Join us as for our weekly Dev stream as Game Designer Mike starts a new build for July. Come and ask any questions you have about Last Epoch and its development.
Join us as for our weekly Dev stream as Game Designer Mike starts a new build for July. Come and ask any questions you have about Last Epoch and its development.
Join us as for our weekly Dev stream as Game Designer Mike starts a new build for July. Come and ask any questions you have about Last Epoch and its development.
A while back we posted a Dev Blog post on our Beesfriends: Community Guides and Moderators program. We like being open with what we’re doing and different programs we operate, so we’re doing the same kind of thing here today for the Community Tester Program.
As such, for today’s Dev Blog post, we’re going to spend a bit of time to cover what the program is, why we have the program, what the goals of the program are, and what exactly Community Testers do. Lastly, with multiplayer coming up quickly, we’re also going to be expanding our roster of Community Testers, so will be going over what’s involved in joining the program, and how to go about applying!
What is the Community Tester Program?
Back when we started getting into development cycles for Last Epoch, we only had a handful of development team members, with a hardcore passion for ARPGs. While this handful of members had extensive experience with the genre, we wanted a group of individuals to help review what was being created and provide feedback from more ranges of experience rather than just the most hardcore of crowd. The reason we did this as a closed off group is because many of these items get tested in an incomplete state. While Last Epoch is an early access game, we constantly aim for each main patch to be a polished experience. Having a select group of individuals to help review changes before they are fully complete helps us to refine and steer the direction of the game, improving the quality of our releases without negatively impacting the gameplay experience of our wider playerbase.
As the team here at Eleventh Hour Games continued to grow with the amazing support of our community, we have continued to evolve our development processes including our internal QA department and their interactions with our Community Testers. Our Community Testers have been a very valuable resource for helping us continue to refine the Last Epoch experience, and as such we have decided that we want to keep the program moving forward. Being involved in and working closely with our community is core to us, so having community members as part of our development process helps define part of what Eleventh Hour Games is. As such, we’re doubling down on the Community Tester program; clarifying its goals and how it operates, as well as expanding the program to continue to make Last Epoch even greater and maintain our close relationship with our community.
Why Community Testers?
The Community Tester program is sometimes seen as an “early access” to the early access, however this is not the case. Sometimes, core parts of the game aren’t available in builds we release to Community Testers, as we haven’t finished working on changes but need feedback on other parts of the game. We didn’t want to have the entire community experience these kinds of “half completed states”, so we recruited a number of players who were willing to do so. Because of the nature of some items and mechanics, and how they can change quite considerable before release or even be removed entirely, testers need to be under a non-disclosure agreement. As such, due to these partial states, we couldn’t do simple opt-in betas. At the same time, we wanted to ensure the direction of the game continued to match to our community, so hiring internal staff for this didn’t make sense. And so, the Community Tester program was born.
As explained above, Community Testers have contributed greatly to help shape Last Epoch over the years. A great example of something our Community Testers have helped steer the direction of is with Dungeons. Originally, our Dungeons didn’t offer any sort of modifiers when progressing between areas. With Community Tester feedback we added these modifiers to make progressing through the dungeon more engaging and provide choices with the dungeon progression itself. As we’ve continued to expand upon these dungeons, we’ve continued to refine this method, in some cases having the modifiers directly effect the dungeon reward such as the case with Soulfire Bastion to further drive incentive for decision making with which doors to take and make them more engaging.
Multiplayer Testing and Joining the CT Program
The CT program will be evolving as we start ramping up our Multiplayer testing. While we may have previously been primarily focused on gameplay feedback, we now need testers for a variety of reasons such as stress testing as well as helping us assure the quality and stability of our online live releases. We will absolutely still be looking for gameplay feedback, but at least initially we will be prioritizing the overall multiplayer experience and not necessarily balance. We will be looking for feedback on subjects like “how does it feel to join another player who’s at a different point of gameplay from yourself?”.
This will not be the case forever. As as we mentioned in our June development update, over time our team will be turning to balance as we iron out the kinks of the overall experience. Ultimately these dedicated testing periods will help us grow our online platform and ensure that we have the best quality launch possible and participation from our Community Testers will be a fundamental part of our journey.
With that being said, we’re looking to considerably expand the current roster of Community Testers. We’re looking for more Community Testers in the near future. Many more. If you’re interested in participating in the CT Program, here’s a few things to know and help decide if you might fit into the program:
Community Testers do need to sign an NDA. This means you cannot discuss anything you’ve seen or learned about through the tests or chat channels for CT’s even to friends and family. It is also your responsibility to protect any information you have access to - so if you’re on a shared PC this may be difficult. Because of the NDA, you must also be eligible to sign an NDA contract (be age of majority, and not have any conflicting contracts)
Experience with testing, debugging and gameplay design is *not necessary*. We encourage Community Testers to engage in the provided content how they want to play it, the less thought put into it the better. Balance is good, gameplay is better, feelings are best.
Community Testers are expected to provide their feedback in a structured way within provided channels. We of course provide guidance to help with this, but this ensures we can collect the feedback and be able to act on it.
Community Testers experience partial versions of the game - it’s not just a way to get the latest updates early. Community Testers are a vital part of our design process and provide invaluable feedback in how we continue to evolve Last Epoch into the game for the community as a whole to enjoy.
While Community Testers are not expected to uphold the same standing as members of the Beesfriends are, Community Testers are still expected to be in good standing with the community. So following the code of conduct, as well as being active and collaborative members of the community can certainly contribute to someone’s assessment as a CT.
There are no commitments to be available for any specific time or any specific test, or any required schedule at all. This is of course a volunteer community program, and we above all want to ensure we’re always respectful and appreciative of our community members who want to try to help shape the future of Last Epoch.
We’re excited to talk more about multiplayer, and 0.9.0 in the near future with more updates and teasers as we start getting closer to the next big update, and hope to see you all there!
The Steam Summer Sale has just arrived and with it comes the final early access sale for Last Epoch! This will be the last time you see Last Epoch on sale for quite a while so if you haven’t already, now is the best time to join us.
If you haven’t been keeping up, we have a huge amount of new content that has been added to the world of Eterra just this year alone. A massively expanded endgame, new skills, reworked masteries, new legendary and unique Items, and a whole host of other content! With multiplayer launching later this year, you won’t want to miss this sale!
To see all the exciting updates, be sure to check the announcements page on our forums!
Join us as for our weekly Dev stream as Game Designer Mike continues working on his Primalist, Herald of the Scurry (Squirrel Companion) build. Come and ask any questions you have about Last Epoch and its development.
Hello Travelers, and welcome to the June Development Update for Last Epoch! In this Development Update, we’re going to be uncovering some information regarding the next big update coming to Last Epoch, some updates on multiplayer progress, and as always, a bunch of teasers regarding some of the new content coming to the world of Eterra!
To start things off, let’s have a quick note regarding how multiplayer progress is going. We’ll dive into more detail here in a bit, but just a quick mention regarding how testing has been going, and what the results mean for us.
Simply put - It’s going amazing.
We greatly appreciate everyone’s patience as we’ve been spending the time to get everything in the background into place: account services, our debugging tools, ensuring stability, and more tasks that are hard to perceive on the surface but are essential for a solid online experience. This work is paying off in the testing phase. In fact, It’s been going so well, we’ve decided to make a “minor” adjustment to our schedule. We had previously implied in passing here and there that the next major update would be 0.8.6 which is what we were initially planning. That’s no longer the case. Instead, we’re going to take a little bit more time to reach our MVP, and make the next update 0.9.0.
That’s right - Multiplayer testing has been going so well we’ve made the call: The next major update for Last Epoch will be Update 0.9.0, with the Multiplayer Beta!
We are calling this the beta because we will have all the existing systems and content fully playable online, but we won’t be done tailoring the *entire* Last Epoch experience to be ready for our full launch. We’ll touch on this more in the Multiplayer section in a moment.
This means a lot of really big things for Last Epoch, and is unbelievably exciting for the team here at EHG. Not only are we able to now set a delivery timeline on a core part of the experience wanted by so many community members, as well as ourselves; but by completing multiplayer into the core experience of Last Epoch, this also means we’ll be able to complete other content more quickly, and sooner. This is due to the reduced replication required for working on two separate “Single Player” and “Multiplayer” projects. To clarify this - Last Epoch will still have an “Offline Single Player” mode, it just means from our perspective we’re no longer working on two completely different versions of the game code simultaneously.
Of course, as per the last development update, multiplayer is not our only focus right now. Our next major update will still also have a significant focus on addressing our largest areas of community feedback for Last Epoch: Performance, and Combat Feel. We’re going to be diving into a bit more detail regarding these two big areas of feedback here as well in this Development Update.
But no time right now to mull over that big news, let's start diving into some of the details!
Multiplayer
Multiplayer at the Core of Last Epoch
We have made immense progress in the last few months to ensure not only that “Multiplayer” isn’t a separate project, but also to create a truly immersive and seamless online experience.
Although we have many more tests on the horizon, our confidence is growing as a result of our last set of multiplayer community tests. As we mentioned in our last update, we have spent a lot of effort on our back-end services, systems, and telemetry. It was quickly clear just how much that effort had paid off as by the second round the testers turned their focus from bugs and issues to instead discuss design feedback and new possibilities for the game.
While we have some more work to get the remaining content online ready, all designs from this point are fully made with multiplayer in mind. We are confident enough to say that by the time 0.9.0 is out, we will be already working on new content, such as new skills, without having to sacrifice progress towards our final goal. We know that multiplayer will be at the very core of Last Epoch and will be critical for supporting long term development.
The 0.9 Beta Update
The 0.9 update will be the multiplayer Beta of Last Epoch. As we stated above, we are calling this the beta because 0.9 will be bringing existing features and content online. Our vision includes more features and changes that we haven’t discussed much lately, but are aspects we consider fundamental. For example, we have some missing masteries that we believe will truly help make the game feel more complete.
Beyond new content or systems, we will want gameplay and balance to be in the best possible state for 1.0. We expect a lot of new players with 1.0 and we want to polish the new player experience, including for offline players. We will also be paying close attention to what changes need to be made once everyone starts playing together.
As we explained in our last update, we are building up to being an online game and multiplayer balancing will be a part of that. While we have made great strides lately to develop our skills as a group, that transition doesn’t happen overnight or even over a few months. We are just starting this process now, so we have more to do and more to learn, but are excited for the future.
Updates From Last Post
Finished or Nearly Finished Content
But that’s enough of the heavy stuff. We have some pretty exciting updates from our last post. Since then we have finished or nearly finished getting some smaller bits of content AND some much larger pieces of content online. Here are just some of these changes: - Transform Abilities - Chests - Monolith - UI Improvements (player cards, minion cards, player in menu UI) - Ailment changes and improvements
Online Platform and Service Improvements
One of the most challenging parts of our development, which we talked about back in November 2021, has been working on making our online services more robust. It’s incredibly difficult to make these improvements and changes alongside the development of the rest of the features and because these services are so fundamental. This has meant we’ve had to make a lot of hard decisions regarding where to spend our focus and effort, but has also meant that it’s slowed us down in the past.
We’re happy to say that we’ve made some incredible progress here lately which includes finishing the migration of our chat to this new service (though there is further polish needed). We’ve also significantly reduced crashes and disconnects in part due to our rapidly improving telemetry.
This has meant that we’ve been able to turn to improving server performance as well. There are some unique performance challenges that online ARPGs have to overcome to make sure the experience is smooth. Some examples include managing physics and positioning for MANY actors and precise abilities, making sure that servers have some long lasting memory to handle systems like parties going through echos, or always having servers ready when players transition to new zones.
We are fortunate that as we’ve grown we have gained some amazingly talented people that are well equipped to handle these problems and will keep us well on track to reach our goal for 0.9 and 1.0. ## Getting to 0.9.0
In order to start getting ready for being online, we are now we are building up our multiplayer alpha. We have a few specific goals for the alpha: - Have a 24/7 Online Last Epoch for testers - Limit down time to being under 3 hours while still having regular updates - Learn better branch and environment management - Be able to maintain a large CCU
We are excited to share the good news that we are already on the cusp of having a fully 24/7 Online Last Epoch for our community testers. In order to achieve these goals we will be expanding our community testing program.
We will have more details on our plans to expand the program *relatively* soon, so please refrain from poking Kain *too* much.
Ongoing Efforts
For our efforts to address community feedback, we’re sharing a bit more details here concerning Performance optimization, Combat Feel, and a few other areas of significant community feedback.
Optimization
We've recently finished our first pass of level optimization - all the levels have been reviewed and optimized, and there's a huge performance increase across the board. Generally speaking, the background FPS should be more leveled now, with less areas that perform significantly lower than others.
For example, every zone in the game had its Draw Calls (the amount of objects visible at a time) manually fixed. By combining certain objects we've managed to make the scenes more uniform with less FPS drops. The result is an area that looks the same, but considerably less costly on the CPU side; Because of this, some of the slower areas in the game have seen an increase of up to 40 FPS.
What's next?
As part of the ongoing optimization effort, we're now taking a look at performance drops during combat; We've identified a few factors causing those to happen and are working on them.
For example, with the Ancient Dragon, a change in the shaders of the particle effects resulted in FPS increasing from 50 to 90 during his attacks.
We're going over every attack and special effect to make sure there are no dips. The goal is to have a persistent, stable FPS across the gameplay experience, so our next step is to make combat as smooth as possible.
More posts on the ongoing performance optimizations to come: we'll make sure to keep you informed of these improvements as they happen!
Combat Feel
In our May Development Update, we mentioned for combat feel we had started work on introducing new death animations as well as on-death effects. Over the last month, we’ve continued to tune these and get them ready for the updated combat feel experience for Last Epoch. In addition to these improvements, combat feel can be impacted by not only “how” you fight, but “what” you fight. As such, we’re also expanding on enemy variety adding completely new enemies, and updating some older enemies to newer models and animations.
These efforts are directed to improve this part of the experience and continue to refine the representation of the denizens of Eterra, making their origins creepier, more fantastic, or more exciting in general. This also helps to bolster their unique identity within the world of Eterra to give them each a more distinct experience. For this, we have to share a couple of new enemies coming to Last Epoch.
Void Penance
In this corner, we introduce the void master of arms, Void Penance! This creepy new enemy can be found within the most corrupted areas of Eterra, and is ready and willing to lend one of its many hands to anyone that feels like getting a bit too close. This also introduces one of our new death animation techniques that we’ve been working on for combat feel.
Voidfused Earth
While Voidfused Earth enemies can be found within Eterra currently, we felt that they didn’t have a unique enough appearance. So while this new enemy shares the same name, that’s about all it shares. This new Voidfused Earth is ready for both ranged and melee attackers alike, so make sure you keep an eye out for these corrupted eart- rending enemies!
Updated Equipment Models
Our efforts also continue on the equipment models front as with every update to provide a more visually appealing aspect to upgrading your character. Our goal here is for every Armor Set, unique Weapon, and Unique offhand to have a distinct appearance. In keeping with the last Development update, we’re sharing here a couple more examples of new Armor Set models which we’re working on for the second highest tier of armor for the Mage and Primalist, and a few more 3D models for unique items!
Mage
Primalist
Torch of the Pontifex
Battlemage's Endeavour
The Last Laugh
Hakar's Phoenix
Summons
We last revealed some of the new summon designs with the concept art for the new Primal Bear, Primal Sabertooth, and the Acolyte’s Golem, however there’s another that’s getting a bit of a glow up. With this summon, we’re going to play a little game of spot the difference. If you’ve been following our dev streams, you may have already seen this teaser, but no cheating! Comment below if you think you can spot the differences between the old and new versions of the Forge Guard’s Manifest Armor summon!
Community Events
From April 18th through May 27th we ran our first ever Community Designed Unique event. Over this time period, we held a total of seven polls to decide on a new unique to be introduced into Last Epoch - one of the community’s design. The weapon type, unique effect, name, everything was decided by the community through six and a half thousand votes. And the result from this was fantastic. From the Community Designed Unique event we have the new “Lament of the Lost Refuge” which will be releasing in 0.9. If you missed this event, we’d like to show you this new item (note affix values may not be final):
There were some very close and exciting races in the votes during the event, but the end result is certainly a very interesting one-of-a-kind item. Granting an all-new damage conversion, and providing character buffs rather than only directly granting power to a particular skill. This grants the item a lot of flexibility in how its power is leveraged. We’re really excited to see all the different builds the community manages to come up with for this item once it’s in your hands, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on it to ensure it meets a satisfactory power level.
We had amazing community involvement throughout the event, and would again like to thank everyone who participated, submitting their ideas and their votes! Because of the success of this event, this may certainly be something we revisit in the future. If you’re interested in more information regarding this event, you can find the full reveal and links to all of the polls here: https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/community-designed-unique-reveal/48908
We have a number of other community events in mind for the future and plan to keep running all sorts of different events. So make sure to keep your eyes out for these kinds of social posts if you’re interested in getting involved in our community events!
In Closing
We can’t overstate just how exciting of a cycle this is for us here, and we would like to thank all of you for being an amazing community, and for your patience to allow us to make this next update such a big one. With the next major update including multiplayer, we’re now starting to set our sights on our 1.0 release of Last Epoch: including the remaining masteries, other core features, and polish, to make for an amazing world for all to play and discover.
Over the last number of months, we’ve been bolstering our team with many new roles, however for 1.0 and beyond, there are still several roles we’re looking to continue expanding. If you’re interested in joining the team here at Eleventh Hour Games, check out our hiring page at https://eleventhhour.games/careers to see what positions we’re currently looking to fill.
We’re approaching a major milestone here for the Last Epoch community, so make sure to keep your eyes on our Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Forums, and the weekly Dev Stream, for more updates as we approach the update to get more information regarding the exact update date, features such as performance updates, and those juicy details and teasers regarding some of the content to expect in the next major update!
Today we are sharing some design thoughts surrounding the creation of our new track in “The End of Time” in Last Epoch. If you haven’t heard it yet, it’s beautiful - have a listen!
Singing wordless vocals throughout help create the mysterious feeling for the End of Time soundtrack. The track also contains a lot of ethereal synths and mandolins that are drenched in echo effects to help create the feeling that you are in a mysterious, faraway place that also has a feeling of hope.
Halfway through the track, a version of the LE theme comes in that hints at the melody and plays around with the timing to give the track familiarity, but with an abstract approach.
This is the first track in the game to utilize a generative music system that evolves over time. This system was designed by Erik Desiderio to combine different sonic elements composed ahead of time, at random. For example, in the game the music engine could play vocal part 3 over background 2 the first time you hear it, then the next time, it could play back vocal part 1 over background 3.
This system allows the player to hear the track for extended periods of time without it sounding repetitive, because the system is constantly combining different elements to create a unique variation each time the player hears it.
Keep your eye on our social channels throughout the week, or join us on our discord at discord.gg/lastepoch as we’re going to be posting our next Development Update soon. This Development Update will be including some important news, and will be available to read in just two days on Wednesday, June 22nd!
Join us as for our weekly Dev stream as Game Designer Mike continues working on his Primalist, Herald of the Scurry (Squirrel Companion) build. Come and ask any questions you have about Last Epoch and its development.
Join us as for our weekly Dev stream as Game Designer Mike continues working on his Primalist, Herald of the Scurry (Squirrel Companion) build. Come and ask any questions you have about Last Epoch and its development.
