Winter is coming to the tropical islands.. Farja, the arctic sorceress has stranded.

The biggest addition for v0.20 is Farja, a new playable character. For more information on her, check out the video above!
Additionally, tons of things have changed in Path to the Sky. Since there was no changelog for 0.19, we'll be including all the changes right here.

General
• Farja was added to the game, and with her, a character selection screen
  
• Most enemy attack patterns have been reworked
  
• Enemies can now equip bows, staffs & shields
  
• Several new enemies have been added to the game
  
• An item-log has been added to the lower left of the UI
  
• A target name, mod & level display has been added to the lower left of the UI
  
• Several new monster mods have been added, mods can now combine properly
  
• A slowmotion and zoom effect has been added to the death screen
  
• Akamos vocal sounds have been completely reworked to fit the quality of Farjas vocals
  
• Daily leaderboards have been added and are now the standard leaderboard mode
  
• You can now traverse the leaderboards with the left/right/up/down buttons
  
  
  Combat & movement
  
• Stamina is a new resource, gained by attacking enemies
  
• Casting spells, rolling, and blocking, will consume stamina points
  
• The combat system has been fundamentally reworked
  
• Wind-up and release timers have been added to all combat mechanics
  
• Rolling has been added to the game (Shield + Move Key)
  
• You will now stand still while shooting
  
• Targeting is now guided and your shots can fly off the 45 degree grid
  
• Dropping off of bridges and platforms can now be done by pressing the Down + Jump buttons at the same time
  
• Staggering has been added to the combat mechanics, stopping an enemy attack or shield wind up (this can also happen to the player)
  
  World & nature
  
• A new transition screen has been implemented, showing the current islands silhouette
  
• Islands are now generated by biomes, which will allow for more diverse levels
  
• Rock, Ice and Bog biomes were added
  
• Monster level, health and damage now scale with the island level
  
• The game will now continue after the 6th level, and allow the player to play as long as they can survive
  
• A new room type, the choice room, inhabited by the drowned sailor, has been added.
  
• Room tokens, representing the rooms type, have been added
  
• Item pools and item pool depletion were implemented
  
• 23 new items have been added
  
• Several items were reworked to complement the new combat style
  
• Swords & shields will now not drop in the item room anymore
  
• The shopkeeper and the item room are now fully sized rooms
  
• The boss room now always drops a chest
  
• Chests now all require keys to be opened
  
• The shopkeeper will now sell cheaper stat items
  
• Grass can now be destroyed by player and enemy projectiles
  
• Equipment carried by the player as well as by enemies will be dropped on death and turn into visual props
  
  
  Visual & sound changes
  
• A new series of visual effects, based on distortions, have been added
  
• Environmental props now have spatialized impact sounds
  
• Entity shadows were changed to now be a round area behind the entities, as opposed to a line on the ground beyond them
  
• The area around the rooms is now darker, to decrease visual confusion and increase the immersion feeling of traversing a big cave
  
• Removed outline and lighting settings due to renderer changes and easier maintenance. Visual consistency was turning into a issue to big to ignore, so it will from now on be streamlined
  
  
  Technical changes
  
• You can now configure your controls in the settings menu
  
• the separation of controller mode and keyboard mode has been removed
  
• The OpenGL renderer was rewritten to use instanced rendering, reducing the drawcall amount by around 90%
  
• The OpenGL renderer & GLSL compiler are now set to 3.3 core profile with compatibility mode
  
• Settings are now stored in an XML file locally, as opposed to in the steam cloud (no-one uses the same settings across devices anyways)
  
• A compressor and limiter have been applied to the master audio channel
  
• Sound volumes were adjusted
  
• I am delightfully surprised you read this far
  
• The A* pathfinder was changed to now work on a grid equal to the game grid rather than a 2x as fine grid to help with enemy tunneling

Thats it for this Update! Thank you very much for supporting PTTS!
If you have any problems, please report them in the forum. Dont forget to post your log and settings file. Your log and setttings files are usually located at: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Path to the Sky"

Thank you very much!

- Johannes

Dear Players,

A lot of work has gone into the update that will hit Path to the Sky very soon. Today, a pre-patch has been applied, which will already introduce a lot of fundamental changes - there are so many of them, that I'm not gonna reveal them all until 0.20 goes live. For now, I Invite everyone to give the pre-patch version a test and see if they like it :)

As a recommendation: Joystick controlls are now infinitely more useful, and I now think its the best way to play the game!

In case you have any problems running the game (this might very well be, because of the many technical changes) please post your settings and log file in the forum.
Your log and setttings files are usually located at: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Path to the Sky

See you soon with the actual v0.20 Update - where all the changes will be properly documented and revealed.

Thank you,
Johannes

Hello Testers!

This week I'm adding a much requested feature to the game. People were sometimes having troubles seeing the items that they picked up for various reasons, or they want to read the lore texts again, or they want to find out more about the items effects... Fear no more! I'm introducing the:

Inventory
You can now find additional info about your collected passive, active & consumable Items here. To open the Inventory, press ESC / TAB. Navigate to the settings / exit menu by pressing sideways keys, or navigate the items by pressing up and down on your keyboard / controller! The inventory mainly is for information purposes at the moment. All passives stack and cant be disabled, although I have planned this feature in the future.

Changes

• Enemies on the outside flying islands will now not fly away too far from their original spawn position
  
• Foliage will now not spawn on destroyable blocks anymore, to prevent accidentally exploding blocks
  
• Dropholes in rooms are now properly climbable
  
• Increased base running speed and running animation of akamo slightly
  
• You can now navigate menus with both the shooting and movement direction keys

Fixes

• Fixed "end of the world" water camera bug
  
• Fixed a bug where scoreboard names would overlap the scores when too long
  
• Fixed a bug where Gnarly stick would cause a crash in the last level
  
• Fixed a bug where Feathercall would cause a crash in the last level

Greetings, Traveler!

Thanks for a great week of testing and feedback :) It was very fun~
This update is pushing a few new features as well as bug fixes and changes to the controller support.

Books
I've added a new form of consumable to the game: Books! They are a bit more rare than Potions. You can find them from enemies that carry shields, but you can also get them from other random loot sources. You can consume them just like you do with potions; they will have utility based effects, which are secret for now. Their names hint at the effects though - have fun finding them all out!

Controller support
I also worked on the controller support. There have been some fundamental problems with the input library I have been using. I've now upgraded it to use Xinput on windows, and changed the axis settings on Mac. While it will still be problematic for some systems (mostly mac I fear), it SHOULD work for all microsoft Xbox controllers, ASWELL as all other devices that use the correct Button settup with an Xinput enabled emulator.
If something is wrong, you may need to inverse the y-axis of the sticks, as well as make sure that your buttons are set up like this:

• Button 0 - A
  
• Button 1 - B
  
• Button 2 - X
  
• Button 3 - Y
  
• Button 4 - Left Shoulder Button
  
• Button 5 - Right Shoulder Button
  
• Button 6 - Back / Select
  
• Button 7 - Start
  
• Button 8 - Left Stick Down
  
• Button 9 - Right Stick Down
  
• Button 10 - Dpad Up
  
• Button 11 - Dpad Right
  
• Button 12 - Dpad Down
  
• Button 13 - Dpad Left

Heres the official v0.11 changelog

Additions

• Books have been added
  
• Added a new weapon
  
• 40+ New unique room layouts were added
  
• Added visual effect when an item is consumed

Fixes

• Fixed a problem where the flat skull shield would not work outside
  
• Fixed missing music for boss in level 3
  
• Fixed bug where submitting score right after being killed by a boss might have crashed the game
  
• Proposed fix for controllers - changed to Xinput on windows
  
• Proposed fix for a possible crash caused by particles in the outside zone

List of Books

• Book of Adventure
  
• Book of Alchemy
  
• Book of Blood
  
• Book of Potions
  
• Book of Preparation
  
• Book of Relocation
  
• Book of Reward
  
• Book of Shielding
  
• Book of Stamina
  
• Book of Transform
  
• Book of Wonder
  
• ???

Hello everyone!

First of all, I want to personally thank all of you for playing Path to the Sky, its been a fun few days and things have been going very well! The biggest feature that people have been asking for is controller support. You asked, and I listened;
Here is a first, experimental(!) build with two controller schemes.
This has only been tested with Xbox 360 controllers. Xbox One / PS4 might not work!
Please, if there is a problem with your PS4-styled / Steam controller - let me know in the forums.
You can go to the settings to switch schemes and see which one you prefer.

Template 1
Movement: L-Stick / Pad
Shooting: R-Stick / ABXY Buttons
Jump: Right Trigger
Shield: Left Trigger
Weapon Active: Right Button
Shield Active: Left Button
Consumable: Select / Back button

Template 2
Movement: L-Stick / Pad
Shooting: R-Stick
Jump: A
Shield: B / Left Trigger
Weapon Active: Right Button
Shield Active: Left Button
Consumable: Select / Back button

One of the major difficulty with controller support for Path to the Sky is trying to fit the 8 directional shooting pattern together with jumping and shielding. You might also wonder why active items arent on X/Y in template B - the reason is that you wouldnt be able to indicate a direction with your thumb while activating an item; some items shoot in a certain direction upon activation, so its better to have them on the LB/RB buttons!

Apart from the controller additions, here are the other minor fixes:

Additions

• Experimental controller support

Changes

• Jumping on ladders now properly launches you upwards
  
• Tapping sideways on ladders now properly releases you

Fixes

• Proposed fix for potential crash caused by removing blocks with grass on them
  
• Proposed fix for potential problem causing mac crash on start
  
• Fixed bug where game would crash on pressing ESC in main menu
  
• Bomb eggs dropping bones has been fixed to stop abuse in the 3rd bossfight

Whats next?
I'm gonna be looking closely at your feedback regarding the controller implementation. Please, dont be afraid to enter the steam community forums and voice your ideas about the pattern implementations. Once we have found some patterns that are enjoyable for most people, I will be working on implementing more monsters, items and general gameplay features! I'd love to hear your ideas!

Hello everyone,

Path to the Sky is now out for everyone! Thank you for playing :)
This is the changelog for v0.10 - These changes are mostly polish for the EA release!

Additions

• Added water physics, sound & effects
  
• Added menu logos
  
• Added credits screen
  
• Added visuals for random spawning mobs

Changes

• Reworked combat & movement sounds
  
• Iproved speech/dialogue sound
  
• Improved menu sounds
  
• Reworked instructions

Fixes

• Shopkeeper now correctly sells keys
  
• Fixed mac display bugs that happened on retina displays

Whats next?
I will be monitoring the first players now and watch for any critical bugs or crashes; Once most of the dust has settled, I'll be looking at the most requested features! For now, Controller support seems to be one of the main requests, so we're gonna try to make that happen!
Dont be afraid to post any ideas / feedback in the forums!

Thank you,
- dek

Hey,

If you missed it, I announced the rewards for all pre-orderers! You can pre-order your steam key and get it today on the official website![pathtothesky.com]
Everyone pre-ordering will have the ability to have their name added to a pool of names in the game, which can be chosen from when generating ranomized texts or item descriptions. Its rare and will not have a big impact on the game, but it can create some fun interactions. More info describing the process can be found here:
A thank you to all supporters.[pathtothesky.com]

Thank you all :)
See ya on the 2nd February!

Yes ~ :8bitheart:

It is time everyone!
After several months of internal testing, PTTS is finally ready to go Early Access Alpha on Steam! PTTS will be available on:

02. February 2016

Thank you so much for the support so far. It means so much to me!
Btw, you can still pre-order PTTS on the official website[pathtothesky.com]. All pre-orderers will be getting a tiny special thank-you, which I will announce tomorrow!

Let's do this.

Welcome, testers!

Finally we're able to start some internal testing rounds. Ill be pushing updates all the time, so dont worry about that.

If you find any bugs, please report them in the steam community forum :)

Cheers!