Updates

Avatar’s Update #293: R54 Livestream Items & Player Made Dungeons Sneak Peek

Greetings Fellow Avatars! Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

Game Development

News Announcements

Community Updates

Release 54 Livestream(s) Items

The Release 54 Livestream(s) items were all Tropical and Polynesian themed in honor of the summer months. Damon Waldrip and Scott “Scottie” Jones have been busily working on creating them this release and they are turning out amazing! This week we are revealing the Polynesian Spear and Polynesian Dress with Tropical Flower Crown.

Polynesian Spear (Scott “Scottie” Jones):

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Community Livestream – Side Quests 2 (Aug 17)

Another content packed weekly Community Livestream is this Friday August 17 at 4 PM CDT on Twitch!

Last week’s livestream focused on Side Quests! Keith “Sannio” Quinn and Travis “Vas Corp Por” Koleski started taking us through a “greatest hits” of all the side quests in Shroud of the Avatar. However there are so many side quests in Shroud that we barely scratched the surface last week! Crushing Atavists of Purity, navigating creepy clocks and zombie children in the House on the Hill, finding all the Banners of Virtue, defeating all the Obsidian Cabalists, daily confirmations with the Oracle, fetching lost mail, finding all the virtue armor, retrieving the companion gear, learning every emote, there are just so many! So we are returning to Side Quests again this week so we can show off more including the mysterious happenings in Crooked Shank!

And remember all purchases from noon to midnight on Friday count towards the Release 56 Stretch Goals!

Watch on Twitch this Friday at 4 PM CDT!

Read more…


Avatar’s Update #292: Player Made Dungeons

Greetings Fellow Avatars! Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

News Announcements

Community Updates

 

Player Made Dungeon Update

In the past week we have had design kickoff meetings for several game systems including Fishing (Phase 2) and Player Made Dungeons. We will be posting more about Fishing (Phase 2) soon! In exciting news we have been able to make faster progress on Player Made Dungeons than expected due to how much it uses underlying systems like our basements. While we had originally planned this for an Episode 2 feature we now believe we can have a version of the system up and running as soon as Q4 of this year without affecting our work on other systems like Fishing! To kick off the upcoming launch of this exciting player made content we are going make available five dungeon entrances, along with five static example dungeons in Release 57. One dungeon entrance and one example dungeon will be craftable, four will be purchasable from the Add On Store.

The included static example dungeons, complete with creatures and loot, will vary in point size and difficulty level and can be used until the player built dungeon feature goes live. When the player built dungeons feature goes live in Q4 2018, the example dungeons will vanish and be replaced by an entry room but the player will receive the blueprints to all the pieces needed to rebuild the dungeon (some assembly required!). Player built dungeons will be expandable and customizable with in-game craftable rooms and/or Add On Store rooms.  As a bonus the Add On Store Dungeons include a Unity asset pack of dungeon rooms and hallways that you can experiment with using Unity which is free for non-professionals to download!

Tomb Entrance plus 50 Point Dungeon (craftable)

This sarcophagus can be crafted to use as the entrance to your dungeon. There will also be a craftable 50 point example static dungeon, complete with creatures and loot, for low level players that can be used until the player built dungeon feature goes live. Read more…


Community Livestream – Side Quests (Aug 10)

Another content packed weekly Community Livestream is this Friday August 10 at 4 PM CDT on Twitch!

This week’s livestream will focus on Side Quests! Keith “Sannio” Quinn will taking us through a “greatest hits” of all the side quests in Shroud of the Avatar. There are so many side quests in Shroud that it is hard to choose which ones to pick from in order to augment your Avatar! Crushing Atavists of Purity, navigating creepy clocks and zombie children in the House on the Hill, finding all the Banners of Virtue, defeating all the Obsidian Cabalists, daily confirmations with the Oracle, fetching lost mail, finding all the virtue armor, retrieving the companion gear, learning every emote, there are just so many!

And remember all purchases from noon to midnight on Friday count towards the Release 56 Stretch Goals!

Watch on Twitch this Friday at 4 PM CDT!

Read more…


Avatar’s Update #291: Shooter Album Party Recap, R56 Livestream Goals Updated, & Cosmos Double XP Weekends

Greetings Fellow Avatars! Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

Game Development

News Announcements

Community Updates

 

Shooter Jennings Album Release Party Recap

This past Tuesday, July 31st, Shooter Jennings treated all of us to a preview of his newest album, “Shooter”, at a special album release party in the player owned town of Ordinis Mortis. For a brief time when Release 56 launched there were multiple “Shooters” scattered around Novia who had a special quest. The first 25 players who completed the quest got on the secret guest list to get backstage at the event and received prizes directly from the real Shooter Jennings. Those prizes were Shooter heraldry items and wax cylinders of tracks from Shooter’s album. While the prizes were being handed out DJ Darkstarr spun tunes on Avatars Radio. After the prizes were handed out everyone got to hear the new album which releases on August 10th and then DJ Darkstarr played spun more tunes for another couple of hours while everyone danced. NOTE: Everyone who completed the quest before the event also received a couple of Shooter prizes in their in-game mailboxes courtesy of Serafina and Vas Corp Por.

Shooter Heraldry Art:

The event itself was held in a basement decorated amazingly by a crew led by Minerva and included the efforts of Cambria Stormlin, Shimizu, Griffler, Wind Silvermoon, Gaelis Tragan, Karrin Murphy, Sindariya Tyelma, Gurney, Arianna, Drake Aedus, Rambo, and Luca Xante. Above ground there was a maze that spelled out Shooter and before the event started there was a line that built up (just like a real concert!).

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Avatar’s Update #290: Play Release 56 Now & Global Visual Improvements

Greetings Fellow Avatars! Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

Game Development

News Announcements

Community Updates

 

Play Release 56 Now!

Release 56 successfully launched yesterday, July 26, with thousands of backers downloading, patching, and logging in to check out the changes! There’s lots of new content to explore, including:

Read more…


GOALS UPDATED: Release 56 Livestream – August 3, 2018 (Cosmos Themed)

Another release livestream is upon us! The Release 56 Livestream is set for Friday August 3!

All Avatars from around the world are welcome to join us in the livestream activities. We will be doing deep dives, answering questions, having sales, handing out prizes, and tracking towards stretch goals. At the suggestion of one of our players (Redfish) the theme for this livestream is Cosmos in honor of the comet which is making its closest approach during Release 56! All of the items will prominently display our Sun Magic, Moon Magic, or some other celestial symbol like stars.

LIVESTREAM SCHEDULE (Central Time Zone)

Monthly livestreams are on Twitch and include answers to your gameplay questions, world building tours, prize giveaways, sales on items, and more! Here is the schedule:

  • 3PM: Introductions
  • 3:30PM: Deep Dive 1: Player Owned Towns
  • 4:30PM: Q&A (+ more Ep 2 goodies)
  • 5:30PM: Deep Dive 2: Combat with Bosses (Aether Creatures, Unicorns, oh my!)
  • 6:30PM: Q&A
  • 7PM: Ending Announcements

Read more…


COMPLETED: CRITICAL: R56 Restart and Rollback

We have to restart Release 56 and rollback to the game save state before we launched it this morning. We unfortunately skipped a step during the launch this morning and did not run a data migration for brewing which means that all brewing items might be in a corrupted state unless we rollback and relaunch. We apologize for the interruption.

UPDATE: The rollback and restart has been completed and the service is live again.

 


Release 56 Instructions

[From a forum post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

Avatars,

Please read this entire message, as well as the linked Player Guide and Known Issues.

Release 56 of Shroud of the Avatar goes live this Thursday, July 26, at 10:30 AM US Central Daylight Time (15:30 UTC).

Release 56 is the first release in which we focused on the current iteration of our Top 10 Priorities (from Q3 2018 post). We were able to address most of the items on that list in some fashion. We made strong progress on systems polish, bug fixing, performance, user interface polish, tier adjustments, and the rewards cycle.

Bug Fixing: We dedicated a significant portion of the release to working solely on fixing bugs and reducing our overall bug count. We addressed nearly 100 issues with over 50 of them highlighted in these notes including fixes to various scenes (typos, stuck spots, etc.), crafting fixes (including a major fix to how effects get calculated), and various user interface fixes. Read more…


Community Livestream – R56 Obsidian Trials (July 27)

Another content packed weekly Community Livestream is this Friday at 4pm CT on Twitch!

Sarah “Serafina” Dworken will give you all the latest news and then Travis “Vas Corp Por” Koleski, Keith “Sannio” Quinn and Chris “Atos” Spears will be showing off the Release 56 first playable version of the Obsidian Trials that has all sorts of cool new features! There is an entrance on the Novia Overworld near the east entrance to Nightshade Pass. Play sessions run every 10 minutes with one minute of preparation time between matches. During the match a poisonous boundary that deals extraordinary amounts of damage rapidly reduces the amount of playable area. If you are caught in the boundary you will die quickly so you must stay ahead of it. There is a lobby area where players go when they die during a match, prepare for new matches, and replenish supplies from a merchant. The lobby is where you can also spend the currencies you earn from playing in the Obsidian Trials. Making any kill during a match will earn you Obsidian Skull Coins which can be spent on consumables like unique potions and a unique teleport scroll locked to the locations of Obsidian Trials. Winning a match that includes at least 5 players earns you Obsidian Medallions which can be spent on Victory Emotes and Titles (eventually we will be expanding this to also include unique patterns, gear, and components). We also modified the PVP scoreboard to display the timer for the match, show numbers of players in the match, display the winner, and to reset for each match.

Watch on Twitch this Friday at 4pm CT! Also join the community’s Discord chat to ask questions about what’s presented:

Read more…