DevBlog Weekly Roundup #1

Hey everyone, welcome back to another weekly roundup of development updates and noteworthy news! Today’s update is a three-parter, and we couldn’t be more excited for the future of our community and Quarter Onion Games!

Emberlight is going free to play!

Wait, what?! You read that correctly. Starting this coming weekend, Emberlight will shift to a free to play title on Steam.

When we launched Emberlight back in 2019, we had some big plans for where we wanted to take the game. In particular, we had discussed adding in a “Dungeon Master” mode that shifted Emberlight into more of an RPG. However, as we developed more of this mode, we found that it would change the game’s core so that keeping the traditional “roguelite” mode with this new one was impossible.

And thus, Emberlight: Rekindled was born. While there is shared DNA between the two games (such as roguelite elements within the quests themselves), the foundation of Rekindled correctly supports being an RPG. It also allowed us to layer these roguelite features over top of the RPG versus both genres competing.

Since there is overlap between the two games, we want Emberlight to be as accessible as possible. And nothing beats accessibility as much as free! We can now get more eyes on the current game as a proof of concept (especially from many non-gamers joining our community through EMBRS) and build on renewed interest in Emberlight to fine-tune our approach within Rekindled development.

As a bonus, anyone that currently owns Emberlight will get a copy of Rekindled for free! Our promise for those that believed in us back at the Emberlight launch and were waiting on the DM mode, which unfortunately never came to be. All owners of Emberlight will see a copy of Rekindled on Steam upon launch in 2023.

Well that’s awesome! What’s part two?

Glad you asked! In parallel to securing funding for EMBRS via the XRPL Grants program (which we should hear back on sometime in May!), we are in the process of obtaining financing for Emberlight: Rekindled. This has involved building detailed mockups of Rekindled to best showcase where we’re looking to take the game in contrast to Emberlight and typical business tasks such as pitches and spreadsheets. As a result, we should have an excellent idea about our budget status for both projects by June!

More awesome! And the finale?

Play to Earn (and a sprinkle of E-Sports) starts next week! On May 2nd, we will begin weekly tournaments within Emberlight. Sign-ups for anyone interested in that week’s tournament will be from Monday-Wednesday each week on our Discord server, and the tournament itself will run on Saturday and Sunday.

Each week, we will have a specific achievement within Emberlight that is the goal for that week’s tournament posted Friday night. Everyone will compete for the top prize of 100 EMBRS and a slot into Rekindled’s early access! Up to 100 competitors will win 10 EMBRS, and we will also select three randomly to gain early access to Rekindled.

Everything is handled through Discord, so please join us there if you are interested in earning EMBRS through this tournament. We will post details in a new Tournament category. As we are building for both the crypto and gaming communities, we look to be able to help everyone from both communities be able to get involved with this tournament as painlessly as possible.

With all of this going on (and the many questions building in your head), we are looking to do another AMA on May 10th. Time is to be determined, and we will post an update as soon we have settled on it.

That’s it for last week, don’t forget to check out our Discord and Twitter for more regular updates throughout the week. We look forward to seeing all the new players in Emberlight, seeing all those competing in the upcoming tournaments, and answering all the questions everyone has in the forthcoming AMA!