Hey everyone, Dink here, from the Aetherforged team, here to help wrap up the last months of streams and progress.

What a month, things started slower than usual but picked up pace tremendously towards the back end. Our optimisations from last month have really paid off, building and running tests are much quicker and painless.

Our subscriber and patron lists grow ever longer, with us reaching an incredible amount in such a short time! We appreciate the faith you have in o7studios tremendously.

Patchlog 0.0.3

So many small details this month, but they bring us ever-so-closer to that testing environment we want to get into your hands.

Further updates to item passives

Buffs have been refactored to allow more flexibility for future kits and interactions

Heals/Shields have been reworked, tracker more robust

Double animations on some abilities have been patched out

Squash volume level of the level up noise

Playername is now synced across clients!

Projectiles are now visible on all host/clients

Forgers now don’t disappear on death on the client end

New tower added to suit the ground texture

Warcardinal material updates

Blinks and Dashes framework in place, Nibra has her dash and the blink spell works

gameplay, graphics, keybinds and audio options menu added

Default placeholder in place for shop items that don’t have an icon yet

Default placeholder for forgers that don’t have ability icons yet

Slight networking clean up, less hassle

General updates to Sil, Lucan and Nibras kits

Forger swapping in-game for debugging purposes

Recall should trigger on the first push every time now, instead of stopping you with the first then recalling on the second.

Lighting changes, making things look 10% better (somewhere around there)

Pathing rebuild, less jank, more tank? Forger/Minion pathing works a lot smoother on the client and host.

Lucan no longer gets trapped in his punch animation

Damage types have been added, along with siege effect

Only siege or auto attack effects damage towers now

The Phantom – Roennes kit has been started

Recastable abilities first pass started

Death no longer instantly removes you – this will let us use death animations etc (or even a resurrect in future?)

Jaromir’s kit has been started

General housekeeping again

Fixed a random scrolling bug from happening

Updates to our UI layout and stats

Stats panel now updates to your current stats (currently on host, client to follow)

Changing the map to be a flat plane instead of a camera

Remove a huge amount of unneeded UI assets

Made our fonts much sharper and cleaner

Updated health bars – much less screen space now

Nibra lore piece

Nazarah lore piece

Jaromir is rigged

Thought I would also give everyone a visual queue on just what was done this month, the following video is the development of Aetherforged for the past two months (This is only people working in unity). Each little dot is a file that was edited in the past two months, and each light from a person is them editing it, you can see the huge clear up I did part-way through.

Testing sessions

We managed to have 2 official Aetherforged testing sessions this month. With such tests, things always crop up that we hadn’t even considered like this:

We did the latter test on stream, but I missed the dialogue with our amazing subs, so future tests will probably be done off stream for now. Don’t worry, you’ll still see plenty whacky stuff from me and Mox during the streams.

Going shopping

Coming back to the shop again, we gave it a nice facelift and functionality update, now the shop inventory, bottom panel inventory sync up. There are now placeholders in place for items without an icon and buying/selling works on both clients and host!

Oh, and buying items now effects your stats on the lower left panel, so we can see exactly which items are doing what they say they are! Alongside a couple bugs being squashed.

Options, so many options

We visited our options panel again this month, adding a slew of options and debug tools. Including:

Hosting games

Player name

IP entry, along with default server connection, localhost (connecting to yourself) and disconnecting

Forger select, huge boon for testing couldn’t live without it anymore

Keybinds, you can rebind everything in the game to your preferred setup

Graphics options, texture size, Antialiasing, Vsync – more options to be added eventually

Resolution options, fullscreen mode

Optional FPS and ping display

Item/Stat slideout panel defaults

Audio sliders for Master, Music, Effects, Ambience, Voice and the Announcer

Camera settings (as seen on the gameplay panel with alpha functionality)

Sync

With our gameplay updates last month, I’d like to expand by showing the current lane, particles, movement, abilities, animations and health now all sync between clients and servers.

Updates to looks

We heard the pleas of the masses, and Melv has taken the dive into the UI again. Check out this quick WIP:

Closeout

I hope you have enjoyed this months blog, I’m 100% sure I’ve missed some things here and there. There were other drawings, emotes, UI updates, lore posts that I left out this month.

You’ll notice there are a few more nods this month to the updates to kits in game, it’s pretty hard to show these off but know that our forgers are coming together quicker and quicker.

I hope you’ve all enjoyed this month and a HUGE thank you to our dedicated patrons! I hope you’ll join me and Mox for this weekends Ludum Dare where we’ll be making a game up on the spot and taking it to completion in one weekend.

Oh, and here’s Jaromir without any textures, posed and in-game, looking happy to have made it in.

Duncan “Dink_Dunk” Duguid

Lead Developer