Good evening, Dink Dunk here ready to lay some progress down from another month, fresh from the fires of the forges.

Another month passes with some amazing work getting completed within the studio. We have some really exciting things dawning shortly also.

Shoplifting

The shop is here, including some first pass icons. We hope it’s refreshing enough from other games in the Genre, we aimed for a simpler, easier to understand build system. Doing away with component items or recipes entirely.

Hopefully, this lowers the inherent learning curve for a game in this genre, combining systems that affect similar aspects makes sense. We’ve taken the stance that there should be no active items, with tier 2 and 3 items having unique passives.

Don’t worry though, even though there are 6 “starter” items, they build into 20 Tier 2 items and 56 Tier 3 items.

I felt it worth mentioning our stat system, to show some of the differences between similar games:

You’ll notice there aren’t any consumables either! Everyone gets a ward, which should alleviate some of that stress every supporting player has felt from time to time. All players get to place an indestructible ward every three minutes or so.

It may have dawned on you that we haven’t talked about consumables. As of yet, we haven’t decided exactly the direction we will be taking consumables, though they will be included in the game. We’ve been discussing everyone having refillable starting consumables, consumables that fill over time, have charges, upgrades etc. If there are any ideas people want to throw in the ring, feel free to ping us in #aetherforged-discussion.

Expect a full blog on dedicated to all our items in the future.

Lore pieces

This month saw the release of another atmospheric background lore piece for one of our forgers, Sil, written by Beard Dude. “A Cold Night in Jupe” dives into the backstory of Sil’s upbringing in the cold, mechanical city of Jupe, and helps to explore what it is that makes her tick–why she is the way she is today. As always, the lore can be found on our website or on our subreddit/discord.

This month also marks the beginning of a new lore release schedule, with a new lore piece every Thursday. With Sil’s re-release, this also begins our process of updating old lore pieces. Stay tuned for what we have in store over the next few months!

Wasp

Justus also got busy with ye-old wasps animations, this is a model from way back that we are planning to use in the jungle until a better predator comes along.

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Tespis

Way back in April, we released Tespis, the Panacea. Whilst I might have skipped over her to tackle Jaromir and Lucan first model-wise, she’s been getting some love from Justus, whose visual effects are getting exponentially better every time I get to post them.

I’ve chopped out some of the released information that’s relevant for each abilty below:

Sil

Sil also got some updates this month. Oldar and I decided to set a deadline for her major animations to be complete, happily, we have completed all but 2 (being death and Ability 3).

Her major animations (and major animations for every Forger) being: Idle, Run, BasicAttack, BasicAttackAlt, Ability0 (passive, if applicable), Ability1, Ability2, Abilty3, Ability4, Death, Intro, Flail, Stunned and Recall

There is another list of nice-to-have animation, but they aren’t required at the moment to get a playable game, something to revisit in our downtime.

Jaromir

If you’ve not been following the streams, you’ve missed out on some fantastic Jaromir progress. I’ve enjoyed taking him from his concept through to completion live, you can look forward to more forgers being completed in this format.

Lucan

Lucan is in his animation stage, with the same list as Sil above to be completed, here is a sneak peak at an idle block out completed by Oldar.

Map updates

Melvyn and Omegabeard have been busy working away at some new map assets. Here’s Melvyn to say a couple words:

Omegabeard (Environment Artist) and I have been hard at work adding the final touches on our first full realisation of our in-game map – Where Forgers meet in the heat of battle. This is what we’re considering the first iteration of the map, and is likely to change throughout development, it’s a welcome contrast from the grey-brown blocks we’ve grown used to over the course of the past year and a welcome pallet to supplement the brilliant new 3D models the team have been working on. We’ve learnt a lot throughout this process, cut our teeth and earned enough stripes to dive headlong into preparing the next iteration. You’ll be seeing a lot of the sand dusted slabs of stone, ancient monolithic devices and overgrown groves of the Forge over the coming months.

Kindling some hearths

Unfortunately last month I had to call off our monthly forger release and push them back due to our artist having technical issues with their setup. We will be releasing a new forger this month, and one the month after. However, there might be something to look forward to in between the two releases.

I’ve been enjoying streaming tremendously on twitch recently, the love for Aetherforged is overwhelming and I can do nothing (yet) but thank you for your support and generosity in subscribing to the channel (either with Prime or $$).

If you haven’t already; be sure to sign up on the website, there might be more than just an “accounts” page to get excited about shortly…

A sword requires a sheath, a quill yearns for the inkwell, a Forger seeks out the Forge.

Duncan “Dink_Dunk” Duguid

Lead Developer