Greetings, Forgers,

Over the past month, we’ve seen a lot of things happen. Nazarah, for example, was shown off and given life in our Forger spotlight. A microlore blog was released, showing a rather unsightly underbelly of the AetherForged world. If you’ve watched any of our streams, which you should keep tabs on here, you’ll know that many of our devs have been showing their hard work as it happens. However, that’s not all that has happened in development this month. We’ll be pulling the curtains back on some of the in-game systems we’ve been developing, and some of the models and art we have on the map now.

As a reminder, all the assets you see in this blog are works in progress, so, while they may appear complete and ready-to-push, they can still be iterated on.

Map Work

First of all, you may have noticed in the past that our map was a big blob of gray and depressing. While this is great for asylums, the team felt like giving it some more life. With SaxPanther’s ground texture and more, the map’s look has progressed dramatically from the past to now. The walls are soon to come! Meanwhile, the minions are also looking nice on our map now.

Along with that, environmental work has been done so that our map will end up filled with life! We’ve had several contributors to this, the biggest one being Nick. He’s done a lot of work from scratch, starting from the bottom up in modelling. Many of these small things will filter into the AetherForged map in some way.

Forgers

In the past, we’ve shown off a couple of the forgers that will make up the core of our roster, and Duncan and TwistedIronPaw has continued their work on the models that will represent them in-game. As the weeks go by, these models will be rigged, animated, and their skills programmed. This will edge our game closer to a playable and, therefore, testable, status.

Sil has been completely modeled and rigged. When she gets animated, she’ll be ready for action to go on the Forge.

If you’ve been watching the official o7 stream, you’ll have a really good beat on what Lucan looks like. If you haven’t been, you can always keep up with our development here on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays! Not that we’re shilling or anything.

Nazarah, who was recently shown off, is being worked on by TwistedIronPaw for the modelling. He appears on stream here and there, so make sure to watch his work, too!

UI

Melvyn has been getting a lot of work done on the UI elements, including menus, the client, and the in-game shop. In-game, this UI should look familiar to most MOBA players, but also have some quality of life upgrades iterating on current UIs in other MOBAs. It is this design philosophy that we’ve used throughout our development that we hope shines through: continuous improvement.

Pings

If you’ve ever played a MOBA before, you’ll know that there’s one universal fact: that hearing the DANGER ping repeatedly from your feeding teammate or seeing ENEMIES MISSING from your tilting lane partner is the most annoying thing EVER. Well, you can now do that in AetherForged too. With a wheel of basic pings, you can now tell others that they’re in danger with the RETREAT ping. You can, however, do other things with these pings. For example, you can tell someone that you question their logic in making that play with the MIA ping. However, my personal favourite and something I haven’t seen in other games yet is that your teammate is only good for vision with the WARDED ping.

Melvyn tells me, by the way, that each ping has its own individual pitch. When we go into pre-alpha, I expect many of you to make your own dank beats.

The Best to Come…

This past month has been one of the best months for the AetherForged team. As we move forward, your interest in the game only fuels us further. Recently, we’ve hit 800 reddit subscribers and as the community manager, that makes me incredibly happy to see. I hope we hit 1000 before our pre-alpha is ready to go.

Cheers,

HeroicTechnology, Community Manager