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Aether Story: Alpha Patch 0.3.19 is now Live!

Categories: Aether Story Patch Notes
Written by thephantom on Feb 04 2020

This post outlines all the changes for the 0.3.x minor patches that were included in the Alpha 3 release cycle.  Missing minor patch numbers are a result of minor patches that were rolled into the next release, this is mainly a result of our patching system incrementing when we don't always want it to.

Change Log

0.3.10

  • New Feature: Game Installer
    • When downloading the Windows version of the Aether Story game Launcher you will now find the game packaged in a Setup installer, instead of a zip file.
    • You no longer will need to manually extract the zip file and create shortcuts. The installer will take care of this for you.
    • The installer will also include an uninstaller to help clean up the game's installation and shortcuts.
  • New Feature: Entity Names On Hover
    • Ever wondered who that NPC was but didn't want to have to talk to them to find out? Now you can see who every one is by simply mousing over them.
    • Currently all entities of importance have names on hover, this includes signs, telepads, quest objectives, merchants, and named NPC's.
    • In the future we will add ways for you to disable this feature and for you to hold in a key to have all names appear on the screen at once.


Hovering over NPC's now show their name and their titles if applicable.

 

  • New Feature: Quest Experience After Each Quest Stage
    • Instead of holding the experience reward until the end of the quest chain, you will now get experience after completing each stage of the quest.
    • This greatly improves the rewarding feel of progressing through quests.
    • In the quest log you will see the total experience gain if you were to do all steps of the quest.
    • Completing a quest will give you the missing portion of experience you have yet to gain.
    • If you abandon a quest and attempt to redo the objectives, you will NOT gain experience the second time.

 

  • New Feature: Experience Bubbles
    • To help make the questing experience even more rewarding, when you gain experience you will now get a purple notice in the middle of the screen. This notice will turn into experience bubbles that fly to your experience bar and pop on impact.
    • This effect gives an audio visual reward to gaining experience and it feels very rewarding.


Gaining experience after the first stage of the quest now shows experience bubbles flying to the bottom of the screen!

 

  • New Feature: Minimap Icon Rework
    • The Minimap has more useful information displayed on it than ever before.
    • New quests will now show up as yellow exclamation points (!) on the minimap.
    • Quest Objectives will now show up as yellow dots on the minimap.
    • Quest turn-ins now show up as fatter yellow dots on the minimap.
    • All non-quest related NPC's and NPC's that don't aid you in your current quests will now show up as grey dots on the minimap.
    • Merchants and other notable NPC's have new visual icons on the minimap.  Such as telepads are show up as blue diamonds, and merchants show up as bags of coin.

 

  • New Feature: Sound Effects
    • All quest objectives now have sound effects when collecting them. This helps make progressing through a quest even more rewarding.
    • Certain UI actions now have sound effects, including Selling items and Taking items from chests.
    • Opening treasure chests now has a sound effect.
    • Teleporting on a Telepad now has a new sound effect.

 

  • New Feature: Jumping down off of ledges
    • You may now jump down off of short ledges.
    • This is a game changer! Imagine heading down a long ledged path to find a chest and a deadend. Your only choice is to head back the way you came. But not now! With the ability to jump down off the ledge, you can get back move on with your adventure instantly!
    • This changes the way we design and approach locations.  We can create ledges at the end of dungeons to get back to the entrance, for example.
    • We are still working on improving the controls for jumping down.  Currently it is a bit too easy to trigger and makes certain areas challenging if you fall off by accident.
    • High cliff edges will still be unpassable.


Jumping down off of hill ledges. Wee!

 

  • Quest Changes:
    • Hungry Adventuring
      • An additional frog has been spotted on the log bridge, little guy is now blocking your way before you finish the quest. But good news! Once you finish the quest you will now be able to use the bridge as a shortcut.
    • Meadery Beedicament
      • The Goldenrod flowers have been spotted closer to the Meadery and are now easier to obtain.
      • Dizcus now requires all 18 beehives to be gathered instead of 16, why did he ever want to leave two hives without honey is anyone's guess... all that lost profit!
      • Dizcus has decided to give you a few mugs of his finest brew as a quest reward.
    • Scholarly Research
      • The research book objectives now have an entry for each book location, thanks to Malcolm the Instructor remembering who borrowed his books.
      • Turns out the Ley Lens wasn't missing radient energy afterall, so you no longer need to collect the pristine seashells.
    • Fixing For Love
      • Moira has decided to give you some of her Big Momma Stew for helping her.
      • Jacob misremembered where Lanchet cave was, and now tells you its to the north of the Lumberyard. (Moving the cave to the north will help prevent confusion of players having problems finding the cave in its original position to the south... there were far too many caves to the south that confused players.)
    • Construction Objstruction
      • Constructor Worker Bob has decided to change his daydreams from nature and waterfalls to something else... this will help make Bob a bit easier to find.
      • The Foreman has decided that you helping him get the permit and his workers back onboard is enough of your time and trouble, and will now reward you at this point.
      • Perhaps in the future you will be able to help him with more construction work.
    • As a Matter of Axe
      • The amount of grindstones required has been reduced.
    • Miscellaneous:
      • All quest experience rewarded has been drastically increased.
      • Some quest rewards have been changed: mostly more gold is now rewarded.
      • Quest objectives that aren't currently active are no longer interactable, to help avoid confusion on items that aren't ready for you to worry about.
      • Quest Reward item choice selection will not default to the first choice, which now forces you to make a decision.  If you try to close the reward window the "Choose your reward" text will now shake as a hint as what you need to do.

 

  • Other Changes:
    • The Abandoned Windmill in the Meadows has been opened, while there are no monsters in there yet, you can explore it to find some hidden treasures.
    • All donors who have donated at least $300 have had their names added to the game as gravestones. Check out the Outpost graveyard to learn about these forgotten heroes of legend!
    • Two new stairs have been craved out of the cliff faces in the Domhan Road area by Dizwin enigneers. They said something about how it should help travelers who kept getting turned around in the area.
    • Unreachable frogs in the Domhan Road area have gone missing, but its for the best, as hungry adventurers were frustrated that they weren't able to reach them.  Don't worry rumor has it someone ate them.
    • That beached boat in the Outpost now is approachable... turns out the boat isn't that scary after all.
    • The Outpost guard has installed a new road sign near the Command Hall to help direct adventurers to nearby areas.
    • The Dizwin engineers were at it again, and they terraformed some cliffs near the Abandoned Windmill to make that area leading to the Rookery less confusing.
    • The amount of [Cursed Vials] and [Poison] stored in the chests around the Outpost has been reduced... someone was out to hurt you adventurers and have put measures in place to prevent him from tampering with chests.
    • Your gold balance now shows up on the Merchant Sell screen.
    • The "E" key can now be used to interact with objects and entities in the world.
    • Character name creation now attempts to prevent you from using suggestive or offensive words. While this isn't perfect, it should reduce the number of bad names. Players may still need to report any players who circumvent this prevention.

 

  • Bug Fixes:
    • More small flowers and rocks should be passable, improving the navigation of maps.
    • Character Creation should no longer show erroneous hairstyles in a layer behind the character you are creating.
    • The amount of gems shown in the main menu now correctly shows your gem balance instead of showing your gold balance erroneously.
    • The button to "Sell All Junk" is now disabled if you have no junk.
    • Other character's facing information is now relayed to other clients. Now you can see players turn to face objects and walls.
    • Using the "Tab" key while selecting telepad locations will no longer remove keyboard focus of the selection list.
    • While selecting a telepad's locations you may now use the "W" and "S" keys to move up and down respectively, in addition to the arrow keys and mouse.
    • The Heads-Up-Display (HUD) now correctly fades out when you teleport to a new map position on the edge of the screen.

0.3.12


The new Tall Grass visual effect. Notice your feet are now hidden.

  • A new visual effect has been added to the tall grass in the game. Now when you or anyone (or anything) walks through tall grass their feet will be hidden.  This does not affect game play but provides that little extra of detail.  This is something I always wanted to add, and the idea on how to implement came to me, and I just had to try it out. Took less than an hour to add. Download the latest Alpha patch and check it out for yourself.
  • Various hill ledges around the world have been edited to prevent you from falling into an eternal trap.  If you ever find yourself trapped in the Alpha use the the "/return" chat command to break free, please don't abuse this command.
  • New hill ledges have been added around the world to improve navigation.
  • The music volume has been globally turned down in comparassion to the sound effects. Feel free to adjust your audio settings in the Settings Menu.
  • Fixed a bug where quest objectives would have their names stay in the world even after the objective was erased.
  • Fixed a bug where the UI elements would sometimes go semi-transparent and would not be properly restored.

0.3.13

  • New Feature: Character Animation and Rotation in the Character Creator.
    • Now you can preview what your character will look like from all angles before you play it.
    • These new options are below the "Random" button in the Character Creator.
  • Bug Fixes:
    • Invisible non-passable tiles near the Witch's Hut in the forest have been removed.
    • Chat losing focus when clicking a channel tag while already focused no longer happens.
    • Using an item and canceling on the target screen now allows you to continue using additional items.
    • Chat scroll bar thumb now has a minimum height, so it doesn't get too small to click on.

0.3.14

  • Bug Fixes:
    • Other players jumping off of hills should now properly animate.
    • Various hills around the world have been fixed so you cannot climb up them and get trapped.
    • The level cap of Level 5 is now enforced properly and your experience will not go past it.
    • Using an experience giving item will fail if used when at the level cap or higher.
    • Improved context loss further, it should no longer occur. Context loss is when the screen goes black when another application causes the game to lose GPU rendering context.

0.3.15

  • New Feature: Illegible Scrolls now take you to 4 new hidden areas full of hidden treasures.  Be sure to not sell them and use them at a chance to find awesome riches!
    • Note: You may buy Illegible Scrolls from Mahua the merchant in the Outpost. He restocks them at most every 5 hours, but you will be fighting other players for them... limited supplies!
  • New Feature: Party Accept Invite Confirmation.  You are now prompted with a Party invite dialog if you are have the "Auto Accept Party Invites" setting turned off.  This setting should most likely be turned off by default in a future patch.
  • New Feature: Root Cave added to the meadows that is a Dizwin's home. Be sure to stop by and say hi.
  • New Feature: The Domhan Forest (Southern Forest) has been expanded to have a larger maze area in the northern half of the map.  As a result all chests and hidden items in the map have been reset, have fun finding some new chest nodes!
  • General Improvements:
    • Character names are now subject to a bad word filter and character filter. You no longer will be able to create characters of just symbols or naughty words.
    • Game Masters now show up in game with special color and tag. Be sure to say hi!
    • The meadows chest loot tables have been changed once again to reflect better loot. You should get even less bones now!
  • Bug Fixes:
    • General Party Bug Fixes, including: errors when you attempt to invite yourself, players who are offline, or when you try to kick a player who is offline.  The party commands should run without any errors now.
    • Mousing over entities and moving should now hide the labels.
    • Pressing enter while creating a character or while a failed logging alert appears will not trigger the wrong actions.
    • Several more hills have had their collision data fixed.
  • Known Issues:
    • Entities and other players who are slightly out of range will sometimes get stuck and appear to no longer move or be invisible.  This is a known issue and will be addressed in a future patch.

0.3.19

  • New Features:
    • Alpha Funding Pane - now you can get limited edition pets and rewards if you donate a certain amount per month. These rewards will only be made available the month in which they are released, if you don't unlock it you will never be able to get it. Don't miss out!
      • A new monthly Community Fundraising Goal has also been added to the Alpha Funding Pane.  This goal allows everyone to work together to unlock a bonus feature.
      • Be sure to check every month for updated goals and rewards in the Alpha Funding pane.
    • Pet Followers - you may now have a pet follow you around the map, other players will see your pet, you may use it as a way to customize your character, and you may show off to other players your rare pets.  Currently only one pet is available in the game: the Pink Slime Pet - available if you donate $10 of the month of February 2020 as a Alpha funding reward.
    • Collections Menu - allowing you to browse your collection of pets, and in the future other collectable items, such as costumes, weapon skins, and more.
  • General Improvements:
    • Party Auto Accept setting is no longer enabled by default.
    • A new "Report Bugs" button has been added to the main menu along the top title bar.
    • Beehives should no longer be interactable before you are on the quest objective.
    • The Domhan Forest music track has been remastered and should now have balanced audio levels. Be sure to head on over to the forest and take a listen for yourself!
    • Dev Stream Status - on the character selection screen, allowing you to know if you are missing a live Twitch stream of the game's behind the scene development.
  • Bug Fixes:
    • Entities and other players who are slightly out of range should no longer get stuck and appear to no longer move or be invisible.
    • Map tile glitches near the Rookery entrance have been resolved.
    • Several tiles that allowed you to walk up hills have been fixed.

Ready to experience this patch yourself?

You may download the early Alpha access now easily through itch.io:

We are really enthusiastic to have you play our game! Being a small indie game
dev company, we depend on your support to keep us going.
Please consider making a small donation to help us fund the continuous
development of Aether Story! It will really help us out.

 

If you already have Alpha Access, head on over to the Game Downloads page and download the new Launcher Setup Installer!

 

Please let me know if the quality of life improvements have improved your enjoyment and feeling of reward!

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Comments

Dec 06 2019 at 09:22 AM

EllixOnline says

I'm enjoying the game so far :) I like all the work you've done on it and I can see this project getting far! Don't give up! It's gonna be awesome Can't wait for the combat to be implemented

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