Couchpotato spotted a new trailer for the Early Access title Book of Travels:

Book of Travels | “Play Together” Trailer

Might and Delight posted a little update explaining how the story and lore are presented to the player in Book of Travels:

The scribes are hard at work, chronicling the world of Braided Shore

Dear Traveller,

Today we wanted to talk about how our work looks in regards to the story of Book of Travels. We're thinking a lot about how we want to present the larger story of the game to the player, and how to expand it over time while still holding true to our original vision and design philosophies
about not wanting to hold the player's hand too tightly or spoon feed them.

When it comes to story in the world of Braided Shore, there is much to do. We are both looking to introduce more lore details to the world, and to expose the intrigue of the Prologue so that more players have the chance to find and play through it.

We’re introducing new lore both through item descriptions and, eventually, new encounters and events. We want the storytelling of Book of Travels to feel intuitive, and like something you unveil as you travel
. With every item in the game world telling you bits and pieces of information, we’re hoping to add another layer to your roleplaying and immersion.

[...]

We also want the world to feel alive, whether you’re wandering through the deep woods or bartering in a bustling town. Ensuring that interactions with NPCs feels worthwhile, and that the world highlights the quests and events available to you, is also a major focus of our current work.

When looking at the steam achievements, and talking to the community, we can tell that the main intrigue of the Prologue is incredibly hard to find, and that many players simply have not played through it. We want to expose this story to the player, and ensure that the way we tell the story is in line with how the game is played; what if there wasn’t a one singular path to the great city of Kasa? What if there was a way for Travellers to find many clues that point to the city, and the cause of its peculiar lockdown?

This autumn and winter, you can expect hundreds of new item descriptions in-game (our story team has already written over 15 000 words of new lore in the past two weeks), many new dialogues and small encounters, as well as a mystery that seems to permeate the lands of Braided Shore.

For a behind the scenes peek at what we’re up to, you can find our work on the Beta, where it will be featured alongside bug fixes, polish of features, and experiments with new gameplay mechanics.
We’re hoping that, from the very start of the game, you’ll feel the call of the open road, and that the stories you encounter along the way will not only entertain, but stay with you whenever you brew a soothing cup of tea, or when you walk past a grassy field and feel like you might spot omin hiding amongst the underbrush.

You'll hear more from us in the coming weeks. As always, we encourage you to sound off in the comments and on the forums about what you think of any new information we put out.

Until next time, Traveller. May your tea never grow cold...

Best wishes,
The Might and Delight team

Thanks Redlyph!

Redglyph spotted a progress update on Book of Travels:

3 Month Tech Work Progress update

New Beta Test Environment

We want to thank you for your patience. As you are aware we had some significant issues that we needed to take time to solve that we estimated would take 3 months. We are now 3 months and 1 week after that and finally have some news for you as well as a new Beta Test Environment for you to use.

If you followed our Tech Blogs you would have seen that we were doing “things” but as it was all short comments aimed at internal users it may not have made a lot of sense. In essence, what we have done is change some of the core tech the game uses as well as streamlined some of our production pipelines. That main change with this is an update of the Unity Engine from a 2019 version to the newer 2021.3.3f1 version. If you look this up you will see that yes there are newer versions, however we needed one that offers Long Term Support as well as not jumping too far ahead from the 2019 version.

Updating the engine comes with several benefits. You should initially notice that the game *feels* a bit smoother but mostly it allows us to add some new technologies in that we can use in the near future to give you better gameplay, from things like a new Input System (affecting mouse movement and potential controller support) to new cinematic cameras and live real time events. Now this stage is complete we need to present you with an updated Road Map which will be coming in the near future that will explain what we will fix and change as well as provide some detail on new content that we know you are all excited to hear about and play.

As well as the engine update we have started to make other performance improvements by re-writing portions of code and changing some visual effects to give a higher frame rate. The area you will see the biggest change here is with water. We use a very detailed reflection system which lead to water being always on, which is very costly. We have now managed to improve this system so only a small amount of water around your character is rendered leading to a significant frame rate improvement.

Overall one thing we need to avoid is making things worse. The problem with game development, especially in small teams, is being able to test all of the content to make sure its bug free and smooth before it gets released. This is one of the benefits of early access but also one of its greatest curses. One thing that greatly aids in this is a Beta environment, and that is what we want to share with you today.

Please understand – a version released on the Beta environment will be more unstable than one released on retail. It will also be a lot more restricted. However it allows us to have people play test updated versions without impacting the majority of players. We have now prepared an updated version of the game and propped it on the Beta Environment for you to try out if you wish to take part in testing new features.

Also it is important to realize that we have only addressed underlying core tech issues and general performance. Many of you wait for specific issues to be fixed regarding quests etc and these are not delivered as part of this update but will be addressed soon.

Be aware of the following:

• The Beta Environment is more unstable than retail.
• The Beta Environment will be turned off and restart at random with no notice.
• Characters created on the Beta environment will be wiped periodically – do not use this for long term game play.
• Only 7 seats exist per region – therefore only a total of 28 people can play on Beta at any one time.
• On Beta you will occasionally see content that is not fully known by other players. Please avoid Spoilers.

This gives us the following development pipeline so you can understand how we will release content going forward, where the quality of the game needs to be higher in each stage before it can be released to the next. This environment is Windows PC only.

Local Development environment –> Internal QA environment –> External Test environment –> Public Beta environment –> Public Retail environment.

Our goal is that a version will spend a week on the Public Beta environment before moving to retail. For those of you who play the current build on this Beta environment please be aware of the following issues:

• Boats will periodically teleport you when they reach docks – this might lead you to landing in water and having to walk to land.
• Some water has rapid wave effects (most notably in Siram Fields)
• The game client might hang during logout. You should be able to close it with Alt+F4

You may join with the password BetaShore2022 - for details on how to join a Steam Beta click the "Discuss" button below.

Thank you for your patience,
Joe & the team at Might and Delight

Redglyph spotted the development roadmap for the Book of Travels:

The Next Quarter and Beyond

Dear Traveller,

It’s been seven weeks since we put out any sort of community update, not counting the set of patch notes that has gone out between then and now. We’ve been very busy with our work to get Book of Travels to a good place
and the studio is going through some important changes to that end, both in terms of how we structure and organise our workflow and in terms of leadership.

You may remember our last communication in which we detailed our plans for the future development, and in broad strokes that plan still stands. What I want to do today is bring further clarity on what is being done and what is going to happen in the near future.

Just like I put it on the table seven weeks ago, we are in a development phase of going back to the foundation and untangling the messier parts of the game code. To that end we’ve called in help from old friends with large amounts of experience
dealing with situations like ours. You’ll get more details about these additions of talent and what it means soon.

For now, know that we’re taking the necessary steps to ensure we get to a place where we can efficiently build a better foundation for Book of Travels to grow on.

So, you may wonder what these actions mean for you as a player. Here’s the deal:

• For the next 3 months we’ll focus on more large scope tech issues.
  These won’t be specific bugs or glitches that are typically visible to the player, but more world encompassing system issues that need to be addressed in order for the game as a whole to be more fertile ground for us to start eradicating the comparatively smaller problems that actually are evident to the player.
• During this time we may appear to be quiet or seem inactive.
  This is just because we will be very busy. Since the nature of these larger scale issues don’t always make them suitable for traditional patch notes, you won’t necessarily see a typical flow of those during this period. You will, however, notice the game getting updated in the Steam client, and if an update doesn't come with the traditional patch notes – now you know why.
• After this period we’ll resume with the releasing of additional content.
  By this point we plan to have the game’s foundation solid enough to allow us to start growing it again. We have lots of cool things that we’re dying to get into your hands. The city of Kasa, for instance, is very close to being finished and we know you’re excited for the deeper character customisation tools that we’ve talked about in the past. But this doesn’t mean that we’ll be done with fixes, just that we can start doing both fixes and fun new content.

So that’s the gist of it. We have a plan and the means to execute it. I hope that this has been informative and clear, and that you share our confidence in the project’s future. As always, we’re enormously grateful for the patience and the excitement that you continue to show us. See you in Braided Shore!

Best wishes,
Oliver & the team at Might and Delight

Might and Delight have posted a new update about Book of Travels, an intriguing atmospheric TMORPG in Early Access (Tiny Multiplayer Online RPG - a single-player experience featuring rare but meaningful encounters with other players).

An Update on the Near Future for Book of Travels

Dear Traveller,

Before we get to the matter at hand I’d personally like to thank you on behalf of the entire team at Might and Delight for playing Book of Travels, engaging with each other on our social platforms and providing us with the invaluable feedback we need to improve and grow the game.

Now, we’ve always said that we’re going to be communicating our plans and priorities with you as they take shape and today I’m going to tell you about how they’ve changed recently.

Our original plan was, as you may know, to continually flesh out the game with content in the form of additional features, levels, character forms and more – all of it along with a flow of patches with fixes on a regular basis throughout the Early Access period that we call “Chapter Zero”.

But the truth is – and this is the part where we need to be brutally honest with ourselves – Book of Travels is nowhere near the level of polish we expected it to be at this point in its life cycle, nor where we need it to be to make it a successful product in the long term. New content tends to birth new problems for us to deal with when they get added, and for a team as small as ours it quickly becomes unsustainable.

Simply put: we need to get Book of Travels to a place where we can start building it with brick and mortar rather than putting bandaids on it. And for that to happen we need to go to the foundation.

[...]

Here is a presentation video (and transcript) introducing the Early Access and explaining the concept: