Good evening everyone! I hope you have had a fantastic weekend. I’ve been super busy as usual practising my sculpting in Zbrush. I entered the Artstation challenge to create a game ready character, you can check out my submission here.

I am a couple of nights work in just now, I’m only just beginning work on Sin so expect to see some more of her in the following 35 days!

Otherwise, in real life I have a family member in hospital and work is kicking up dirt. Plenty to worry about, which is part of the reason for some of the updates in AetherForged this week.

Planning

Since Melvyn joined us last week we have been super hard at work. He confirmed some issues that I had, such as having myself tackle the planning/management of the project along with programming, art, unity implementation, alongside doing most of the community work and planning releases, all whilst balancing IRL with AetherForged.

So with that in mind, I have asked HeroicTechnology to come back to our team. He will be donning the mantle of “Director of operations” and dealing with the planning side of the team that I was trying to tackle previously. He will hopefully be doing a couple of blog posts to free me up on a Sunday night.

We realise that community interaction is pretty low at the moment and I hope that soon enough we can address that issue and bring us back onto a smooth running hype train!

Implementation

Melvyn has been influential in helping mockup our UI this week, working with Justus who provided the background particles.

Welcome to AetherForged! Made complete with this AMAZING login piece from Dirk!

Gigimoi has been busy making the darned thing work, along with Melvyn providing a visual update!

The backend server-side of the login is now up 24/7. Gigi started separating the login server from the game server so that in future we can separate the machines that they run on. For testing, the login server is running 24/7 on the amazon AWS servers but the game server requires more power than the free tier provides. So for now, it’s hosted at Gigi’s.

In other news, Mox has been pushing onwards with a much broader area than previously. Tackling initialisation during server startup of towers, minions and forgers.

In the midst of updating all of that we’ve also gotten a nice visual change, teams now have colours!

Minion health bars were tweaked, much less intrusive now. They also found their legs somewhere along the way!

I’ll note here that animation may have gotten slightly out of sync. I’ll be fixing this once Mox has gotten most things synced with the server.

Melvyn was also busy doing something else that should have been completed ages ago, the in-game UI.

On top of all of the above, he completed a wide selection of sound effects. I picked out 5, Salt acquisition after you kill a minion and our 4 roles personified in audio.

Role sounds being played when you select your role in the forger select.

Justus had some great progress on the water shader. No animations, just shader effects!

There was a lore release this week, so if you somehow missed it, here is the link!

Closeout report

It’s been an insane week overall, I’m glad everyone was along for the ride. I seriously hope that everyone enjoys reading these blogs. With a combination of HeroicTechnology and Melvyn, our front facing fence is going to be painted real sweet in the next few weeks!

I’d also like to take a moment to ask you, the people keeping this project alive, what would YOU like to see more of? Lore, Streams, Devlogs, Videos etc any idea goes. Send your ideas in #aetherforged-questions in the Discord @Dink_Dunk or @heroictechnology.

Appreciate ya!