After two all-nighters, I can finally and officially announce that The Bar on the Abyss 2.0 update will be released tomorrow, Friday 16th
I will post the full list of features and changes with the update, but hereâs a small preview: I added 3 more solutions to the confrontation with Pyriphlegethon!
Your new Spirit Gift will now enable you to avoid a fight altogether: charm them, use your insight to uncover the true reason for their attack, or apply logical thinking to break their resolve.
Choose Your Grief Path: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, or Acceptanceâselect the emotional journey that fits your MC and explore how it shapes their afterlife.
36 Career Backgrounds: Deepen your backstory with various career paths that unlock additional choices and provide unique perspectives on events unfolding around you.
A New And Improved Skill System!
Your Spirit Gift: Choose from six mythical artifacts that enhance your abilities and open new ways to approach challenges.
Detailed Death Choices: Define the circumstances of your characterâs deathâwas it a tragic accident, a deliberate act, or something darker?
Bug Fixes and Improvements: Enjoy a smoother reading experience with numerous bug fixes, text-flow improvements, and better formatting.
How You Can Help
Thank you for reading The Bar on the Abyss, Iâd love your thoughts on the new update**!**
Your feedback is more important than everâ suggestions for more choices, ideas for how your character should react, and thoughts on the latest content; Iâm all ears and eyes, like some biblically accurate angel!
Based on your feedback, this update will continue to evolve, with a few âpatchesâ while I work on the next chapter.
So donât be shyâI want to hear both the good and the bad!
Iâm so proud to have brought this update to life. This year has been so hard, but writing this game and connecting with all of you has been truly the best experience.
Thank you for reading The Bar on the Abyss and sharing this eternal journey with me. I wouldnât change a thing.
Not the âclosed the chapter bitâ, obviously, the first half. What did the cosmos do since the moment I was born? Close the chapter? Doesnât the chapter only close at the end?
This doesnât feel like a paragraph/line break situation. Maybe itâs just me, but doing it like this gives me the idea that Death was interrupted by something, when itâs just you doing a parenthesis in the dialogue to describe what Death is doing as they talk.
The highlighted text shows up in every option of this list (and also when you get to this hub from the main question hub by picking âTell me more about this place. You called it âthe Abyssâ?â). Also, the options donât get greyed out, but that I donât know if thatâs intentional.
But you can see how the text after the choice starts considerably lower than in other pages, so that makes me wonder if you wrote something in the code that the game is not displaying:
Or very clearly it does not, because if it actually DID this letter wouldnât be coming from the FOREIGN AFFAIRS ministry. Iâm on to you. You canât scam me, Iâm better at ruleslawyering than you are. By the way, here you write âflameâ uncapitalised, but when Raven mentions it later itâs âFlameâ.
BIG continuity hiccup. You can visit the companions in any order, meaning you can visit the Witch before Hastur. The problem is that if you do that, you can tell her that he does not remember the nightâs events anyway, even though you only find that out when you visit him. I suggest moving that revelation to the mandatory morning gathering during breakfast, to keep the continuity.
Suggestion for an extra option at this part (or maybe right after): if you tell Death they should remember, being able to tell them that if their experiences start to weigh too heavily youâre there to help them shoulder them.
This happens a lot (like, a LOT), a blank space after âPeisinoeâ that shouldnât be there when the name is followed by punctuation. Are you perchance copy-pasting their name (if you are, you should make sure what youâre Ctrl+Vâing does NOT have a blank space)? You should Ctrl+F throughout the text to find all the instances where this happens.
In this set of options, if you pick the second option before the first, the text doesnât quiiiiite line up correctly, as the text of the screen you get from option one sort of follows from the text that precedes this choice first appearing.
I think my money pouch is borked. It started with 400 coins when I picked it up, was at 500 when I got to the market, and after I bought a gift for everyone for 9x30=270 coins total and it should be at 230 (or 130, I donât even know anymore), itâs at 275.
At this point I checked the stats screen and it says I have 240 coins (a value that matches NONE of the possible actual values considering the math so far), even though to my knowledge I spent or received no money.
I presume you intend to have all the gift-giving opportunities close together, but it feels IMMENSELY off to not be able to give Lilith her gift here for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of it being that itâs also a flower and it would make for quite the symmetry, an exchange of flowers.
Aaaaand thatâs the end so far, in a not-ominous-at-all note, nosirree. >_> Iâm sure everythingâs fine, might fine, yessirree. cough
I have a technical suggestion, which is to make your chapters more numerous and shorter. This will help whenever you have to update the game (whether the WIP or when you need to push a patch for the final version), because in the actual game thereâll be no manual save points but there WILL be autosaves at the start of new chapters*. Smaller, more numerous chapters will reduce peopleâs loss of progress in those occasions.
*in the WIP, the game will just kick you to the start of your current chapter, regardless of what point in the chapter you did the save on
This is a VERY good suggestion Dashingdon is a bit weird with its text files (like, had to upload each scene separately with this update) but iâll see what can be done in the future.
I canât thank you enough for the actual beta testing you did here lol. Although, Iâd also love to hear your general thoughts on the update and its new systems
I like the customised options that come from the Grief (even if I didnât take all of them) and the Career. More character definition is always good, imo.
I havenât played TBotA in AGES, though, so youâll have to remind me about the differences between the previous skill system and the new one.
Iâm not sure about the Spirit Gift, though. It already attaches to your best stat, so it doesnât FEEL like it adds anything beyond just having the points where you can use it be stat checks instead? It might even detract, because instead of MC solving a problem because theyâre very good at [thing], now they do it because they have Magic Bauble , and itâs a Magic Bauble they didnât even have to work for, so, for me, it makes the MC less badass.*
PERSONALLY, the Spirit Gift would be more satisfying to me if the MC had had to work to acquire it, if using it had a cost, and/or if it attached to a stat other than their best one
*note that Iâve already been told multiple times that Iâm extremely peculiar regarding what makes me feel MC is a badass, so consider adding varying amounts of salt to my Spirit Gift considerations
Dashingdon is a bit weird with its text files (like, had to upload each scene separately with this update) but iâll see what can be done in the future.
, and itâs a Magic Bauble they didnât even have to work for, so, for me, it makes the MC less badass.*