Aethermancer News

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!

We will share development insights here in a blog-format from time to time.

If you want fresh out-of-the-oven showcases of new monsters, features and areas, follow the development on our Discord!
We actually talk there!

Other places to follow Aethermancer:
• Twitter
• Reddit
• Instagram
• Facebook
• TikTok