Author Archives: dallas

dallas

About dallas

Made some games. Lots of games.

10% Bonus on Player Owned Towns & Capping Overland Map Access to 230 Towns


SotA_PoT_MetropolisNow that we have begun allocating Overland Map locations for Player Owned Towns (PoTs), we have encountered some map density issues. We have decided to cap the number of PoTs with Overland map access rights at 230 total. This means there are only 0 more available PoTs that will have Overland map access rights.

Once those remaining 0 PoTs have sold (via full payment or monthly payment plan), any additional PoTs purchased will not have Overland map access rights, but must connect to another PoT that has Overland map access. Additionally, PoTs that do not have Overland map access (or have foregone that right), and have not requested connection to another PoT with Overland map access, will be connected to one NPC town in the quadrant/biome you requested (you may request a specific NPC town to connect to in your PoT Submission form and we will do our best to honor such requests).

SotA_10PercentBonus-v1Additionally, we are including Player Owned Towns (with or without Overland map access rights) in our 10% Summer Bonus promotion! Starting at 10am CST, July 10 and running through Midnight CST, August 31, 2015, you will receive an additional 10% bonus added to your Store Credit for any Player Owned Town purchases/upgrades (including monthly payment plans).

 

(NOTE: The 10% Bonus will be applied to your Store Credit within 24 hours of your purchase; 10% Bonus is for pledge or Player Owned Town purchases/upgrades/payment plans only and does not apply to Add-On, Stretch Goal, or Make a Difference Store purchases; Existing Store Credit applied toward a purchase does not qualify for the 10% Bonus)


Update of the Avatar #133 – 2015.07.10: 10% Summer Pledge Bonus, Reward Expirations, R19 Postmortem, Troll WIP, and More!


Greetings Fellow Avatars!

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

  • 52 Day Countdown for 10% Summer Pledge Bonus & Reward Changes
  • Hangout of the Avatar: Release 19 Postmortem, Royal Warrant & ONBE Awards
  • NBNN Interview with Chris Spears
  • Very Large Creatures: Trolls (work-in-Progress)
  • World Builder/Level Designer and VFX Artist Job Openings
  • In-game Community Weekend Events
  • Receiving Pledge Rewards and Add-On Items
  • Changes to Store Credit Conversions
  • Steam Access Keys Available for All Backers
  • How to Cancel Monthly Layaway Payment Plans
  • Upcoming Events
  • Recommended Games to Back


timeIsRunningOut6

52 Day Countdown for 10% Summer Pledge Bonus & Reward Changes

SotA_10PercentBonus-v1If you were thinking of pledging your support to the development of Shroud of the Avatar, or upgrading your existing pledge, now’s a great time to do it! To celebrate twenty months of successful monthly releases, we are offering a 10% Summer Pledge Bonus! Starting at 10am CST, July 10 and running through Midnight CST, August 31, 2015, you will receive an additional 10% bonus added to your Store Credit for any pledge purchases or pledge upgrades (including monthly pledge payment plans).

(NOTE: The 10% Store Credit will be applied daily starting early next week, but all purchases as of 10am CST this morning will qualify for the 10% bonus)

Read more…


Final Two Days to Back Bard’s Tale IV Kickstarter!


Check out this entertaining video that our pals over at inXile made for the final 48 hour countdown of their Bard’s Tale IV Kickstarter Campaign!

Final 2 Days of the Bard’s Tale IV Kickstarter

Bard’s Tale IV is helping drive the revival of the dungeon crawler genre! As described by inXile, it is a single-player, party-based cRPG with dynamic phase-based combat, challenging puzzles and riddles, and a game set to beautiful Gaelic music, where the Bard’s songs and melodies affect gameplay. They’ve already met their funding goal, passed their first three stretch goals, but need your help with their next stretch goal (the RPG “Super Team”, Bruce Cordell, Wolfgang Baur, and Sean K. Reynolds, design three custom dungeons), as well as collecting more of their cool Social Achievements. Click here to check out their Kickstarter campaign!


Update of the Avatar #132 – 2015.07.03: Port Phoenix Lore, Q3 Schedule, Obsidian Architecture, Trolls, Tantalus Quest, Remix of the Avatar, and More!


Greetings Fellow Avatars!

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

  • Port Phoenix Lore
  • Q3 2015 Schedule Update
  • Architecture of the Obsidians!
  • Very Large Creatures: Trolls
  • Tantalus Consortium’s Reinforce Novia – Quest
  • Remix of the Avatar
  • New Outdoor Fountain Decorations
  • Thou hast been invited to the Release 19 Postmortem!
  • World Builder/Level Designer and VFX Artist Job Openings
  • In-game Community Weekend Events
  • Receiving Pledge Rewards and Add-On Items
  • Changes to Store Credit Conversions
  • Steam Access Keys Available for All Backers
  • How to Cancel Monthly Layaway Payment Plans
  • Upcoming Events
  • Recommended Games to Back


Port Phoenix Lore

SotA_PortPhoenix_Story0

Last week we shared a few “moving in” images of our newest Player Owned Town, Port Phoenix, the first town based on the swamp biome. Special thanks to WrathPhoenix, the Governor of Port Phoenix and founder of the Phoenix Republic, for providing the following lore behind Port Phoenix:

Read more…


Update of the Avatar #131 – 2015.06.26: Play R19 Now!, Port Phoenix, Player/Dev Combat Scrum, Forum Changes, $10 for $10 Last Day, and More!


Greetings Fellow Avatars!

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

  • Play Release 19 Now!
  • Player Owned Town #3: The Swamp Town of Port Phoenix
  • Player/Developer Collaboration: The Combat Scrum
  • SpeedTree Blogs About SotA
  • New Adobe Homes and Decos
  • The Challenge of Openness and Collaboration
  • $10 for $10 Summer Bonus Ends Tomorrow!
  • World Builder/Level Designer and VFX Artist Job Openings
  • In-game Community Weekend Events
  • Receiving Pledge Rewards and Add-On Items
  • Changes to Store Credit Conversions
  • Steam Access Keys Available for All Backers
  • How to Cancel Monthly Layaway Payment Plans
  • This Week In the News
  • Upcoming Events
  • Recommended Games to Back


Play Release 19 Now!

Avatars Radio FireLotus Release 19 Party hosted at Memorial Caretaker’s Cemetery lot in Ash Haven. Check out more screenshots in the Release 19 Screenshot Gallery.

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Release 19 Instructions


[A SotA Public Forum post by Starr Long]

Darkstarr

Greetings Avatars,

Thank you to our loyal backers of Shroud of the Avatar. Release 19 access for all backers at First Responder level and above begins this Thursday, June 25 at 10:30 AM Central Time (16:30 UTC). If you signed up at E3, please be sure to create an account on our website as soon as possible in order to gain access for the weekend.

Please read this entire message, as well as the linked instructions and known issues.

While we are getting closer to launch we are still in a constant state of change, and we do not yet have in-game systems to inform players of these changes, or to share ways to help them to explore new content and systems. This means we rely entirely on this message, and the linked instructions and known issues to convey the current game state. We regularly have to answer questions or filter bug reports, because some players elect not to read this valuable information. By taking a few moments to read through this information, a great deal of our time and efforts can be redirected to focus on new “unanswered” questions, and addressing critical issues impacting each release. We greatly appreciate you taking the time to review this post, and for all the truly valuable feedback you continue to provide.

Those of you who have been with us for a more than three months know that each quarter we put out a release schedule for the upcoming quarter (expect a Q3 update this week). In general, the accuracy of that prediction, especially during the final release of the quarter, can sometimes be considerably off our original plan. This is symptomatic of our responsive and iterative production methodology that gives us the flexibility to respond directly to player feedback and pivot when needed. Release 19 is certainly no exception to this pattern, and when you scan the deliverables below, you will notice many items that have been struck through. Many of those were painful for us to delay, especially taming, musical instruments, and guild warfare. However, there were more fundamental issues with combat that needed resolving first before we could proceed with those other deliverables. Overall, we continue to maintain a robust pace, and the amount of content we deliver each month is always what we estimated, it is only the actual deliverables that change.

As you will see below, we focused most of our efforts on improving the combat experience; an effort we will continue to focus on over several more releases. We have made sweeping improvements to AI, skills, spells, combat math, armor, animations, sound effects, and visual effects, all in order to make combat feel better and be more balanced. While we are still not quite there, we are beginning to see where we will end up, and we feel confident it will be a fun place to be. We also spent some time starting down the path of player created quests with the additions of player writable books (quest clues) and public cache chests (waypoints, quest rewards, clue repositories, etc.).

Also, remember that while we are providing new content with each release, our community is working overtime to make new events for you to enjoy. So, be sure to check out a couple of the Community Events Calendars run by our community members (via in game book or the player run websites Avatars Circle Community Events and Events of the Avatars calendar).

Without further ado, here are the R19 deliverables.
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The Challenge of Openness and Collaboration


SotA_ForumPostingPledge

Some of Portalarium’s most important founding principles are “Openness/Transparency”, “Collaboration” and “Sharing of ideas and opinions.”  We have put great effort into living by these principles on a daily basis with all stakeholders of the Portalarium tribe (employees, investors, partners, backers, community members, etc.).

One of the ways we acted on these principles was to create and maintain public forums, open for the entire world to participate in, both viewing and posting. We reserved some areas of our forums for backers only, but we felt it was important there be a community forum where the dev team, backers, and non-backers could interact with each other, share ideas and opinions, collaborate, and brainstorm.

For two years, we’ve been able to keep our public forums freely open for both viewing and posting. Unfortunately, recent abuse of our public forums by spammers is forcing us to remove free posting privileges. Our volunteer forum moderators are drowning in the hordes of spam posts that have recently invaded our public forums. For the past couple of weeks, our web dev team (i.e. Tassilo Philipp) had to set aside higher priority game and web development tasks while he endeavored to close the holes the spammers are getting through.

We on the executive management team felt it was necessary to stop spending our backers pledge money on the endless efforts necessary to block spammers, and instead, stop them by making them pay to post. We’ve anguished over this decision for weeks, as it is a compromise of our principles, and we will suffer from the loss of ideas that often resulted from free sharing of opinions in our public forums. However, we believe this is the best course of action to take at this time.

Please know that we do not consider this a permanent situation. As our funds and team priorities allow, we will continue to revisit the integration of automated spam tools that may allow us to re-open our general forums for free public posting.

In the meantime, starting June 29, 2015, our General Forums will remain open for everyone to read, but you must be a backer to post. All existing backers (including Steam Early Access backers) will be able to post. Non-backers can purchase forum posting privileges with our new $5 Forum Posting Pledge, which can be upgraded to a full game pledge at any time. If you pledged through Kickstarter you will need to link your Kickstarter account for forum posting privileges.

Dallas Snell
COO/Founder/Portalarium


Update of the Avatar #130 – 2015.06.19: Prattkeeping, Port Phoenix, Swamp Template, Vengeance Tournaments, Unreliable Travel Guide, $10 for $10 Bonus, and More!


Greetings Fellow Avatars!

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

  • Prattkeeping, er, um, I Mean Tame Emote
  • Port Phoenix and the Player Owned Town Swamp Template
  • Order of Vengeance Tournaments
  • The SotA Writing Round Table Unreliable Travel Guide: R18 Edition
  • $10 for $10 Summer Bonus
  • World Builder/Level Designer and VFX Artist Job Openings
  • In-game Community Weekend Events
  • Sign Up for the Bear Tavern – War of 5 Armies!
  • PaxLair’s Farewell to Release 18 Party
  • The Bard’s Tale IV Kickstarter
  • Receiving Pledge Rewards and Add-On Items
  • Changes to Store Credit Conversions
  • Steam Access Keys Available for All Backers
  • Word of Mouth Marketing
  • How to Cancel Monthly Layaway Payment Plans
  • Upcoming Events


Prattkeeping, er, um, I Mean Tame Emote

We found it amazingly coincidental that our new taming emote (/tame), included in Release 19 next week, bears some resemblance to Chris Pratt’s velociraptor taming pose from the recent Jurassic World movie. How weird is that!

SotA_Emote_Taming_Prattkeeping

Read more…


Update of the Avatar #129 – 2015.06.12: Zombies! Oh, and $10 for $10 Bonus, E3, Solace Forest, Public Cache Chests, Console Radio, Kobold Masks, and More!


Greetings Fellow Avatars!

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

  • Zombies!
  • $10 for $10 Summer Bonus
  • SotA at E3 Next Week
  • Solace Forest
  • Hangout of the Avatar ~ Release 18 Postmortem
  • Player Created Quests
  • Public Cache Chests
  • Time Lapse Video of New Britannia’s Celestial Bodies
  • Aether Vibration Amplifier Console
  • Kobold Masks
  • World Builder/Level Designer and VFX Artist Job Openings
  • In-game Community Weekend Events
  • Sign Up for the Bear Tavern – War of 5 Armies!
  • Vengeance: Quests
  • The Bard’s Tale IV Kickstarter
  • Receiving Pledge Rewards and Add-On Items
  • Changes to Store Credit Conversions
  • Steam Access Keys Available for All Backers
  • Word of Mouth Marketing
  • How to Cancel Monthly Layaway Payment Plans
  • Upcoming Events


Zombies!

SotA_Zombie1

Character artists Geoff Mellon and Kevin Wells and animator Bren Wilson really nailed it with these awesome zombies!

Read more…


$10 for $10 Summer Bonus



To help everyone get their summer off to a great start, we’re having a $10 for $10 Summer Bonus Promotion! If you make any single purchase of $10 or more on the SotA website between 3pm CDT June 11 and 10 am CDT June 27 we will make a one-time deposit of an extra $10 into your Store Credit! Happy Summer!

[NOTE: The $10 for $10 offer can be exercised only once during the promotion period.
$10 Store Credit should show up in your account within 24 hours of a qualifying purchase]