INTO THE AETHER DEVLOG 2024

It’s now officially been 8 years since the very first concept for ITA. Wow… 8 years? The game should be done by now! Okay, that doesn’t mean it’s been in development for 8 years. In fact, the current build of ITA was started in 2022. Let’s see how we got where we are!

2016:

In 2016, Moof and I came up with an idea for a game. I may elaborate on the why and how in a future post! We instantly got to work coming up with character names and designs, and even made the first sprite which was actually a sprite of Jake.

We had never made a game before, and even though our plan was to make it in RPGmaker, we sorta had this feeling maybe this would just be something we come up with some concepts for, but it doesn’t go anywhere- and yet we never hit that roadblock. We spent all of 2016 making the first world, and by December, it was almost done!

2017:

We didn’t hit out goal of finishing it in one year, but decided we’d use the extra time to make Play as Trinity mode. The first version of ITA’s Chapter 1 was finished in 2017, but we weren’t done there.

2018:

In 2018, we went back and added more shading to every single sprite, smoother sounds, and effects for the battle system, and we did lots of music now that we had more experience, and we released it on Gamejolt in September of 2018. It was our freshman year of college.

2019:

This wasn’t just a hobby anymore, it was a dream. We both went to schools for game design. However, in that first semester, after several group projects in unity and Godot… we’d gotten a taste of what it’s like to make a game from scratch. We realized the limitations of RPGmaker and decided it could not fulfill our vision of the game.

In 2019, we tried re-making the RPGmaker game in Godot. We’d gotten to the point where we wanted to move away from RPGM, but we had never made a game from scratch on our own, and building an engine for such a big game was a challenge. We tried getting experience by making a smaller Godot game first, then we tried making that smaller game in Unity, then gave up, and by fall of 2019 just tried to make ITA in Unity. We started redesigning the cast and reimagining what kind of game it could be. (Here is an early concept of this weird in-between era!)

2020:

By 2020, the first prototype of modern ITA had been created. Completely reimagined from what we’d now call ITA Classic. We even had a whole cutscene system created! Then… we decided to enter in a two-month gamejam. We used the 2020 ITA engine for AFTEREFFECT and planned to move on after that, but the gamejam version of the game simply felt unfinished without our vision of a second route. That second route was harder to make than planned, and due to heavier class workloads and part time jobs- it wasn’t complete until December of 2021.

2021:

We continued making art, updated character designs, reworked plot points, and music for ITA during this time period where programming went towards Aftereffect. We also re-released the RPG maker classic version of the game to include part of the lost second chapter world we made but never released prior to moving away from RPGM.

2022:

In 2022 we made the bold decision to start the game from scratch one last time in Godot after noticing Unity get less and less user friendly. We were no longer in college, but working way too much! We had a few bursts of lots of progress— and lots of bursts of stagnation because of work schedules. During 2022 we rebuilt the game using Unity’s cutscene engine code as a base.

2023:

In January of 2023, we decided to make a consistent work schedule for ITA in person during our days off every single week, and this was the best decision we ever made. In 2023 we rebuilt all of the Starry Hills overworld rooms, finished Starbright town (a huge undertaking), and we built an entire battle system which we’ve been working on the entire year. I’d say the battle system is 80% done.

WHAT'S NEXT?

In 2024 our goal is to finish the rest of the battle system, and from there, we just need to program cutscenes, overworld puzzles, and menus. I won’t promise a release date since we’d need time to polish things, but we may be able to finish a playtesting build of the game this year! Who knows?