite eye colors, though onyx does look good with the charcoal.
The hatchling animations received a lot of love from the animators in this build, and dragon players will notice the overall improvement when they go to raise their new-colored hatchling. The improvements include adjustments to the digging and swimming animations, the strafing animations, and the falling animation. They should all appear more natural and less twitchy.
Dragons weren’t the only ones to get animation improvements. Both the human and raknar received much needed healing animations. The humans also received a better sleeping animation and nearly a dozen emotes! You can see the complete list in this build’s changelog. The human model received his shoulder fix, and tweaks were made to most of his animations to work with that change, though it is still a work in progress.
The walk and run speeds of the Juvenile dragon have been adjusted to better match its size and animations. We’ve also slowed dragons’ max flight speed down, while increasing the Juvenile’s max climb speed while airborne. We think that these changes will give a better feel to flying, and we look forward to hearing your feedback on it! While we’re on the topic of flying, thank you to everyone who reported the bug with the Dragons’ flying ability; we are trying to identify why that ability seems to be having issues while the other dragon abilities are working as intended. As soon as we have a fix for it, we will let you all know!
Since raknar webbing was seriously tanking performance, we have introduced a decay mechanic to it. Raknar webbing will now last anywhere from 16 to 48 hours, based on the individual raknar’s Webbing evolution. We have plans to expand on raknar webbing in the future, along with other improvements for their game play once we finish our initial dragon improvements.
The new design elements for the dragons are coming along nicely. Though they are not usable yet, new dragon “stations” and items have been added to the game in preparation for the new mechanics. Dragons will also now be limited to a single nest, in preparation for the new nest changes our programmers are working on now. Dragons who have multiple completed nests will be able to continue to use them for the time being, but any new nest built will cause the previous nests to become abandoned.
Many other general improvements have been made to the game. We’ve toned down the motion blur and light shafts, adjusted terrain to create a more organic appearance, and added two new smaller islands to the Lost Isle map. They are significantly smaller than the main island, with the first able to fit a few houses and the second could permit a small, if very close, village. To find these new islands you will need to explore by flying or swimming. Though as I type this I am sure some enterprising raknar may find a way to reach them that we did not expect!
Ever since we implemented the particle effect for hit detection, a blood/gore toggle option has been a popular request, so we’ve implemented one for you all! We’ve also increased the stack size of many items, improved the radius of the campfire light, made small changes to the torches, and made several more small quality of life improvements.
The team here at Forged Chaos is looking to expand with two new positions.
We are looking for a programmer with experience in C# and is familiar with Unity. We are especially interested in someone who has AI or networking experience.
We have also posted a position for a game designer. Their focus will be on adjusting existing game data to improve the play experience and hammer out the details of new features for implementation.
Our latest build is available for beta testing through steam. It will not require a server reset, however you should back up your server database before updating if you plan to switch back and forth between builds!
You can read more about this build in our official forums at: http://trialsofascension.com/forum/threads/0-11.10862/
Build 0.10b2 is Live!
With our first Early Access patch just pushed out as we speak, I thought it would be a good time to go over what it is we have been working on since we launched a little over a week ago. This patch brings many quality-of-life changes for players, along with a very important database update! While I am going to review the biggest additions that are included in this massive patch, there is still more for you to find in it! To view the full change log for this patch, visit our website at:
http://trialsofascension.com/patchnotes.
The biggest change that players will notice is the new options for death penalties in the game. Dragons have had a death penalty in play since day one, where their molting progress was reset every time they died. It really wasn’t fair that only dragons got death penalties, so we added them to the humans and raknar too. Now when a human dies, they lose the progress toward their next level in their skills, and raknar lose the progress to their next rank of their abilities.
And if you prefer to play without death penalties, we have you covered there too! Server hosts can now adjust the death penalties on their servers, and can customize them on a per race basis. Want humans to lose all their progress when they die, but want to make it easier on the defenseless hatchlings? No problem! Run your server the way you want it. The death penalties cause a loss based on a percentage of the maximum required, with Extreme at 100% of maximum progress, Severe at 75%, Moderate at 50%, and Minor at 25%. Again, that is based off the total requirement for that level of skill, ability, or molting; not on the player’s personal progress.
Arguably the second biggest change for this patch is a change to our database engine. Our previous one seemed to work well enough, but after our launch we received many reports on file corruption and servers crashing, which we traced back to the database. Because of the stability and corruption issues we felt it was of high importance to get a new database structure in place as quickly as possible. This necessitates the resetting of the servers as they are updated to the new build. We realize that this is upsetting to some people, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We will do our best to avoid server resets in the future, but we are in Early Access and it will happen again eventually. If you feel that is too much to handle, please consider waiting until we fully release before purchasing the game.
Server hosts will also notice that the regeneration rates for resources have been removed as server options. Instead all resources will regenerate at a very fast rate, to keep up with player consumption. Server owners can still customize the scarcity or abundance of the plants, animals, and minerals to their liking, which changes the maximum limit of the resource for the island. The fauna also received a bit of love and we tweaked their spawning mechanics so they will spawn into the world closer to players than they did previously.
We’ve also made some adjustments to how a few resources can be collected to improve the overall quality-of-life for new players. We have made it so that the rocks needed for the primitive items and campfires can be harvested from boulders by humans with unarmed attacks. Clay, which is vital for both humans and dragons, has been added as a terrain type in a dozen locations across the isle, where it can be gathered in large quantities from the ground itself. Bits of clay and rocks can still be found scattered on the terrain, as well as harvested from boulders. Our last modification to terrain resources is to allow both grass and dirt to be gathered from the regular terrain, since dirt is naturally under the grass and grass should be available all over the green parts of the isle.
Dragons will notice now that choosing “harvest” as the default terrain action for gathering dirt, grass, sand, and clay will no longer auto-harvest nugget spawns. We hope that this will help new dragon players differentiate between consuming for molting versus harvesting. We have more plans to separate the two in the future, in case this doesn’t help.
For human crafting, we have lowered the fern fronds needed to make rope and the amount of clay needed to create bricks. The grass mat has also been renamed to “Sleeping Mat” to help explain its purpose and has been changed so it cannot be moved by anyone but the owner. In that same vein, the “Unfired” clay items have been changed to “Wet” to indicate their need to be dried and overall incomplete state. Humans can now use the primitive saw to build resource stands to store boards, timbers, logs, and stone.
We’ve heard from many of you that more feedback for your actions would enhance combat, so I think you will be pleased to know that we are working to improve it. We’ve added more sounds to combat along with particle effects when hitting an object or creature. This will help players to tell if their attacks landed or not, and what they hit with them when swinging. We are also looking into ways of relaying the target’s condition to the player without resorting to HP meters, but it was beyond the scope of improvements for this patch.
Video fidelity should be much improved, as we identified what was causing the “ghosting” effect and were able to fix it. We added the much-requested volume controls to the settings menu. There is now a master volume, along with Music, Ambient, and Effects controls. Music adjusts the volume of the background music played while on the server selection, character creation, and loading screens. The ambient controls the bird song during the day, the crickets at night, the patter of the rain, and the ocean roar. The effects are all sounds created by player or mob actions, including the chirping of the grubs.
Player feedback is vitally important to our development process. We have a clear idea of where we want to go with the game, but we also realize that this isn’t just about the game we want to make. It is also about making a game that others enjoy playing. Your feedback helps us identify what works, what doesn’t work, and how we can improve the overall experience for everyone. The bug reporting is also incredibly helpful as it allows us remove the errors from the game faster than we could do on our own.
Again, there is too much in this patch to cover in one article, so be sure to check the change log out yourself! Thank you all for your continued support in our development and we hope you all enjoy the updates in this patch! It is the first of many more to come. Share your thoughts with us in the comments below or visit our official forum at: http://trialsofascension.com/forum/.
Taking a Look Ahead: What we have planned for ToA: Exile
So we have pretty much covered everything that is currently in the game through this article series. At least enough for our followers and those just finding us to get a feel for what the game can offer them at this time in development. But what we have planned for the future is at least as important as what we have already achieved.
We’ve updated our website this past week, and along with it we’ve added a new roadmap of what the team wants to achieve before we consider development complete. While it is still a rudimentary list, it does clearly show what we want for ToA: Exile. This list is by no means definitive; more may be added to it over time. But it does include all of our must-haves. Once we have all the details worked out for each new addition we will expand on the smaller steps to achieve our goals.
The first section covers characters. We still have three more growth stages to add for the dragons, and the female model for the humans is needed too. Both of those have HUGE resource requirements, so our art team will be kept busy on them for a very long time. We also want to add so much more to customization for the characters. Hairstyles, scale colors, chitin patterns, the list goes on and on. We want everyone to have a good chance of making a character that looks different than the others of its race.
Right now all of the characters will spawn at random locations on the beach, but we want to change that so only humans will spawn on the beach. The raknar will then spawn in the caves and the dragons up in the safety of the mountains. This fits nicely into the background story of each race, with the humans washed up on shore, the dragons hatching in the peaks, and the raknar finding their way up from the depths.
Speaking of caves, we want to expand on our underground world. Currently needlefangs will spawn in the caves, but we want a full ecosystem to exist below. This means adding flora and more fauna to the area, and then give reasons for the surface races to seek them out.
We also want to beef up combat a bit more. It has always been our goal to have siege warfare in the game so that humans could destroy each other’s structures, and so that the older dragons could also erase humans from their islands. This will require several models and animations, in addition to the supporting mechanics that will need to be programmed into the game. Being made of wood, rustic buildings will take less effort to destroy than the Norhaven.
Structures are a big part of human play, so we want to continue to expand on the foundation we have for them. We want to make it so that players can add-on existing structures. We also want to add a third, castle-like style that is even stronger than the Norhaven style. Stone walls as a more sturdy alternative to the wooden palisades is also a possibility.
Humans will receive a little more love in the form of new skills, such as farming, trapping, fishing and so on. They will also receive new crafting recipes to go along with the new skills. The new items, models, icons, and data entry to go along with this will take some time, as will the mechanics to allow for these actions.
Magic is something we have been contemplating for a very long time for ToA: Exile. We did have the basics for magic in the very earliest of our testing, but the system we developed was overly grindy and did not work for the game. So we went back to the drawing board and came up with a system that we felt better fit our game and the goals we had for magic. However, the scale of it is immense and we felt that we did not have the resources to do it justice before we went Early Access. We are excited to start working on getting magic back into the game, so that dedicated human players can attempt to challenge the stronger stages of dragon growth.
In addition to the final growth stages, dragons will be getting more love in the future as well. We want to expand on their nests so that dragons can utilize them for more than just their molting and storage. We are still working out the details, but we want to give them nest customization options, and figure out a way to empower the dragons to protect their nests from damage. Hoard mechanics are a possibility as well, but we will have to find what makes sense for ToA: Exile.
We also want to expand on draconic abilities. Dragon fans can look forward to both claw attack and tail swipe abilities added to their list alongside their bite, wings and so on, so that they will improve with use over time.
Not to be left out, the raknar will get an improvement to their web weaving and we will introduce hive mechanics to the game. Hives are built by a group of raknar, and any eggs they place within the hive will hatch out as NPC spiderlings. They will eventually grow into specialized roles, such as guard or egg tender, and there will be benefits to participating in a hive versus playing alone. We aren’t exactly sure what those benefits will be, but we will let you all know as soon as we do!
We also want to expand on the options for server hosts. We will add several new settings for fauna danger, racial life counters, and the option to have an interracial chat to allow the three races to communicate with one another. We also want to add additional islands for the temperate biome, and then add an entirely new biome to the game! This is a big undertaking, because it not only means a new island, but also new flora and fauna to populate it!
Once again, this list is not definitive. There is much more we would like to add, but for now we will work towards completing this roadmap just as we did our last one, and will will share every step with you along the way. You can count on it! So be sure to follow us on social media or join our discord to get the latest information on our development.
A special thanks to our team members, our testers, and our fans. We wouldn’t have gotten this far without your efforts and support! Please share your thoughts or the story on how you found us in the comments below.
