My minions,

It is this time of the year again, the IndieDB Game of the Year poll is upon us!

What can you do? Simple: vote for the only game you truly love: http://www.indiedb.com/games/tales-of-majeyal/

Well, ok, you can also vote for others if you wish to ;)

Only a few seconds are needed and you will make your god of darkness very happy!

2015 Indie of the Year Awards via Indie DB

My minions, I am happy and proud to give you Tales of Maj'Eyal 1.3.3 ! See http://te4.org/

Your launcher should automatically update your game so no need to redownload it all.

If your launcher didn't self-update correctly, just redownload it from the homepage.

Enjoy and have fun in Eyal!

Don't forget to help ToME by with donations ( http://te4.org/donate ) !

Release highlights:

• A small but important bugfix!

Expanded changelist:

• Try to fix the gamma issue on some computers
• Fixed curse of nightmare, for real this time!
• Buffed curse of nighmare to start triggering at level 4 (as the description was implying)
• When mousing over a zone change there will be a minimum level indicator in the tooltip

Have fun!

I have made a complete set of Legend of Dragoon chars (Dart, Shana, Rose, Albert, Kongol, Haschel, and Meru) each with a normal and Dragoon Form tile (Using images found online, but refined). Making a mod seems like a pain in the rear, so I wanna know if anybody will use it before I attempt to make a mod out of it.

Preview:

http://prntscr.com/98imxc

My minions, I am happy and pround to give you Tales of Maj'Eyal 1.3.2 ! See http://te4.org/

Your launcher should automatically update your game so no need to redownload it all.

If your launcher didn't self-update correctly, just redownload it from the homepage.

Enjoy and have fun in Eyal!

Don't forget to help ToME by with donations ( http://te4.org/donate ) !

Release highlights:

• Many imporatnt bugfixes!

Expanded changelist:

• Yeeks summoned Wayists do not drop items
• Sludgenest drops Maj'Eyal items
• Combat:combatSpeed can take an additional speed
• Fixed Skirmisher's Swift Shot abuse
• Prevented the vats in the old conclave vault from destroying stairs
• Party members are cleaned of debuff when going to the Eidolon plane
• Fixed Archery to properly do on_hit, on_crit, and on_kill effects. It can now handle multiple types of each from ranged weapons and ammo.
• Make Contingency and Matrix respect fixed cooldowns
• Fixes the nightmare part of curse of nightmares
• Add proc chance to Warden's Call (for balance and bugfix)
• Reduced the memory drag (but not altogether fixed) caused by Temporal Warden talents
• Fixed inventory destruction caused by some Temporal Warden talents
• Fixed Fearless Cleave
• Roguelike mode characters can now enter the Eidolon plane by a special exploratory farportal event, thus making Utterly Destroyed achievement possible even in Roguelike mode
• "make_escort" property can reference define_as fields of entities without a rarity
• New string.prefix and string.suffix functions
• Deus Ex Machina achievement altered and now possible to get
• Reduced Insane and Madness flat level penalty, as it just made first levels harder than the rest of the game (which is still very madly hard)
• Cancelling secondary target for Nature's Equilibrium now targets self.
• Reduced Paradox cost on Time Shield, Webs of Fate, and Temporal Fugue
• Fixed Twist Fate
• Limited the number of possible charges of Lightning Catcher
• Twist Fate gives audio feedback when an anomaly is held
• Twist Fate gives better messages when an anomaly is targeted
• Paradox Modifier can not reduce duration below one turn
• Fixed weapon speed bug
• Savefiles from previous minor patch versions will not require to check the "old savefiles" checkbox anymore
• Savefiles from previous minor patch versions will not display the "download old data" popup anymore

Have fun!

My minions,

Do you know that feeling where you loot a nice shiny flaming sword but can't be bothered to wield it yourself?
That's annoying right?!

Think no more, thanks to Embers of Rage you can fix that with nothing but a simple bit of crafting: the awesome weapon automaton!
Strap this baby to your gloves and fire it up, it will wield your designated weapon to strike pain and dismay (and wonder!) into your foes, for a while!

Available soon in a Tales of Maj'Eyal near you!

Watch here! twitch.tv/warrioroflight01

Thanks to all those of you who enquired about me, I'm fine; I was lucky to be away on the train when the Paris attacks happened.
I do not say lucky lightly as my flat in Paris is like 200m from the Bataclan.

My thoughts goes to all my fellow countrymen who fell to blind hatred and to humanity in general: we must keep our humanity.

I'll see you all soon in Eyal where friendship among players is the normality; I love you people!

Those of you that were already playing 4 years ago must remember Susramanian "Sus"; who made made cool things for ToME like the Mindslayers, many vaults, the inscriptions system, the shield block system, the elemental staves system, many many egos, some quests, and so on.
Simply put he was great !

Yesterday he poped up again, saying he'd try to not code anymore because it takes too much of his time but we all know he won't resist for long ;)
So, welcome back my friend!

Also, in the years he left he continued on the gamedev road started with ToME and made his own game; he refused to post about it on tome's forum without contributing again but I think he deserves some help for all he *already* did!

So if you want to help one of the Great Dark Priests, go check out http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=531942024 !
I've had the pleasure of playtesting it and it's quite fun, obviously very far from what ToME is but that's great!
Oh and do not be lured by the mobile-ish gfx style, the game itself looks rather deep.
If you are a tweet-maniac you can also follow him https://twitter.com/NCRGames :)

Thanks my minions, you may now resume achieving many deaths ! ;)

I've been asked to write down how I make my icons, so I'll try to put together a basic howto here, and maybe expand on it later. I'm assuming basic familiarity with the GIMP, especially layers.

Let us start with the anatomy of an icon:

LAYER A: The black and white base, pretty straightforward.

LAYER B: "Color" The color blend, usually using ''multiply'' mode, at full opacity. I almost always use a color blend here, sometimes linear, sometimes radial, usually RGB but sometimes HSV.

LAYER C: "Grain" I usually call this layer "grain" - it usually has some kind of noise. This is where most of the variation takes place. Sometimes it's several layers, sometimes I do stuff like adding noise in the color layer instead of here.

LAYER D: "Lite" Light. This one on the other hand is pretty straightforward: a radial blend from white to gray (#666666), and selecting soft light as the layer mode. This will shift light colors toward white and make darker colors more vibrant in the white areas, but make everything in the gray area more muted. Useful to emphasize part of the icon, also makes it look less flat. Very tempting to overdo it though.

Let's look at Flux Control from the Chronomancy/Flux tree as an example. These are my notes for the tree:

FLUX

flux green: 5cdd5e

color:
blend (HSV counterclockwise): 5cdd5e -- white
rgb noise (independant)
distort: value prop (black)
gaussian 2px
goo:
blend white -- black
rbg noise (correlated)
distort: value prop (black)
gaussian 2px
glow:
blend (HSV counterclockwise): 5cdd5e -- black
distort: value prop (white)
gaussian 2px

So for the first layer we start with a color blend, HSV in this case. I didn't write it here, but it's a radial blend - sometimes I have linear and radial blends for different icons in the same talent tree. HSV blends as opposed to RGB blends are a bit weird in that they're asymmetrical; whether you want clockwise or counterclockwise actually depends a bit on which direction you're blend is set up to go. If you flip your color blend direction, you also have to switch your HSV direction, while with RGB it doesn't matter.

Anyway, the next step here is independent RGB noise - it's under Filters->Noise->RGB noise. Usually I use correlated, which gives me a random scattering of black pixels, but here I used independent, which gives red, blue and green pixels instead. The filter has values for how many pixels you get, preset is .2, I usually use .3

After the noise I use a distortion filter called value propagate to make it more pronounced - this is a combo I use a lot. Filters->Disort->Value Propagate is how you get it in GIMP. Select "more black" or "more white" depending on what you're going for.

Last touch is a gaussian blur to smooth it a bit - otherwise value propagate leaves squarisch shapes (which can look good too...). It's under Filters->Blur->Gaussian Blur. I usually use it with 2 pixels blur radius, the smallest possible.

This is what the end result (for that layer) looks like, and next to it the merge (using multiply) with the black and white base icon:

The next layer I've called "goo" instead of "grain" in this case.

I started with a blend again, although here it's in shades of gray and white.

Next step is, again, RGB noise, although now it's correlated instead of independent. This produces lots of black and white speckles.

As before, we make the speckles more pronounced with value propagate and smoothen things with gaussian blur.

This is the resulting layer, which we then combine with the other two with the grain merge mode. Basically, with grain merge, any color value above medium lightness makes the result lighter, while any value below medium makes the result darker.

+ =

For reference, this is the complete icon, the "goo" layer, and the icon without the "goo" layer:

- =

The last layer is another grain merge more layer, but this time in color; starting off with another HSV blend. It goes by the name of "glow", and like the "goo" layer, is in grain merge mode.

Here I don't bother with the noise filter, but instead directly go to value propagate and the gaussian blur.

Here's the three other layers without the "glow" layer, the "glow" layer by itself, and the final icon again:

+ =

So here I didn't use a "lite" layer, stuff was glowy enough already.

Hope it's somewhat helpful - I could also share my .xcf files and text files with notes (those are in short hand and not always complete though).

Ask questions, or tell me if there's some icons where you're particularly interested in the style...

My fellow minions!

"I Aten't Dead" as the great granny weatherwax would say (if you do not get the reference, go read the Discworld, like now!).
Many developments are happening on the orc campaign front as we speak and hopefully some news will come soonish ;)
ToME itself is not forgotten and the 1.4 branch is slowly coming to maturation, along with a new sleek UI skin!

But I admit, I did take a few weeks off on vacations, even gods have too ;)

Go forth my minions and play!