Dev Blog

Questing and Leveling Revamp

The questing and leveling of the first three zones of the game have been completely revamped and improved. Now quests flow into each other much smoother, allowing the leveling between 1 and 5 to be seamless.  To accommodate this revamp many changes were made to the game.

The content in the game up to this point has been added over the last couple years in segments without an overall care taken to consider how it all fits and flows together. That is what this revamp addresses.  Quests were modified to be simplier, more rewarding, and to move you in the direction of new quests. There should never be a point in the game where you don't have a new quest for long.

To further improve the feeling of the game's leveling experience it was also important to add the missing monsters to the rest of the world. Up until this point only two areas had monsters. But now all three zones have monsters.  No more placeholders.

Now when you are leveling you are not only gaining experience from quests but also from killing monsters. The amount of experience given by monster kills is low, because I don't want you to feel like you have to endlessly, mindlessly grind monster kills.  But gaining experience from just dialog driven quests felt like not enough, so I introduced...

New Feature: Hunts

Hunts are a supplemental questing system. Basically when you kill a hunt eligible monster on the victory screen will show your hunt progress. Once you kill enough of a certain monster you will complete the hunt. The hunt will give you bonus experience and gold, like a quest. But unlike a quest, you don't have to pick up the hunt or turn it in, the reward is given to you automatially when you complete the objective.

To make the Hunt system even more rewarding, when you complete all the hunts in a group you will get a large bonus reward of even more experience and gold.  All hunt rewards are one-time for each character. 

This design allows us to encourage you to kill monsters, but not the same one mindlessly. It encourages you to explore and find not only the remaining monsters to finish a hunt, but also to find the missing monsters to complete the hunt group.

To help you track your hunts a new tab has been added to your Quest journal.  This new tab shows all the hunts available, your progress, a hint on where to find the monster, and what your reward will be.

Once you reach max level the experience reward from hunts will be converted into gold, so you will get even more gold. 

As we grow the game with new zones and content, new hunts will be added.  So keep your eyes out!

Misc Changes:

• New: Login screen mute button and fullscreen button. Added by Charles.
• Experience needed to level each level has been increased slightly.
• All maps that should have monsters on them now do: be careful!
• The far reaches of the Domhan Beach with the Tidal Cave has been reworked to not be approachable by low levels. It is now found through a new tunnel cave full of high level monsters.
• The Tidal Cave itself has been relocated to the western shore of the Meadows.
• You may now get to the western shore of the Meadows via a new temporary board bridge.
• Paulo the Banker has finally moved into his newly constructed Bank building, located next door to the Inn in the Domhan Outpost.
• Many quests have been changed and reworked. Almost every quest was modified. So the exact changes will not be listed. Create a new level 1 character and see for yourself!
• All quests rewards have been reworked. Now quests give gear. By the time you complete all quests and reach level 5 you should have the gear neccessary to take on the Abandoned Windmill (with a party).
• All monsters attack faster and have had their stats adjusted to account for players who should now have a set of gear while leveling.
• Monsters who greatly under level you (their levels will be gray on the map) will no longer give experience.
• Monsters who greatly higher level than you (their levels will be red on the map) will have a high chance of dealing crushing blows and you will have a high chance of missing. 
• Encounter aggro behavior has been modified slightly. They will no longer get tethered as easy, and will reset more often when they can no longer reach you.

Bug Fixes:

• "Sell All Junk" now properly sells all your junk in one go once again.
• Using an item from your inventory, such as recipes or "honeycomb", will now properly disappear from your inventory.
• Using a consumable/targetable item, such as food, will now update the held quantity and close the targeting menu once you run out.
• Rapidly interacting with NPC's has been improved by imposing a minor delay (unnoticable).
• Using a potion while dead is no longer possible.
• Spamming space bar at the end of battle will no longer cause weird victory screens.
• Getting stuck in battle has a new failsafe: if you attempt to attack it will detect the battle is over and properly remove you from battle.

Known Bugs:

• Battle EXP is no longer earned at max level which is affecting the leaderboard.
• Cutscenes with movement will sometimes hang and never complete. This is remedied by restarting the game and doing the cutscene over again. If you encounter this issue please report it in Discord with a screenshot. Thank you!

What are you waiting for? Download the game and check out the game's latest Alpha patch now!

You may download the early Alpha access 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!

And don't forget to join us in Discord.gg/phanxgames to share your suggestions, find other players to play with, and hang out.