We've hit Goal 2! (Patreon)

Hey everyone, great news!

After just over a month from our initial launch on Patreon, it is with much pride that I announce our second goal of $200 has been reached!  We are forever grateful for the immense amount of support and passion displayed for the Aether and our subsequent work - it really means a lot to us as a team. As always, we want to develop the best experience we can for you guys, and the resources we have at our disposal from our Patrons will really help us deliver the experience you are all eager for.

Now, with our many thanks and celebrations out of the way, I'd like to address what our next step is to keep all of our lovely supporters on the same page. So, what is next?

Rewards

To start off, I'd like to say that we are incredibly eager to start delivering our rewards to every one of our Patrons immediately; and now that we've hit Goal 2, public indev builds will be distributed alongside those rewards! That is absolutely our number one priority right now, and (as I speak) we are working day and night to get our services up and running. Unfortunately, there are a lot of factors to distributing these rewards and builds; a lot of infrastructure has been developed to get these out to you guys, but we were not expecting to get so much support so quickly!

Now, in saying that, I want everyone to know that the rewards are not far away, and our promise of getting them delivered to you in September will be kept. We want to make sure we are as transparent with our fans as possible going forward, so everyone knows exactly where we are in development.

So let's get down to specifics - exactly what are we working on right now, and what do we need to get done before rewards are sent out?   

Specifics

In short, the main aspect of distribution that we're working on right now is a brand new launcher for the mod. This launcher has been carefully designed to fix previous design issues with our last launcher, and we felt like it was an important key to our releases going forward. One of the main things we're pushing for in this launcher is the ability for us to give personalized indev builds to Patrons.

If you guys want a closer look at this launcher, there's a sneak peak of this new tech up above!

Now, it's certainly not in a finalized state, and more work will be put into it in the future, but this is the current design we are working with for the initial release. Likewise, while the launcher is definitely very close to "finished", we still have a few things to work on before we can release it to the public. We want to make sure that what we release has the quality you will come to expect from Gilded Games.

When?

While we can't give any specific date, we can tell you that the release of this launcher, the Patron rewards, and the public indev builds are right around the corner. We are talking within a weeks time, maybe two at most. Rest assured though, they will come before the end of September, and we're quite hopeful that it could launch even earlier than we predict.

At the end of the day, all of this preparation is to ensure you guys all have the best possible experience with the project. We appreciate every one of you, and your support has been so incredible from day one. Hang in there for just a little longer, and then we can start getting this ball rolling!

Post Launch

I don't want to give too many specifics on what will be happening post-launch, but I think it's fair to provide a rundown of our general plans for the project as we move forward in development.

The most important thing to note with the mod's development is that we will now be treating this process as a very open one, with lots of transparency and communication between us (the developers) and you guys (the community). What this means is you'll have the opportunity to see a lot of early prototypes of content we're experimenting with, and you'll be able to help us guide the development as we go.

The first indev build we'll be releasing to everyone will have most of the content that our 1.7.10 release had, but there will be some aspects of the experience that are being redesigned from the ground up. Most notably, the initial Slider's Labyrinth dungeon. This means that for these first few indev builds, you'll be playing a very early and "work in progress" experience. It is important that everyone understands this going forward. We are happy to let you guys test these builds early on, but we just want the community to bare with us while some parts of the mod are not quite finished.

Much more details on our plans post-launch will be provided in an upcoming post, so I'll leave out most details until then.

Once again, thank you SO much for the support, and we hope to see you in-game very soon!

Brandon Pearce.