Hello there, Duncan (Dink_Dunk) here to introduce our first o7 studios devblog!

I have been wanting to write a little blog for myself and for AetherForged for a while now actually, and after being poked by Eli (Saxpanther). I’ve decided to give it a shot, so without further ado here’s to my/our first blog post!

Sharing is caring

For this first post here I thought I would focus on the process of sharing updates, specifically AetherForged updates. o7 studios could share everything at once or go deep into development secrecy and do everything in a single grand reveal. It’s something that has been talked about since the beginning of the project.

Previously we have been trying to keep everyone up to date by streaming and doing regular posts on Reddit without a schedule. Though this method has its flaws and we appreciate people’s patience when there isn’t much to show.

We did a stream just before myself and Eli headed off to Gamescom to enjoy pancakes, beer, Sun and Tricky towers and said we would stream again in around 4 weeks… Yeah, that didn’t happen, and I felt terrible for it!

Never again! I won’t make promises unless I am 100% sure I can keep them, and don’t say I’m going to do something; tell people when it’s done! With this in mind, I hope we can come up with something that is both sustainable for us and interesting for our fans.

Forging some updates

It was actually an incredibly productive couple of weeks for us after the last stream, Tailing off towards present day (Exams, Work, Moving, Game updates). Our Forgers are almost to the point of being playable, Nibra has her Q and W coded and in-game. Networking is now a thing, we can host, join and leave games. Although abilities aren’t synced at the moment, they are high on the priority list! The reason for taking so long with our first few Forgers is because we want to create a sustainable system going forwards, future Forgers should be much quicker to implement.

We also have a fancy build server; along with a sweet slack bot that automagically pulls down our branches and builds them within unity!

However, there was a slight issue due to the format of the models that were being used in the project (.blend files). The build server had to have blender installed and it refused to run correctly, making all of our models invisible on the server’s version of the builds (Perma invisibility confirmed?)! After some troubleshooting, we settled to convert everything in the project to .FBX files. This has had some unknown advantages; such as animation import settings taking a fraction of the time as they did before, and events added to animations within unity no longer get removed due to reimport.

In the weeks following the previous stream we have also moved to the latest version of unity. Allowing Justus to create some mighty fine looking particles quickly.

Some visual effects based updates were done on the armatures of our test forgers. Allowing for simple targeting of effects, such as a foot bone for a buff/debuff particle to attach to.

The animator for Nibra has had an upgrade, now it is tied directly into the kit code! The motion controller was also updated to take advantage of the refreshed movement system that was implemented; it allows the animations to have velocity separate from movement, allowing us to have a cosmetic turn speed and acceleration.

So, there you have it, AetherForged updates for the past couple of weeks. If you have any comments please post them on the subreddit, and also tell us how often you would like to see updates like this!