Not A Valid Funding Option™

So there's been a joke floating around the dev team for A Long Time. It started with things like... "Cashing in on life insurance is not a valid funding option""Depending on the lottery is not a valid funding option" "Robbing a bank [or multiple financial institutions] is not a valid funding option" Care to add more to the list? Let us know in the forums or in the comments on facebook.

There's more to it than drawing

I was going to take this post to go in to details about the art on the Magic Science card, but that particular thought was diverted so this could come to the front of things. It's a thing. Let's just roll with it. Art isn't just drawing up things on a whim. Contrary to popular belief, the art for NEXUS--and by extension, Seven Courts--involved a lot of research. This isn't to say that all art involves research; some pieces just flow from brain to hand to page without any prompting. But for the art in NEXUS, there's a good deal of thought that's gone in to each piece. Yes, every piece. Even the poker-style Ace through 10's. Colour, size, placement and position, item type. We…

How I got started with Aetheric Worlds

Life Death was the first. It's the piece that gave me the most hope for the rest of the pieces I was asked to do. Hope that all the Dualities would turn out just as good, just as rich, just as evocative. There weren't many iterations of this particular card, since the bulk of it was hammered out between myself and Michelle before I started drawing. This particular card did set up the format for all the others. Each card that followed Life Death was set to a frame with a border that I had made, ensuring that each card is done within the same sizing parameters. (as seen here with the WIP shot from Life Death) "But wait," I hear you say; "What if…

Musical Treasures

While working with Vladimir on the music for NEXUS, one of the tracks we'd requested was to be the theme for the thirteen Artifacts. The track was meant to evoke each of the Artifacts via different instruments, keys, and rhythms. After several hours' discussion with Vladimir on what was to carry the theme all the way through (while the Artifacts' individual themes would rise and fall throughout), he conceived a series of brass-themed intense chords. Woven throughout that theme came thirteen phrases to represent the Artifacts, told as the wanderings of a traveller in search of the Artifacts of Tyanaphos. The end result is the fourteen-and-a-half-minute-long suite of music entitled "Treasure Hunter." The dawn echoes with the distant call of horns from the Castle of…

Building Social Games in a Disconnected World

Ætheric Worlds is easing into building Social Games. The normal definition of a Social Game is one in which interacting with other players is a significant aspect of the game play, or gives significant benefit… but I'm going to broaden that definition to any game where a noticeable set of features are specifically for social interaction, including things like global high score lists, viewable player achievements, etc. These are features where communicating to the outside world is paramount, and the feature doesn't work if that communication fails. On the flip side, Ætheric Worlds is also building games for use on multiple platforms, including mobile platforms. With desktop systems, we can generally assume that a network connection will be available (and treat the times when it…

Ætheric Worlds: The Past, Present, and Future

Well, given that Ætheric Worlds is less than two years old, that's a rather pretentious title for this week's ramble, but at the same time, it's somewhat accurate. We started out in autumn of 2012 with a single idea: let's see if we can put together enough resources — story, art, and programming — to convince investors that we have a good shot at making games, and build a game studio around that. The first game we chose to work toward was a little ambitious for a studio with three part time coders, two part time artists, one part time writer, and me — I can do nearly everything the business requires except write software or create art. In the beginning, we were incredibly optimistic.…

Money, Money, Money - The Search for Funding

In his book WALDEN, Henry David Thoreau wrote, "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." Now, I consider myself something of an optimist, or at the very least, delusionally cheerful in the face of adversity. But somehow I don't think Thoreau ever had to worry about trying to fund a gaming studio. Because developing a game, and even moreso a larger world of continuity for it, is definitely building castles in the air. But how does one put a foundation under it? None of us here at Ætheric come from particularly affluent families (unlike, say, Bill Gates), and while almost all of us are gainfully employed…

Elements of Sound

Part of the design of a game is its sound, and NEXUS is no different. Not only were we going to need basic User Interface (UI) sound effects (clicks, sliders, check boxes, error sounds, etc.), but we were also going to need music. And from the beginning, one of the ideas I'd had in mind was that each Element of NEXUS would have its own distinct theme. Fortunately, the others were enthusiastic about the idea. And as we launched our earlier IndieGoGo effort, we offered specific tracks that would only be available to the backers. It was eventually decided that eight tracks would be made available with NEXUS — one for each Element, and a main theme for NEXUS itself. The IndieGoGo backers would then…

How Nexus Fits into Tyanaphos — Part 1: Why We're Doing Small Games

NEXUS: The Zoraidian Oracle is designed to be a buy-once own-always card game. Once it's done, it won't need any other purchases for play; while we can (and probably will) release additional music and backgrounds, and could even release an entire different card set for it, the reality is that it is fundamentally a small game. Our next expected title, Chimera, will be another small game, albeit of an entirely different sort. We have an additional two or three projects that have been proposed as well, all of which are small games that can be developed for all of the platforms that we're trying to reach; some of which also tie back into the world of Tyanaphos, much like NEXUS does. However, as indicated in…

Game Development, Equality and Crusades

One of the things that has gone around in game development circles for at least the last several years, and likely longer, is the concept of "equality" — almost especially for women (or at least, most loudly for women), but also for non-Caucasians and for those who are handicapped. The concept is not so much about equal time, but for equal representation: if white men are going to be shown as strong, capable, smart, brave, etc., etc., then so should everyone else (and they should be fully dressed, at that). In addition, there has been a groundswell of effort to get more women (specifically) into positions in the gaming industry, and to recognize women as serious gamers, equal in skill and competitiveness with their male…

Developing User Interfaces

Building user interfaces for games is an art form. Unlike building user interfaces in a business environment where you're looking at getting the job done as cleanly and efficiently as possible, with games, you want to get the job done in as fun a way as possible while retaining player interest and without being too frustrating. So for games, we're frequently making UI decisions that are specifically against efficiency. As an example, if we have a game UI that simulates a roulette wheel, then an efficient UI would just start to spin the wheel once you've placed your bet and, without further interaction, tell you what you've won or lost. A more entertaining simulation however, would not only have you place your bet, it would…

Keeping It Balanced

I belong to several different game development circles, and through them, I try to keep track on things going on in the industry and in game design. One of the forefront issues, not surprisingly, is women in gaming (and women in games). Here at Ætheric, we're almost an exact 50/50 split (although women currently hold the upper hand in that our president is a woman, HA!). And since the guys that work here are smart enough to recognize that women are just as much in the gamer demographic as men are, a lot of our gaming ideas and discussions are very "equal opportunity." Another contentious topic is sexism (both male and female). For example, when talking about costume options, in-game cultures, body design, and so…

Moving Time!

This last week of January, in addition to trying to finish up our company taxes (state taxes are due in by the end of the month) and working madly on NEXUS, we're also giving ourselves an additional challenge — moving offices. In July of 2012, we determined that working on our private machines and meeting at my dining room table (or around a conference table in Michelle's complex while my house was for sale) was not the most efficient way of getting things done. It led to a more social atmosphere, and while we did get some planning done, it was incredibly difficult to maintain consistent follow-through; plus, seeing things on the small, 19-inch monitor we had for our "conference computer" was nearly impossible. We…

Full-Time vs. Freelancing, or a Day at the Ætheric Office

One of the more difficult things about trying to get Ætheric Worlds off the ground is the fact that several of the developers, including myself, work regular full-time jobs. It's kind of a necessary thing, since at the moment, none of us are getting paid for our work with Ætheric. And since none of us are lottery winners or able to live off vast inheritances of any kind, regular employment is sort of important. But Ætheric is important to us, too — we believe in our company, we believe in our games, and so all of us put in time on top of our normal lives. At least one or two nights a week, the other devs and I head over to the Ætheric office…

Balancing and Scoring in Nexus

When NEXUS was first brought up, it was as one of two games that we considered introducing as our first game from the company. After some discussion about them, we realized that NEXUS was not only the easier of the two to write, it was also the more complete of the two, and would be the sane one to begin with. Naturally, we started to design the other one. Fortunately, a couple of weeks into this process Michelle — who had been asked to see what she could do about finishing up the cards and the basic playing rules — presented us with a home-made NEXUS deck. Made out of white shipping labels stuck to spare playing cards with the NEXUS card names hand-written in…

New Year Update

Welcome to the New Year. For all that our IndieGoGo campaign didn't net more than about 1.5% of what we were hoping to get, 2013 was actually good for Ætheric Worlds. We clarified the direction we're moving in, and were able to put in solid work on our first game, begin designing our second, and make contacts that could lead to a digitization deal for another. That's really not bad for a company which started the year with the entire crew having the flu at once! At the beginning of December, we scored four inexpensive Dell Optiplex 755 computers. They're all running Windows 7, and they're all able to drive two monitors. Along with the Mac Mini, that brings us up to five active company-owned…