Aethermancer News

We are happy you signed up for today's tour through Terastae! Your guide Anni will show you what's there to explore with some hints on how level generation for Aethermancer works.



Meowdy partners, I’m Anni and your guide for this exclusive tour showing off our exploration! Since you’ve been battling so many monsters, you might want to sit back for a while and enjoy this small walk through this absolutely-definitely-no-monster-danger zone. Though we’ve had people wander off during tours and they definitely just started a new life somewhere far away and didn’t get lost or anything!



Also if this isn’t your first time on this tour, please keep in mind that some of the paths might have changed since you came here last time. No tours will ever be the same, even if they give you a similar feeling. So you will need to stay close and not wander too much, even though it might seem tempting to branch off and go exploring. Who knows what you might find out there or what might find you. But now that we’ve established some ground rules, we can start our walk through **NAME REDACTED BY PR** in Terastae! Let’s start at the beginning!



Notably: One of the first things that might catch your eye about our surroundings here is that we do like to do a bit of landscaping to enhance nature’s true beauty. While we appreciate everything flourishing, we do want to keep things somewhat contained so that everything is nice and easily traversable. Otherwise you might sprint and break something, you know? On the other hand it’s always fun to see how well we can mix and match our handcrafted creations with nature’s wild beauty. Sometimes we even adjust the near environment to really make things stand out or better integrate them into the overall look and feel we are going for. Oh but that’s not the only reason!



Did you know, that not all plants can grow everywhere? Some can only grow on certain terrain, so we need to keep that in mind whenever we’re planting them, so we sometimes need to adjust the soil to match it to whatever we wanna put there. We really do care about the beautiful flora in **NAME REDACTED BY PR** but some plants are even more finicky than what I just told you. There are a number of plants ᵃⁿᵈ ᵐᵃʸᵇᵉ ᵒᵗʰᵉʳ ᵗʰᶦⁿᵍˢ that will require additional environmental factors to be juuust right for them to thrive in this fast-paced world. You could even go as far as to say they can only grow in their specific biome or area because they are so picky. But let’s move on, we don’t have all day to stand here and watch grass grow!

Right now, we are working on making traveling as easy as possible so we’re making sure to preserve these well-traveled paths wherever possible, so nobody needs to ask “Do you know the way?”. You know, that could get annoying after a while. We are currently also discussing plans of getting some printed flyers in case somebody doesn’t re-meme-ber where they are. We’re actively trying to avoid any Hänsel & Gretel situations, where people feel like throwing bread on the floor is anything other than a waste of food. But we also don’t want people to feel frustrated and smash the next best thing they find and have additional employees for cleaning up only.



Ah damn … I might have been mistaken and this isn’t the super-peaceful-relax-trip I thought it was going to be with those monsters hanging out over there. Hm, but it seems like they are guarding something, so they might not pay too much attention to us if we stay further away. Our best chance would probably be to slowly move away, so we don’t disturb them in whatever they are doing.

Good thing, that worked so well! We should have paid more attention to where we were walking. But it does really make you wonder what they are defending. Could be something useful or powerful but I didn’t get a good glimpse of it. But I might also just be making stuff up at this point. You know, doing a lot of tours really changed me for the better. There’s so much to learn and explore. For example if you turn around …



Over there, can you see those cliffs? I didn’t pay too much attention earlier but they look different than the ones we saw earlier, not as high for sure. Did you notice that those high cliffs also weren’t everywhere? Since all of this is its own ecosystem a lot of things are connected and influence each other. That’s probably why some patches seem to spread that far. But to be honest, that’s more of a wild guess, than an actual fact. You know, one should always make sure that they aren’t just making up wild speculations and interpretations about things somebody said. You also shouldn’t just jump into things, you’re usually better off starting at the beginning.



Right, we’re back in good old Pilgrim’s Rest. So sorry we had to cancel the tour and you didn’t get the full experience, but who knows, maybe somebody else can take you along next time they’re going. I gotta go now, somebody really tested the limits over there and got himself stuck. No idea why he keeps trying to break stuff but I should probably try and help him fix it!

All the best on your travels, Aethermancer!


[h3]Hope you guys enjoyed this little trip. If you want to directly ask Anni about level generation or overworld in Aethermancer, head on over to Reddit to a little live q&a:[/h3]

Aethermancer Sub-Reddit

This devlog focuses on monster animations in Aethermancer! It consists of the written devlog by one of our Pixel Artist Adam as well as a video about specific monster animation at the end.



"Just for some background on my involvement with moi rai, I worked on Monster Sanctuary towards the end of its development creating monsters 51 through 111, then later remastering some of the earlier monsters. I worked on MS as a freelancer and since a style was already established, my main goal was just to match the style and tone already in the game. After a grueling year of drawing loveable pixel art monsters, Monster Sanctuary was released. I looked at our main developer Sersch and he looked at me. I gave him the Pixel Artist’s Salute and rode off into the sunset. Wacom tablet in hand, never to be seen again.

Then I came back! My dramatic reappearance to the moi rai team came pretty much right at the start of their new project, Aethermancer. Unlike Monster Sanctuary, Aethermancer’s art style was still undecided and moldable, so I wanted to take that opportunity to push the art direction into a position that would be best suited for our team's strengths. Most of my professional work has been drawing characters looking cool while punching, looking cool while shooting, looking cool while slashing, and just looking cool while doing all sorts of destructive things. It’s really one of the only things I know how to do. So when designing the visual structure of our new game, all I could think about was “will the monsters look cool drawn like this?”

This goal affected a lot of the artistic decisions within the game. For example, the choice to cut away to a battle screen instead of fighting in the overworld was made in part because we knew we could make more detailed sprites and animations if we went with a side view perspective, as that would only require animating the sprite from one view. While I love the idea of battling in the overworld like Chrono Trigger, what I don’t love is animating a giant toad with a pipe doing a body slam facing down, then a body slam facing right, then facing up, then facing up and to the right… you get the point. With the current design, each monster has one detailed battle sprite and we can take a lot of time and effort to make the actions super fluid and unique."


Some initial concepts for a more complex Naga overworld sprite, and also a monster in an isometric-style that will probably never reappear ever again ever:


"Another concept I had in mind is something that I call 'animation space'. I loved working on Monster Sanctuary, but one issue I kept running into while animating is that I had no space! Each monster had to stand still (well, hop forward), pretend to swing at the air or do a little dance, then jump back into place. There are only so many ways that you can animate an attack like this, and I think I animated all of them. Apparently monsters in Monster Sanctuary use the ‘Shouting’ technique quite often..."



"That ain’t the case with Aethermancer folks. We tried it out at the beginning and said 'Nah, this is GARBAGE!'"



"The monsters in Aethermancer have the whole canvas to move around in. Some monsters jump to their enemies and slice em up (Naga), other monsters dash straight towards them and punch em in the face (Gargoyle), some go underground, pop back up and then whack the opponent (Mandragora). This style gives us a ton of space for unique and creative animations. You want a monster that teleports behind the enemy like Goku and blasts him with a Kamehameha? We can do that. A monster that jumps so high that he goes off the screen then comes down smashing the enemy with an aerial strike? We can do that too! A monster that punches so hard that he causes the enemies to fly through the background, opening up a NEW SECRET BACKGROUND!?! Well actually no, we can’t do that.
That’s too much work. This is probably my favorite part about working on Aethermancer, there are just so many opportunities for creativity in the battle animations and I think it makes the monsters stand out from other games and feel unique."



"We as a team are quite proud of the new style of monsters in Aethermancer, and it’s always exciting to come up with new ideas and share them with all of you! We’re looking forward to creating a cast of loveable (or in some cases, weird and creepy) new monsters that you can smash your opponents into oblivion with in all sorts of new and interesting ways!"

Hope you guys enjoyed reading about our monster animations. If you want to get more insight into monster pixel art animations, you can also check out this video Adam made where he goes deeper into thought processes when animating pixel art monsters:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Stay tuned for the next dev log and feel free to leave comments![/h3]

Seeing you guys react to our monsters in such a positive way over the last few months got our pixel artist Jorge in the mood to talk a bit about them. More specifically, in today's devlog we'll talk about Monster Design - Our goal and process, plus some of the guidelines that glue everything together.



[h2]Goals[/h2]


You might have noticed how the monsters we showed you come from either mythology, folklore, or fantasy tropes. It’s not uncommon to look at mythology and folklore for inspiration, but with this project, we wanted to really lean on that and create a cast of monsters that felt like portrayals of creatures from myth and legend around the world.

At the same time, in classic Monster Taming fashion, we also wanted to have unique monsters for you to grow to love. What this meant was trying to reach a spot where, if you saw a monster like Sphinx in our game, you wouldn’t see it as just another fantasy Sphinx, but as “Aethermancer’s Sphinx”, if that makes any sense.

In a way, this might be why it’s been so fun to design creatures for this new game: We kinda force ourselves to add our own ideas and a personal touch to these creatures. Designing a new monster always comes with its own unique challenge of “how can we reinterpret this creature in our own style?”.

[h2]Guidelines[/h2]

Besides our two main goals, we decided to come up with some additional rules that could help us define how monsters would look like in this universe.

Animalistic monsters. A simple way to summarize this idea is to say that we wanted to avoid human-like characteristics in our monsters. This may not sound that different from what any other Monster Tamer would have in terms of direction, but when you’re working with creatures from mythology, you might find yourself stumbling through a ton of half-human monsters, humanoid creatures, or humans with godly powers.

We could just *avoid* those of course, but some of them were too cool to simply say “let’s not have them in our game”! So we had to find a different approach: We’d reinterpret those mythical characters in a way that made sense for Aethermancer. That was the case with Jotunn, icy giants from Norse mythology.


When reinterpreting mythical creatures in this animal-like approach, I like doing some research to find a species that feels like a good source of inspiration for that specific design. In Jotunn’s case it was the Muskox.

Next we start thinking of how those two concepts can converse with each other. “What if these white spots were ice crystals?”. “What if we do the long fur like this?”. Having clear sources of inspiration like that can really help move your design along. If my idea was a bit more vague, like, let’s say, “Ice buffalo”, I might have gotten a bit stuck here and there.

Another guideline we have is form follows function. Just like in Monster Sanctuary, we want the monsters in Aethermancer to support a wide variety of playstyles. We wanted that to be seen *through* the art, and our decision was that the gameplay of the monster should influence their design.

Sphinx is a pretty good example of that one. In Aethermancer, Sphinx’s focus is on support, while also being quite tanky. We didn’t want to go with a design that made it look like they could be on the frontlines dishing out hits, even though it’s not uncommon to design Sphinx in fantasy as some sort of mighty, imposing creature.


With that direction in mind, the idea that came to us was “What if Sphinx’s is a lazy house cat instead?”. We still wanted to have that regal feeling, but this direction fit perfectly into the idea of “not a frontliner”. We had that in mind for everything in Sphinx’s design, and even the wings were drawn with the intention to make it look as if they had a cape or blanket on top of them.


[h2]Process[/h2]

Ok, the next thing I want to go through is some sort of “step by step” on our monster design process. Nothing super crazy here, but I thought it’d be cool to share.

[h3]Step 1: The monster list![/h3]

We have a shared document that everyone in the team has access to, and the idea here is that anyone is free to add new monsters to the list and to vote on the monsters they’d like to see the most. From time to time we have a more focused meeting to gather new ideas and references, but oftentimes we’re picking creatures that the team feels strongly about from this list and that also fit well in our planned biomes, and move those along to step 2.

[h3]Step 2: Just a whole bunch of sketches[/h3]


After picking a monster to experiment with, the next step is just letting ideas flow. There’s some brainstorming right before that to come with a good direction, like “Grimoire should feel strange and magical”, or “Naga should feel reliable and strong”, but in general, this step is all about getting as weird as we can. We’re usually doing this over voice call and streaming our sketches to each other. Sometimes an idea may not go forward, but ends up inspiring someone else on the art team, and they come up with something neither of us would've thought of alone.


Grimoire is a funny example actually: I was almost erasing the sketch that became our current design because I felt it was a bit *too weird*, until Adam saw it and thought it looked kinda interesting. I worked on the idea a bit more until that design got in a place we were all pretty happy with.

If you’re ever working on character design yourself, here’s a tip I like to live by: When coming up with ideas, don’t be shy about being the person that brings the dumbest ideas to the table. It’s honestly quite funny how trying to come up with good ideas has to be one the least effective ways to come up with them. To let your creative juices flowing, you need to delete that filter in your head that tries to gauge every idea as “good” or “bad”. Most often than not, unique ideas will feel weird at first glance, and you’ll only find their potential if you’re open to them.

[h3]Step 3: Polishing that one good idea[/h3]


After we find that idea we like, the rest is pretty straightforward: Polishing the concept little by little until we have a finished sprite. There’s still some experimentation here: Changing the pose a little, testing a new detail, messing with the colors. For the most part though, this is where we start shifting from design work to spriting, and a bit later, animations. I’m not gonna talk about this part here, but I might have heard someone in the team cooking up some animation talk for a future dev log.


[h3]Hope you guys enjoyed getting a feel for how our design process goes as much as I did writing about it.
Stay tuned for the next dev log and feel free to leave comments![/h3]

For our second devlog our Tech Artist Basti will take you behind the scenes of our announcement trailer and show you some of the things we did to take our pixel art from merely imitating the past to something that resembles your romanticised memories of it - a guide on taking pixel art "to the next level" if you will:



Now first, what is the problem when we "just" imitate the past? When we take a look at screenshots from our childhood games, most of what we like about it is the memory of playing that game as a child. If we had no connection to those games already, we probably wouldn't find them appealing today. To prove my point, here is what Aethermancer looks like without any of the effects. Not very exciting, right? (Even though the pixel art itself is still amazing!)



To make it more exciting we first add some more movement to the scene. Now I'm no pixel artist, so I can't animate anything in the environment. What I can do however is add some particles. That's a good start, but I think we can do better.



The next steps are a bit more technical, but I hope it's entertaining for you none the less. One thing modern games really like to brag about is how good their lighting is, and we wanted to do that as well. There's just the problem, that lighting in 2D doesn't look as convincing as it does in 3D... at least by default.



As you can see we have some problems with the lighting. For example the player light shouldn't light up the top of the cliffs. To make the lighting a bit more "natural", we need some additional information about each object in the scene. Mostly that is "Is this object horizontal or vertical" and "How far above the ground is this pixel". When we visualize that information, we get a colorful image like this one:



Now with that additional information we can tell the lights to only light up objects that are facing the light and are not too far above or below it. This helps us create an illusion of depth so the player has a better feeling for the space they are moving through. That's already pretty good and conveys the mood of the scene a lot better than before.



Still, there is not a lot of movement going on. So next we're going to add some wind to blow through the trees and the grass. Our goal here is that the scene never really stands still. Right now the "wind" consists out of two parts. The first part is this randomly generated texture that represents the wind in the environment:



The second part is caused by the movement of the player. When you walk around, the Aethermancer leaves an invisible trail that affects the wind around themselves. With this trail we can fly through the fields and push the wheat aside. They also wobble back into place once we're gone.



Lastly every game with a gloomy mood needs fog, so we're also going to add that. Now for the fog to be convincing, we need to take the rest of the effects into account. First we need to make sure the fog only covers things up to a certain height, so we keep the illusion of a three-dimensional space. Also the wind needs to interact with the fog. If you look closely, you will see the pattern of the wind texture in the fog.



Now with all those little tricks we managed to make the scene look a lot more lively and gloomy at the same time. And that's the final result we arrive at:



Hope you enjoyed these behind the scenes insights into our game! Also, for better comparison here's the before and after in one video:

To start off: Why we chose to work on ‘Aethermancer’ as our next project, instead of ‘Monster Sanctuary 2’. Working on a direct sequel to Monster Sanctuary would have been the more safe route and was definitely something we considered. But ultimately, working on Monster Sanctuary for over 5 years, we'd like to work on something new. We wanted to keep the monster taming aspect though and mix it with something different this time: A Roguelike/Roguelite game.

In what way Aethermancer and Monster Sanctuary will be similar

• You’re still fighting 3 vs 3 Monster battles, The battles being more challenging and engaging than usual monster taming games.
  
  
  
  
• Your monsters will have access to a lot of different attacks and passive skills, similarly like in Monster Sanctuary, encouraging players to come up with synergetic builds for monsters and team compositions. Players will recognize a lot of skills which will be in some way similar to the ones in Monster Sanctuary. You’ll also have other options to enhance and customise your monsters, like equipment.
  
  
  
  
• Buffs and Debuffs will play a big role again in monster & combat strategies.
  
  
• Every Monster is supposed to be viable and interesting on its own. There should be no monsters which are clearly inferior to others in all use cases.
  

How Aethermancer will be different

• First of all, in addition to being a monster taming game, it will be a Rogulike, a Roguelite to be more precise. It is designed to have shorter playthrough time, being more difficult, with the idea players to try to beat the game multiple times. You will lose your monsters and most of their progress, but you will keep their souls and they will be slightly stronger when in your team next time. Also you will have a meta progression for the Aethermancer (the player character) and with the natural experience of players getting better at the game, it will make consecutive runs easier. While differently skilled players will require different amounts of attempts, the goal is to have a game that eventually most players will be able to beat on normal difficulty.
  
  
• Skills this time won’t be acquired through skill trees, but we’ll offer the player a choice out of 3 skills on every level up. Those skills will be picked randomly from the monster’s skill pool. This is very common in Roguelike games and the idea is to have every run feel and play differently, even when using the same monsters. Also it will make every individual monster of the same kind feel a bit unique.
  
  
• Using Skills will require 4 different Elements of Aether, instead of the classical Mana Points. Your monsters will have a shared pool of Aether which replenishes to a certain degree every turn.
  
  
  
  
• Additionally, your monsters will have skills and equipment which helps you to generate and manage Aether
  
  
  
  
• The environments will be randomly generated this time, to also make different runs not feel too repetitive. Also the exploration will be top-down now, no longer side-view.
  
  
  
  
• There will be a hub location that will evolve over time, using meta currency you get from your run attempts. You’ll help the residents build new houses and it will grow over time, becoming more and more prosperous.
  

Here is an early sketch of how it might look like when fully evolved:



Conclusion

Of course there will be a lot more small differences in detail and features which we won’t mention yet. Also, it is clear to us that dipping into the roguelite genre, while on the one hand we will create something new and more unique, but on the other hand will make this game not everyone’s cup of tea (similarly some didn’t like the Metroidvania aspect of Monster Sanctuary). But we think we can make this idea into a really cool game and we will put our 100% into Aethermancer as we did with Monster Sanctuary!