INTO THE AETHER 2025 PROGRESS WRAP UP:

How far have we come? And how far is left? Ideally, not a lot... But of course, everything takes longer than one thinks it will. Also, I'm still working a full-time job... so, that doesn't help things go by quickly, but the plan is once chapter 1 finishes, I would love to see how fast we can make future chapters if we could work on them more than once a week! We've been giving little progress updates in the Discord for a while now, but we haven't gotten a chance to break down just what all that fully means in context, and where we're at. So if you're curious about that (and you like reading lots of paragraphs), then you're in the right place.

Quick note: It's really hard to give exact percentages of just how complete certain aspects of the game are. So, I've broken it down into a list of tasks, and I'm deriving the completion percentage from how many tasks out of each list are complete. The flaw is that some tasks take a lot more time and effort than others, so keep that in mind! 

BATTLE SYSTEM: 

• These are estimations because sometimes we forget things we need to develop, but if we're accurate... the battle system is 94%. Fundamentally, it works! Mainly, we're just missing cutscene functionality during battles. So, bosses changing facial expressions during battles... we have a way of doing that, but it's sort of a workaround, so we can do it in a cleaner way. Also, making enemy reinforcements spawn in battle. Or scripted skill events, like an enemy hits you for a tutorial and keeps doing it until you succeed in the tutorial. That sort of thing! 

• Player skill kits: 90%. I think Clarence is missing one or two skills, but that's it! Everything else works. Celeste needs some animations, too, but her skills are programmed.

• The one thing that doesn't exist for any of the main trio is their ultimate skills. Well, sorta. They exist, but are just treated like normal skills. I've been working on special cut-in sprites, so I just need to finish Celeste's ult cut-in, and then it needs to be animated, and then we're good on that front.

• Enemy skill patterns are only 28% done. That's because Moof hasn't started it yet, but I've done a few of the easier ones. That's gonna be one of the last things we do. They're mostly all planned out, though, so it probably won't be that bad once we actually program them all.

BATTLE SYSTEM: 

• Most overworld code is done. The entire cutscene system works, and actually, most cutscenes are done, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

• The only major thing lacking is that there is a new type of puzzle for half of the chapter, and that puzzle type doesn't exist yet. So, the rooms that will include those puzzles are a bit empty. So... let's just say overworld coding is 80%.

• Well, after my initial draft of this... I have to amend this to say that we've made really good progress on that second puzzle type!

• Menus... are 70% done. Menus have been taking a long time to make. We still need the shopkeeper's menu, the equipment menu, and the mysterious other menu. Well, actually, let's make that 79% because really, the equipment menu is almost done. Just needs the "optimize" button to be functional.

MUSIC:

• Music is 90% done. That's to say, I'm only missing one song. Maybe two, but the other one is an optional song that doesn't need to be in Chapter 1. I do need to write the new game-over theme. That's the one that isn't optional! 

• There are about 60 songs for Chapter 1 alone. I'm really proud of this. Only 13 tracks remain unchanged from the Classic era, but the rest are either new renditions of old songs or completely new songs. I'm sitting on another 70 complete songs for other chapters, though. I make music whenever inspiration strikes!

• As for other SFX... It's actually Moof who is better than that, and I'm not going to make a list of how many sounds are needed for different battle things because that's something we'll determine as we begin work on enemy skill patterns. There are at least 27 sound effects that are on my radar that the game will need, but it will probably be a lot more when battle sounds are factored in.

GRAPHICS:

• Parallax backdrops are 71% done. This sounds like... not a lot, but... honestly, it might as well be 90% done. The only parallaxes that are missing are the ones for the final boss and the parallax for an optional boss. One of which already has a rough draft. The other... I imagine will not take very long!

• Overworld sprites are 81% done. For clarity, I'm referring to overworld NPC and enemy sprites in this category. There's a small handful of NPCs left, here. There's one enemy sprite that exists, but needs different angles! It's probably more like 70%, though... because the ending of Chapter 1 will need additional sprites, but I haven't really factored that in yet.

• Portraits are 89% done. There are three NPCs left that I think deserve portraits! When I say "portrait," I'm referring to the dialogue sprites. I don't plan out what facial expressions should exist prior to making them. If I think an expression should exist, then I make it while I'm making the cutscene. In a perfect world, I'd make a few more alternate-angle sprites for Celeste and Clarence for dramatic scenes, but... that will probably be a post-chapter 1 thing.

• I've hidden a few of them so I don't spoil them all!

• CG's: This is a tough one. For context, CGs refer to the full-screen cutscene graphic art that occasionally show up in visual novels. There are about 13 art pieces planned. Only one is done. This would put this at 8%. Oh, here it is! And even then... I may have to make some edits to this one since it's from 2024. I realized the perspective of that little dresser on the left makes no sense. Since CGs do not affect gameplay, this is something we'll do at the very end. 8 of the 13 CGs are for the animated sequence that- those of you who played Classic- will remember. Luckily, most of these already have rough sketches!

• Enemy battle sprites are 86% done! It's just the main boss that needs additional animations, and the optional boss that needs a sprite. (That's being developed last because I can have the main story playtested while that's being worked on.)

• VFX is about 30% done? Maybe less... I'm not sure how many attacks will need unique sprites. Most player skill VFX exist, and feel very satisfying. Virtually all enemy VFX do not exist. This is something Moof will do once we begin working on enemy attack patterns.

CUTSCENES:

• This is a big one! In terms of writing, Into the Aether, chapter 1 is 86% done. Although that really just means we have two cutscenes left to write, and the rest is all flavortext! So, it's not that bad!

• In terms of actual cutscene implementation and programming, we are 80% done. Although... some cutscenes will need additional polish. This is a pretty big deal for me, though... because it's been what I've been working on for the entirety of 2025! There's one smaller segment missing, and then there's the finale. Luckily, I'm currently halfway into programming the finale! But it's ambitious, and I know it's going to take a lot of work. But pretty soon, we'll be able to start the first story-complete playthroughs. Gameplay has a lot more gaps, but really, no one besides me and Moof know the story in its current form... so it'll be nice to see reactions.

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IN CONCLUSION!

Alright, there's still a good amount of work ahead of us, but I can see the finish line! A lot of art left, a few cutscenes, some puzzles, some NPCs, a lot of battle stuff, and then it's just playtesting and polish!

TEN YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT!? Well, not really!

That makes it sound like we're actually pretty bad game developers! ...Really, the current game we are working on was started in 2022. So, really... 

2016- ITA CLASSIC BEGINS

On January 19th, 2016, we drew the first concept sketches, came up with the names for the original playable characters, and even started pixelart. Moof and I actually both had a similar idea for an RPG at the exact same time. My original concept differed a lot from Moof's idea, which is the one we went forward with, though! I'd love to explain in detail what these early concepts looked like, but I'll save that for another time. 

The basic outline was completed within days. We knew what worlds would be explored, who you played as, and in the following weeks and months, we would have ideas of all the main bosses. My girlfriend at the time told me I should learn how to write music and compose the soundtrack of the game, and I defiantly told her "that will never happen." ...So, anyway, I started learning FL Studio. I'd never written a song, and had no idea how. Every song I thought of was just a song that already existed! But... after there was some drama with a friend, who we realized was kind of toxic, and negatively affecting the whole friendgroup... I wrote the first boss theme, and that was the breakthrough I needed. It was like a switch had been flipped in my brain, and music ideas were flowing nonstop.

At the end of 2016, the first chapter of ITA was..... Almost finished. I was actually really sad we missed the arbitrary December deadline. We finished in January, but we took another few months to add Play as Trinity mode, to make up for the fact that it took longer than we thought.

2017- FIRST BUILD OF ITA CLASSIC CHAP 1 AND PAT MODE FINISHED

We released the first chapter and PAT mode to our friends in May, and began working on the second chapter. The whole process of finishing the chapter threw us off our groove, though. Our ideas for Chapter 2 had a strong first half (Serenity Springs), but Moof wasn't inspired by the original concept for the second half. We also had all of ITA stored on a flashdrive sticking out of a laptop in a backpack, and the flashdrive snapped in half, and we lost months of progress. Once we finally worked up the drive to continue, we remade that progress in one week.

We also improved our own art during this time, and began adding actual shading to the portraits during the end of 2017. This slowed down progress a bit. We met Zee, who became the third part of Splee Team, as they saw us working on ITA on the computers during our programming class. They were impressed... they had been wanting to get into game design, but never had the courage, and felt inspired seeing us actually do it. 

2018- SECOND BUILD OF ITA CLASSIC FINISHED AND FIRST OFFICIAL RELEASE

The second big graphical overhaul of ITA took place this year. We also took a small ITA break to participate in our first gamejam: Dreamscape, and that boosted our confidence a lot. We had much higher standards as 18-year-olds than 16-year-olds! We reshaded every single overworld sprite, including tilesets, backdrops, etc. We redrew lots of portraits, we rewrote lots of cutscenes. Once we were finally happy, we finally released the first chapter at the end of September (or beginning of October?) of 2018. We were also busy graduating from high school and starting college during this time, so a lot of the year was a bit tumultuous. We finally began an earnest effort to make ITA Chapter 2 once again!

2019- EXPERIMENTING WITH NEW GAME ENGINES

We realized during January that we felt like RPGMaker couldn't contain our vision for Into the Aether. This was because all three of us at Splee Team had begun making class projects in engines like Godot/Unity, and we were amazed at how much freedom there was! We began a project to faithfully recreate ITA in Godot, but with new portraits and a more dynamic UI.

This is a little collage of work on this concept from Jan-May of 2019. I was pretty inspired in terms of art, and we have scenes of all the Starry Hills rooms remade from this build, but Moof saw a mountain of coding challenges and was intimidated.

We decided we needed to spend a few months on a much smaller project first to build up confidence. There was this one Toby Fox quote that guided this decision: "Finishing projects is a skill that you have to practice. You have to finish something smaller before you make your dream game." Something like that. The only thing from this era that stuck around was the new textbox.

During the summer of 2019, we began work on a new game! Something meant to be about three chapters long, and it was going to have a more Paper Mario gameplay style, but with an art style driven by Nier Automata. First, we built a dialogue system and movement prototype in Godot. But... Moof was struggling to understand Godot. We made the choice to switch to Unity. Zee wasn't very involved in this project and was sort of just waiting for ITA to come back. We spent a few months on the Unity build. It got a bit farther than the Godot version of this new game, but... this is where the biggest problem arose... the more intricate art style was something I couldn't really help with. Nor could I really compose music in the style we wanted. It's an idea I would love to revisit, but this is where it fell apart.

While Moof was working on this new project, we started brainstorming ways to revive ITA with new designs. The modern Trinity outfit had existed for years, but was just sort of a fun alternate costume idea. We decided to make it her main outfit, and this is when we got the modern Celeste and Clarence designs too!

It got to the point where we realized... wait a minute, we're more inspired by ITA than the new game... so... why not just... take the Unity dialogue system we designed, and use that for a new build of ITA? So by December 2019, the ITA Remake project was in full swing!

2020-  AFTEREFFECT DEVELOPMENT BEGINS. LOTS OF ITA ASSETS AND CONCEPTS WERE CREATED!

We continued solid development of Into the Aether in Unity until around May. We were extremely productive during this time period, and I even made a whole 3D platformer spinoff game (which can be played in about 20 minutes) to combine my finals for my 3D modeling classes, my 3D Unity game class, and my game narrative class. 

While I was working on ITA Side Story, Moof entered the Five Nights at Freddit's gamejam. This was our second year doing this, but he had an idea for a visual novel, so we figured... why use RPGM when we just remade the RPGM cutscene engine in Unity? I said, "Go ahead, as long as it's just two months and not a year-long break from ITA development."

Then we finished Aftereffect! ...But we only had enough time for the depressing canon ending, and I had to go back on my previous conditions because it couldn't possibly end with only a bad ending. The AFTEREFFECT DX project began. Meanwhile, I was working on pixelart and concepts for ITA for the rest of 2020. There's probably more concept art from 2020 than from any other year, as we continued fleshing out the Remake project.

2021: AFTEREFFECT DX FINISHED. ITA CLASSIC RE-RELEASE BEGINS

We managed to take advantage of our extra at-home free time during the pandemic to be productive in 2020... but around 2021, that productive energy was running out. College was also becoming much more demanding. There were also internal disagreements about how to handle ITA. Namely, we clashed for a while about whether we should switch to side-view to be more faithful to M&L RPG / Final Fantasy 6 inspiration or keep the front-facing battles.

We even toyed with the concepts of a mixed side-view/front-view hybrid...

We decided to focus on college, and so there was no real development progress for most of this year. And, while I maintain that Undertale and Deltarune Chapter 1 didn't have much influence on ITA... it was the release of Deltarune Chapter 2 that really hit close to home... it was a project that let itself be silly, and it was filled with so much passion it reminded us of how we felt way back when. Why we started making games in the first place. We got back to work, and finally finished AFTEREFFECT DX, and also got to work on a re-release of ITA Classic one last time as a final send-off, including playable versions of all the previously unreleased chapter 2 content. Most of the actual ITA development in 2021 was art and music!

2022: ITA CLASSIC RE-RELEASE FINISHED. MODERN ITA DEVELOPMENT OFFICIALLY BEGINS! YEAR ZERO.

While the beginning of 2022 was busy since we were graduating from college, we were able to release the massive ITA Classic update. We also made one last leap of faith... we restarted Into the Aether for the final time. Unity's changes were so bad that we moved back to Godot, and this time... Moof actually started to like Godot! It didn't take that long to redo the cutscene system, and we also made most of Starry High. These are the first screenshots of the current build of the game!

We made a decision during the end of 2022, that once the holidays ended... we would begin meeting up in person every single week to work on the game. This was the best decision we ever made.

2023: FIRST FULL YEAR OF ITA DEVELOPMENT 

While there was sporadic development of the basics of the Godot build in 2022, and some progress with art and tiles, 2023 was the real first full year of ITA, having consistent progress. We began working on the actual battle system... something we'd been avoiding since 2019! Most of Starry Hills/Starbright Town's overworld rooms were finished this year. The battle system and overworld were being developed independently, but by September of 2023, you could actually enter a battle from the overworld!

2024: SECOND YEAR OF ITA DEVELOPMENT: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Development continued steadily until the end of March... we realized April Fools was coming up! We wanted to use what we had to release a joke sequel to AFTEREFFECT. It was supposed to be a very small project with a small tease of the ITA battle system, and it was going to be very janky, but... once we missed the actual April Fools date... we decided we'd actually just take the time to put some effort into it. Instead of the usual once-a-week schedule that we'd been doing... we were basically working nonstop on this for weeks on end until it was finished. It forced us to quickly develop a LOT of core functions that ITA was missing. Once it released... we came to a realization... ITA is ready. It was time to take all the pieces we'd been working on and put them together. Right after AEQ was finished, we jumped into actually programming the cutscenes. 

By the end of the year, the battle system was pretty much finished, and we had finally filled in the gaps in the story, so we knew how everything would play out with the new segment we wanted to add. The main cast now all had portraits, and the new area and new characters all existed. Rock puzzles worked, and we began work on the menus. There were a few gaps, but a large amount of cutscenes were finished!

2025: THIRD YEAR OF INTO THE AETHER DEVELOPMENT: IT'S PLAYABLE!

We were able to start finally working on MENUS this year! We also released AFTEREFFECT Q: DX as our April Fools game because we figured that nobody would expect us to do it again! 

You would not expect these things to take as long as they do, but making the pause menu, save menu, title screen, items menu, skill menu, and equip menu, among other things, took all year! I also spent months on one long cutscene sequence for ITA's new midboss, and we brought in Matt, our animator, to help with the ambitious sequence. I can't wait til you see what he did!
The biggest victory of 2025 was the fact that by September, we were able to do something really exciting. We had our first full-game playtest by someone who wasn't directly working on the game, and they really enjoyed it. The game was at a state where you could play from the beginning to the final area of the chapter without major gaps!

2026: WE BEGIN THE FOURTH YEAR OF DEVELOPMENT

Already within the past few weeks, we've made some great progress! Can't show it off yet, but... Moof began working on the last overworld mechanic needed, and I began working on programming the ending sequence of the chapter. I'm looking forward to seeing more people playtest, and hopefully even a release of the game, but... as you can imagine, everything takes longer than you'll think, and you never know what life will throw at you. Here is to hoping!

Alright, real conclusion.

If anyone actually read this whole article.... wow. You have a lot of time on your hands! But also, sincerely, thank you. There are some people in the Discord who have been there since the first version of the demo dropped in 2018. I'm sure if we stuck by the ITA Classic, the game could have come out much sooner, but... we were high schoolers, so... naturally, it was a bit limited, and subject to change.

What we have now, though? This is a solid vision. Maybe it's more ambitious... but it's something I believe in, and I can't wait til the day it can be played.